“Ron Wooten, all he did was bring the report, dump it in our laps, and he was going to leave it at that,” said Pam Campbell, sister-in-law of Sago miner Marty Bennett, according to the December 15 Charleston Gazette.

Bennett was one of 12 miners to die at Sago. One of these miners died from the impact of the explosion and 11 from carbon monoxide poisoning after being trapped underground for more than 40 hours.

Wooten, a former Consol Energy boss, is the director of West Virginia’s Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training.

Campbell said she was also upset at Wooten’s response to a question about what would happen if another lightning storm occurred near an underground mine with newly constructed seals. “I wouldn’t want to be in there,” Wooten reportedly said.

Due to the reaction of the miners’ families, West Virginia’s governor, Joseph Manchin, cancelled a press conference where the report was to be officially announced December 11 and withdrew the report after it had already been made public. The report said the explosion was caused by lightning—the same claim the mine’s owner, the International Coal Group (ICG), has put forward. ICG has clung to the lightning-strike theory to counter revelations about the rampant safety violations in this nonunion mine that surfaced after the disaster.

The Sago Mine had been cited by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) 273 times for safety violations in the two years prior to the blast. The mine was also recently cited when an inspection found that six of 50 air packs miners use underground in case of emergency were faulty.

The sole survivor of the disaster, Randal McCloy, has singled out improperly built seals to isolate an area of the mine where the explosion occurred and the miners’ faulty air packs as the reasons for his coworkers’ deaths. “Regardless of the ignition source,” says a lawsuit McCloy has filed against ICG and others, “the explosion…was possible only because the seal in that area did not in fact ‘seal’ that area.” The suit adds that the Omega block seals were “shoddily constructed.”

Omega block is a lightweight fiber block that mine owners favor for seals because it is cheaper to construct than regular cement block, which is safer.

The state report said that some 400,000 cubic feet of methane was trapped in the sealed-off area, a level of 13 percent. Methane is explosive at concentrations of between 5 percent and 15 percent.

The seals were designed by federal standards to withstand forces of 20 pounds per square inch (psi), but state investigators found 10 seals were blown apart by forces of at least 95 psi, reported ABC News.

Hundreds of such seals remain in mines today.

Six months after the disaster, MSHA ordered that all seals must now withstand 50 psi, still only about half the force of the Sago blast.

The state report also suggested that bottom-mining in the area behind the seals—harvesting coal from a second seam beneath the mine floor—may have intensified the explosion.

As for the air packs the miners carried, McCloy said that “at least four” of the self-contained rescue devices failed to function. “As a result of the mass malfunction, Mr. McCloy and the other miners with working rescuers had to share their already limited supply of oxygen with those having none,” his lawsuit reads.

The state report did not explain why the air packs failed. It only conceded in its summary that the self-rescuers “did not perform in the manner expected.”

Even if the lightning strike did ignite the gas, the state report did not explain how this could have happened. An article in the December 8 issue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said, “The bolt would have had to zip more than a mile down a road, cross the Buckhannon River, and find its way a mile into the mine to reach the seals. ‘We ourselves are still trying to understand better the possibilities of what happened,’ Dr. Krider said.”

Philip Krider is a University of Arizona expert on lightning who worked as a consultant on the report.

United Mine Workers of America spokesman Phil Smith told AP that the union doubts the theory, but if the state sticks with it, it should begin drafting regulations that require miners to be evacuated when storms approach.
 
 
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