No Stickler for Safety

by Mike Hall, Mar 8, 2006

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee wasn’t much help at all to the nation’s coal miners today, with its 11-9 party-line vote to confirm long-time coal company executive Richard Stickler to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA).

Stickler, says Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts, “is just another fox guarding the henhouse. Career coal company managers and executives like Mr. Stickler spend their time figuring out how to get around safety rules and regulations in order to increase production. That’s just the last kind of person American coal miners need as our nation’s top watchdog for safety.”  

Stickler’s nomination follows President Bush’s pattern of putting coal industry insiders in charge of mine safety while ignoring workers’ input. His nomination now must go before the full Senate. The UMWA, the AFL-CIO and other worker safety advocates will continue to oppose his confirmation.

Coal mine safety—or more precisely the lack of it—has been in the headlines since earlier this year when a mine explosion claimed 12 lives at International Coal Group’s Sago Mine in Upshur County, W.Va.. That was followed by the deaths of two miners trapped by a fire in a Massey Energy Mine in Logan County, W.Va.  So far this year, 21 coal miners have been killed on the job, compared with 22 for all of 2005.

But during Stickler’s confirmation hearing in January, he said he didn’t believe any changes were needed in the nation’s mine safety laws to improve coal mine safety.

MSHA itself must have disagreed. Yesterday the agency issued an emergency temporary standard requiring additional oxygen supplies, evacuation training and lifelines to guide evacuating miners from accident sites. MSHA says it’s only the third time in history it has issued such an emergency standard. The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette reports:

“In the emergency rule text, MSHA also revealed that it has known since at least 1998 that the previously required one-hour air supply was inadequate to allow escape by miners in more than a third of the nation’s underground coal mines.

“That year, an MSHA study found that it would take more than an hour to evacuate 234 of the nation’s more than 600 underground coal mines. At 76 of those 234 mines, miners would need more than two hours of air to escape, the study found.

“The Clinton administration was working on a rulemaking proposal to require additional oxygen, but it was dropped after President George W. Bush took office.”
Roberts said the emergency standard is a good step, but:

“MSHA still has not addressed the immediate implementation of underground communications improvements or location tracking devices. It has still not rescinded its rule allowing belt air ventilation. It has still not issued rules mandating mine rescue teams at each mine in America, as required by the [Mine Safety]Act.
 
“It’s especially galling for the agency to continue its foot-dragging with respect to implementing underground communications until the technology is ‘perfected.’ This just parrots what the coal companies are saying and could cost miners’ lives. Something that works 75 or even 50 percent of the time is 75 or 50 percent more effective than what miners have now, which is nothing. That technology is out there, and must be mandated for use in the mines now while we work to develop and implement technology that works 100 percent of the time.”
 
Last week, the AFL-CIO Executive Council called on Congress and the Bush administration to act immediately to improve coal mine safety and enforcement of mine safety rules.

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