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MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Federal mine regulators need stronger laws to protect the nation’s underground coal miners, particularly when it comes to protecting whistle blowers and criminally charging operators who deliberately cut corners on safety, the head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration said Thursday.
In testimony to the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, MSHA chief Joe Main called for more legislation and a bipartisan effort to save lives, support good operators and hold bad operators accountable.
Main told the chairman, Republican Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan, he was not recommending any particular legislation. Rather, lawmakers should collaborate to address key areas: better tools for cracking down on companies with patterns of violations, stronger protections for whistle blowers, stiffer criminal penalties and “quick fix” injunctive relief that would let the Department of Labor act decisively against an operator when it identifies an immediate threat.
Even with stronger laws, Main said, criminal charges would likely continue to be rare.
“Now they are rare, however, because the bar for prosecution is too high,” he said.
Part of Thursday’s hearing focused on a report by The Charleston Gazette that just two weeks before the Upper Big Branch mine explosion that killed 29 men last April, an MSHA Office of Accountability report warned lawmakers about serious enforcement lapses at the agency.
The March 25, 2010, report to the Senate Appropriations Committee said that in the two preceding years, inspectors in 20 of 25 audited field offices failed to properly evaluate the gravity and negligence of the operator’s violations, and that supervisors in 21 of those offices failed to ensure inspectors took proper enforcement actions.
The report said internal audits also revealed that officials failed to document inspections well enough to withstand court challenges, and that a handful of inspectors failed to do mandatory spot inspections for mines generating high volumes of methane gas.
That report, however, also said MSHA’s audit focused only on field offices where it believed it had problems and was not indicative of a systemic problem at all 92 field offices.
Still, Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., called the report “pretty damning.”