Death in the Darkness

By KURT ANDERSEN

Too many risks and too little inspection in the coal mines?

Lillie Hamilton can look out the back window of her boxy clapboard house in Mink Branch, Ky., and see the family business, a small coal mine burrowed into the hillside. One chill morning last month, seven men--including three of her sons and a grandson--were wedged 700 ft. down a narrow tunnel, crawling on their knees and blasting loose great chunks of bituminous coal with an explosive gel. Suddenly, a monstrous explosion shattered the Appalachian quiet. The Joyce Ann shaft (named for a Hamilton widow) had become a quarter-mile-long cannon, and the men inside fodder. Out of the hole in the hill roared thick black smoke, fire, machinery fragments and a flutter of paper currency, the money ripped from the pockets of the seven dead miners below.

In the past decade, the annual death count in coal mining, the country's most dangerous industrial occupation, has dropped to fewer than 200, down from 1,000 or more a year in the 1940s. The improvement came from both technological advances and more stringent standards enforced by the Government since 1973. But now the trend has taken a troubling upswing: mine mishaps killed 106 men in 1978, 133 in 1980 and 155 last year. The Mink Branch disaster was one of seven major Kentucky mining accidents in seven weeks; since the first of the year, 31 U.S. coal miners have been killed on the job. Says Willard Stanley, Kentucky's Commissioner of Mines and Minerals: "Something is going wrong."

In the view of the miners' advocates, from United Mine Workers officials to Congressmen who represent the impoverished Appalachian valleys, what is going wrong is the Government's system of policing. There are at least 250 fewer federal mine enforcement officials than in 1978, yet hundreds of new mines to oversee. In coal-rich Logan County, W. Va., for instance, the local Mine Safety and Health Administration inspection staff has dropped from 33 to eleven, and of the county's 91 mines due to receive a quarterly inspection last spring, only 62 were visited. U.M.W. Safety Officer Donald Fleming detects a more insidious form of neglect. "The word is out," he says. "If you're a mine operator, it's not too hard to read between the lines: the mine inspector is someone you can ignore."

Yet, after intense lobbying by the U.M.W., the Reagan Administration this month agreed to end the two-year-old MSHA hiring freeze and rehire nine furloughed inspectors. The White House further agreed to ask for an 11% increase in MSHA's 1983 budget, to $154 million--exactly its funding in the Carter Administration's last budget and enough to expand the enforcement staff from 1,700 to 1,900, nearly up to its 1978 level. Ford B. Ford, the Assistant Secretary of Labor in charge of MSHA, denies that Reagan's antiregulatory philosophy has demoralized inspectors and reduced the number and quality of inspections. "I have not sent out any signals to overlook things," he says. Yet Ford does admit to a new, looser approach to mine safety that concentrates more on persuasion than fines. Says Ford: "Enforcement is not the total key."

He may be right when it comes to larger mining operations. U.S. Steel Corp., for example, operates 20 mines and has the industry's best safety record. But the U.M.W. and many MSHA inspectors-believe that only strict enforcement can stop the upsurge in accidents in small mines, where new economics encourage imprudent scavenging. As coal prices quadrupled during the past decade, Appalachian entrepreneurs set up small mines to root out coal from veins too narrow to attract major companies. And while only 15% of the industry's work hours are now spent in mines with fewer than 50 workers, 43% of the deaths occur there.

MSHA has not yet issued its findings on the Mink Branch tragedy, but Commissioner Stanley, a former miner, thinks that the blasting ignited coal dust suspended in the dank, clammy shaft. "We were very surprised by some of the things we saw in there," Stanley says. "The whole situation was very improper."

Inside the Mink Branch mine, far below the muddy clutter of wood siding and decrepit machines at the opening, the Hamiltons were taking coal by "shooting from the solid." This problematic technique consists of detonating tubes of explosives tamped a few feet into a coal seam. (Safer, mechanized extraction techniques would cost at least twice as much.)

On the morning of the accident, the crew was blasting three adjacent faces at once, compounding the risks further. But the faster the coal can be blasted out, the better for an underfinanced operator, whose urge for greater productivity often leads to recklessness. Although Stanley shut down 31 Kentucky mines for violations after the recent spate of deaths, many small operators still ignore safety standards when blasting underground.

"In lots of places around here," says Miner Roy Phillips of Neon, Ky., "those doghole mines are the only things you can make a living at. It's not greed, it's survival." Yet the manager of one huge Kentucky mine finds that trade-off untenable. Says he: "This isn't like mom-and-pop stores any more. If we continue to pretend that it is, the price will be paid in miners' lives."

At least eleven states have effectively banned shooting coal from the solid, and such a prohibition by the Federal Government might be the only way to stop the rise in deaths from blasting accidents. Other dangers, from cave-ins to methane explosions, would remain.

This week a House subcommittee will hold hearings to determine whether MSHA is properly enforcing small-mine safety. Yet Government fiat may finally be unable to make hard-scrabbling independent operators work as safely as the sophisticated corporate giants. The Mink Branch mine had passed all of its 17 federal and six state inspections; just a few days before Lillie Hamilton's sons blew themselves up, in fact, they had spent eight hours in an MSHA safety seminar. "You still find a terrible fatalism out there," says Joseph Brennan, president of the Bituminous Coal Operators' Association. "An attitude that says, 'This is mining, you have to expect accidents.' " More and more, in dark hollows all over central Appalachia, that fatalism is having disastrous consequences. --By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Ken Banta/Mink Branch

With reporting by Ken Banta, Mink Branch

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