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On February 13, 2010, the management at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine ordered an electrician to disable a methane alarm that kept going off, according to NPR. On April 6, a methane explosion ripped through the mine, killing 29 West Virginia coal miners in the worst mine disaster in decades.
Why did Massey management want the alarm turned off? Because the alarm was detecting dangerous levels of methane, and when the alarm sounds, mining must stop until methane returns to acceptable levels. So instead of fixing the problem of dangerous levels of methane, Massey decided to turn off the alarm and ignore the methane.
This is the equivalent of being annoyed that your fire alarm is going off, so you turn it off; then your house burns down and kills you and almost everyone inside.
The most damning part of the story is the reason given by a witness in the mine: the alarm was disabled so they “could continue to run coal.”
“Everybody was getting mad because the continuous miner kept shutting off because there was methane,” recalls Ricky Lee Campbell, a 24-year-old coal shuttle driver and roof bolter who witnessed the incident. “So, they shut the section down and the electrician got into the methane detector box and rewired it so we could continue to run coal.“
Sound familiar? It should.
In late 2005, Blankenship issued a memo to company employees instructing supervisers to “ignore” any directive except to “run coal,” because “coal pays the bills.” That apparently included safety measures to protect the workers who help Blankenship “pay the bills.”
Time for Don Blankenship to go to jail.
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About Work in Progress
Don Blankenship should be in prison.
Just how much evidence is needed before these criminal corporations get shut down?
Great post Michael!
Blankenship/Palin in 2012! They get things done!
This is really astounding.
If corps are people, why not the death penalty?
You must be new to this country. Rich people who kill their wage slaves don’t go to jail here.
thanks Michael.
sounds recently familiar – BP Execs telling Transocean guys to ignore increasingly intensive ‘kicks’
Bobby Ray Inman
From SourceWatch
Retired U.S. Navy Admiral Bobby Ray Inman is a member of the Board of Directors of the coal company, Massey Energy.[1] He is also the Interim Dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, is a former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), a former director of Naval Intelligence, and a former Vice Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.[2]
Blankenship should be in prison but under the current administration he has little to worry about. It’s time to move forward and not dwell on the past. The plutocracy is no longer held accountable only the “little people” need worry about the long arm of justice.
Very clear cut case of manslaughter against Massey. Subpoena the electrician before a grand jury.
“So instead of fixing the problem of dangerous levels of methane, Massey decided to turn off the alarm and ignore the methane.”
I am an industrial instrumentation salesman and service engineer and have been for 25 years. Among the products I represent are flamable and toxic gas detectors. Properly installed these devices are extremly reliable.
It is a far too common practice to disable a device that alarms frequently. Workers tend to trust their gut instincts more than the instrumentation and perceive instruments that alarm frequently as “nuisance” alarms. Gas detectors are easy to calibrate and easier to “bump” test with a brief exposure to the gas the device is calibrated for. The test proceedure can be easily automated.
In a corporate culture like Massey that encourages production at all costs, this tendency becomes deadly.
The number of large companies that the government has shutdown in the last 30 years over fraud or death, accidental or otherwise, continues to hover around zero. Management’s ability to kill it’s employees in order to protect their bottom line, as can be seem by BP being in charge of the situation that began with eleven deaths, is considered by our government and the MSM to be an indication of competence.
Acceptable collateral damage is the American motto.
Wow.
worse then that, this is being told your staff’s fire alarm is going off BECAUSE THERE IS A FIRE, you insist your staff stay there AND turn off the alarm that would have CERTAINLY saved their lives
this is pre-meditated M-U-R-D-E-R
My west virgina brother is facing 10 years in prison for 18 6″ pot plants while this blankenshit fella has no worries about jail. Grow God’s gift to man jail, manslaughter not so much a big deal. WV is filled with assholes.
Sorry about your brother.
We are well past banana republic status. People do jail time for small crimes while the appointed corporate elite can make decisions that lead to death or destitution and are completely protected. What is true for WV is true for NY, MT and CA. DC is probably the worst of the lot.
Wonder if the electrician is in hiding or has bodyguards.
You could have video of the mine owner planting and setting off a bomb that killed all the miners and he would still not be charged with a crime(which is, after all, what he did, no?). Face it, corporate justice is different from the justice system we who are not oligarchs face. IOW, they are never guilty of anything criminal because it was after all only a business decision. Never mind that people died, it means nothing to business. In the end, people are the cheapest to replace.
In keeping with Obama’s stated wish to look to the future and not the past, perhaps we should no longer have prosecutions for murder in this country. Once a murder has occurred, it’s in the past. Once it’s in the past, we need to forget about it and look forward, right?
He did not care about the worker bees while at NSA either.
when were they ever held accountable?
That’s what you get when you let rethugliCANTs design the “regulations” over an industry.
Not only should Blankenship and company be put on trial so should the agencies and the Bush/Cheney appointees in those agencies that “oversee” them as well…
Note that the electrician turned off the alarm. It seems many of the miners were mad because the alarm was sounding which I guess shut the machinery down because it was interlocked with the alarm as a good design should have been. It sounds like many miners were glad to have the alarm tuned off. Perhaps not and perhaps the electrician didn’t want to but was just following orders. There is a whole range of possibilities here but I have a strong suspicion that many miners aligned their motives with the company. Dig coal, get er done. This is human nature.
It does not happen much in union workplaces where loyalties skew to their coworkers. I doubt 1 in 1000 union electricians would have disabled the methane detector.
Still, let us not skirt the fact that the electrician and the miners have some responsibility for what happened.
Two words: negligent homicide.
Yep, blame the victims.
It’s well documented that workers at any Massey mine were fired for raising safety issues.
If faced with termination would you have complained or kept working at the only job realistically available to you?
No. The electrician feared for his job, and his family. He was under much pressure from Massey. Should he have turned it off? No. Should you blame him, or anyone else aside from Massey management?
Absolutely not.
Right, the miners contributed to their own horrible demise because they found an alarm designed to save their lives annoying.
What the fuck’s wrong with you, rapier?