Trump should defend rule that protects coal miners. His deputies are weakening it.
The Trump administration is weakening a safety rule that was dearly bought with coal miners’ blood.
The federal mine safety agency, now under the leadership of a former chairman of the Kentucky Coal Association, is backing off penalizing mines that have an established pattern of serious safety violations.
A recent settlement with Pocahontas Coal Co. is bad news for miners if, as many fear, it signals a return to allowing coal companies to repeatedly endanger miners more or less with impunity.
It’s also bad news for mining companies that follow safety rules. They are put at a disadvantage when regulators allow their competitors to save money by shortchanging safety.
From Scotia in 1976, when 26 men died in preventable explosions, to Upper Big Branch in 2010, when 29 miners died in a preventable explosion, it was obvious in retrospect that repeated safety violations had merited mining shutdowns until the dangers were corrected.
Congress gave the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration, an arm of the Labor Department, the authority to temporarily shut down mines that are repeat safety offenders in 1977 after Scotia, the disaster in Letcher County that killed 26 miners and inspectors in two explosions over several days.
But not until 2013, in the wake of West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch disaster, did MSHA put in place a rule unleashing its own authority and start penalizing patterns of violations.
Now that critical safety tool is at risk, despite evidence that it is keeping miners safer.
The coal industry hates the provision because it interferes with production by shutting down operations in areas of a mine where serious dangers are present until the hazards are corrected. The law also requires that mines pass an inspection without any serious and substantial violations before a mine’s pattern of violations status can be lifted.
There’s no evidence that Pocahontas’ Affinity mine in West Virginia ever received a clean inspection while the mine continued to be cited for serious and substantial safety violations before and after MSHA agreed to the settlement, reports Chris Hamby in BuzzFeed.News.
MSHA chief David G. Zatezalo is a former chairman of both the Kentucky Coal Association and Ohio Coal Association and was chief executive of Rhino Resources when that company received two letters from regulators warning that one of its mines was at risk of being placed on pattern of violation status.
BuzzFeed also reports that Pocahontes is owned by Ukranian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov who at one point hired Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager and recently convicted felon.
President Donald Trump had some heady moments hamming it up with coal miners during rallies. Meeting widows and children after a mine disaster would not be any fun. The president should tell his people to defend the pattern of violations rule.