Critics contend that the Bush administration is beholden to the mining industry and has gutted safety and health regulations in the mines. They point to figures from the Center for Responsive Politics which show that over the last 6 years, coal companies gave $9 million to mostly republican federal candidates. Critics also point out that Bush cut funding for mine safety enforcement by $15 million and stacked the Mine Safety and Health Administration with representatives of corporate interests.
In 2002, Bush named former Massey Energy official Stanley Suboleski to the MSHA review commission that decides all legal matters under the Federal Mine Act. Massey Energy is one of the largest coal companies in the U.S and has been cited for numerous violations. And David Lauriski, the former head of MSHA, spent 30 years as an executive in the mining industry before being tapped to head the agency. He resigned last year to work for a mine-industry consulting company. The current head of MSHA, Richard Stickler, was appointed by Bush last September. Stickler is a former manager of Beth Energy mines. The Bush administration has also cut 170 positions from MSHA.
Jack Spadaro, mining engineer who has devoted his life to the safety of miners. He was head of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy (MSHA), a branch of the Department of Labor, which trains mining inspectors. He's been working in federal regulatory agencies for almost 30 years. He was threatened with losing his job at MSHA after blowing the whistle on what he called a whitewash by the Bush administration of an investigation into a major coal slurry spill in 2000.
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AMY GOODMAN: Can you start off by talking about how you almost lost your job, the enormity of the disaster at the time, and respond to what we're seeing today, the disaster at the Sago Mine?
JACK SPADARO: Well, fortunately the disaster in 2000 -- the Martin County coal slurry spill, did not result in a loss of life as that which has happened in Upshur County, West Virginia. But the disaster in October 2000 was a spill of 300 million gallons of coal slurry into 100 miles of streams in Kentucky and West Virginia, and it killed all life forms for 100 miles downstream from the coal waste [inaudible]. And the failure occurred in the bottom of a reservoir where the flurry entered abandoned underground mine working by Massey Energy, who owned the impoundment, and then flowed into two streams that drained into the Tug Fork River. There were about – well, there were hundreds of people who were affected directly, who had slurry in their yards, against their houses, and there were thousands of people who lost their water supplies downstream. I think all together 17 communities and about 27,000 people were affected.
And there had been a previous spill in May of 1994. The company knew that there were underground mine workings beneath this reservoir because of that previous spill, and because they had actually created those underground mine workings, as well. They knew that there was a chance that something like this would happen again. But the Mine Safety and Health Administration allowed them to continue operating the impoundment. And, indeed, six years later this disaster occurred.
During the investigation, while the Clinton administration was still running the Mine Safety and Health Administration, we were allowed to do in our investigation whatever it took to get to the facts. And that lasted until January of 2001; when the Bush administration came in, we were told to stop our investigation, essentially to wrap it up. And we were nowhere near finished. And then, as we were writing the investigative report, we were continually interfered with by Dave Lauriski, the new appointee to run the Mine Safety and Health Administration, to weaken the report.
And finally, I refused. I actually resigned from the investigative team and refused to sign the final report. And I went public with my concerns, because they were trying to cover up Massey Energy's responsibility and the agency's responsibility, as well.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, [Jack] Spadaro, back in 2004 in a 60 Minutes interview, you were quoted as saying, “I've never seen anything so corrupt and lawless in my entire career as what I saw regarding interference with a federal investigation of that disaster.” Could you talk a little bit about what has happened with mine health and safety regulation in monitoring at the federal government level under the administration, the current administration?
JACK SPADARO:
It's the top officials in the agency who have, over the past five years, interfered with the field operations and tried to prevent inspectors from doing their jobs. Lauriski instituted a program called “compliance assistance,” where he encouraged the inspectors to, instead of writing violations, to try to convince the operators to comply with the law. But the law is mandatory. If an inspector finds a violation, the inspector is supposed to write a citation and make sure that it gets corrected. That's one of the reasons the agency was effective up until 2001 and had reduced over the 30-year period the numbers of fatalities and serious injuries at mines.
I think that may be what happened here at this mine. Although the inspectors were obviously doing their jobs of writing the citations and putting pressure on the company, they weren't allowed to close the mine, which is what should have been done at Sago.
JUAN GONZALEZ: What about this whole -- the fines under federal law, these ridiculously low fines for such major violations? Have any attempts been made over the years to increase the penalties, because these are basically nuisance fines for companies that are making millions of dollars in profits off these mining operations?
JACK SPADARO: It's an outrage that these fines are so low. And I don't know of any serious attempt to raise those assessments. That should have been done a long time ago. I don't know of any administration that's trying to raise the assessments for penalties at mine sites.
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For example, since 1996 in West Virginia, coal interests have contributed more than $4 million to candidates that ran for governor, Supreme Court and the legislature. And over the past five election cycles, the industry contributed over $2 million to gubernatorial campaigns and inaugurals, and $1.5 million to legislative races, and about just over $500,000 to Supreme Court candidates. And that's just on the state level.
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JUAN GONZALEZ: We still have on the line also Ken Ward, investigative reporter for the Charleston Gazette.
KEN WARD: /snip
But the other thing that – and I think that that's very important for people to understand, because the issue really with the coal industry, with all of these things, is a matter of an industry that clearly for a century or more has done a very efficient job of externalizing its true costs of doing business. You know, we ran a story in the Gazette this morning about the long list of tragedies in West Virginia. Sago now is joining a long of names: Farmington, Loveridge, Hominy Falls, Eccles, Glen Rogers, Monongah. You can go on and on and on and on. And my friends in the environmental community --
AMY GOODMAN: And when you say you can go on and on and on, I bet most of what you just said, no one has ever heard of before.
KEN WARD: Most of the people at Hominy Falls died.
/snip And aside from the threat -- the constant threat of these terrible sorts of tragedies -- between 1,500 and 2,000 coal miners still die every year from black lung disease. An untold number of people are maimed in the mines. They lose a hand. They get hit in the head by a piece of rock and are brain damaged. It's terrible things that go on in these mines all of the time.
This is really an industry that, as I said, has been incredibly efficient in externalizing its cost of doing business. And it's important for especially the folks that listen to your program to understand that, though they may be seeing -- think they're seeing increases in their energy costs, the families of the 12 miners who died at the Sago Mine, those deaths are, in part, borne by everyone who wants low electricity costs. And people need to understand that we all are partly responsible for those deaths. And we should all mourn that.
