In the suit Delorice Bragg and Freda Hatfield accuse Blankenship and Massey of having “a long history of negligence.” They say Massey “created and/or knowingly allowed to exist numerous egregious unsafe working conditions that were likely to cause serious injury and death to its miners.”

The lawsuit cites a memo Blankenship issued in October 2005 to all Massey deep mine superintendents. “If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e., build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever), you need to ignore them and run coal,” it said. “This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that coal pays the bills.”

This memo, the suit notes, is proof that the company president conveyed “the message to the supervisors that A.T. Massey, Massey Energy, and Don Blankenship personally demanded that the miners produce more coal, and not devote necessary time to safety-related construction projects.”

The suit draws largely on evidence presented by the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety, and Training in a report the agency issued in November. Its findings indicated that Bragg and Hatfield would be alive today had Massey, the biggest coal producer in West Virginia, followed basic safety practices.

Echoing the findings of the report, the lawsuit blames a poorly maintained conveyor belt storage system for the fire. The report said the cause of the fire at Alma No. 1 mine was bad alignment in the head drive and storage area of a coal conveyor belt, which caused the belt to rub against a bearing. That created friction, which ignited coal dust or spillage.

According to the report, state and federal records show the mine had numerous citations for dust accumulations in the year leading up to the disaster. Between October and December 2005, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) had cited the mine 25 times for safety violations, seven related to ventilation and three with accumulations.

Miners also testified in the state investigation that two fires were extinguished in the two weeks leading up to the fatal fire. No records exist, however, to show whether the company reported these fires to MSHA or state officials.

Brandon Conley, a belt man, testified that on Dec. 23, 2005, the same events happened as those that sparked the Jan. 19, 2006, fire. The belt in the storage area was misaligned, causing a fire. Conley said he tried hooking up a hose, but found the valve did not match the hose. Unable to get enough water pressure, he battled the flame for 30 minutes before he got it under control. Conley reported the fire to foreman Fred Horton who instructed him “not to say fire over the phone, just to say smoke or getting hot or something like that so you don’t scare everybody else.”

Another belt man, Wyatt Robinson, testified that a fire broke out Dec. 29, 2005, at the tail piece of a belt. Robinson said a bottom roller had gotten hot and spit flames onto belt shavings next to a coal rib, causing the shavings and rib to catch fire. He said it took 20 minutes working with foreman Dave Meade to extinguish with water hoses the flames that were “three and a half feet wide and three feet high.” Robinson expressed concern that the foreman did not order an evacuation despite the size of the fire.

The lawsuit says Massey bosses waited too long to warn Bragg, Hatfield, and others who were further into the mine from the belt where the fire erupted.

The fire broke out on second shift. Belt examiner Bryan Cabell was the first to discover it. He tried unsuccessfully to put it out with extinguishers. In his testimony, Cabell described grabbing the fire hose and trying to connect it, but it did not fit the water valve. He then turned the valve on, but the water had been turned off. The water to the automatic sprinkler system was also off. The state report says, “The two men were lost because more effort was expended in fighting the fire than evacuating the mine.”

Bragg and Hatfield were working on a production crew of 12 in a deep section of the mine. The company had not installed a smoke alarm there. The fire burned for more than half an hour before the section crew was notified that something was wrong. They were warned only because a dispatcher outside the mine turned off the belt line to get their attention.

The miners got into a vehicle and started driving out on an established escape way. But they encountered smoke so thick that they could no longer see. They had to abandon the mine vehicle and proceed by foot in total darkness toward a secondary escape route, feeling their way along the mine walls. When workers reached clean air and could do a head count, they saw that Bragg and Hatfield were no longer with them. Rescue crews found their bodies two days later.

The lawsuit says that ventilation walls, called stoppings, had been removed “at least five weeks before the fire to expand mining operations” and “had not been replaced.” The state investigation cited this fact as the main reason why smoke traveled up the intake tunnel into the affected section of the mine and compromised the primary escape way. “If the stoppings had been in place as required, the miners would have had a clear escape route, and no lives need have been lost,” the lawsuit says.

The Coal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1969, won after strikes and other battles by coal miners, prohibited running fresh air into the mine along the conveyor belt that carries coal out. But in 2004 the government issued new regulations allowing this hazardous practice. Many companies now use the tunnel carrying out coal as an air intake to cut costs.

The state report charged 16 mine employees, mostly bosses, with violating safety rules. The state mine safety agency later revoked the licenses of five managers and suspended those of two others.

A criminal investigation is proceeding simultaneously because data in the company’s computer were erased sometime before March 2, 2006.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home