NIOSH has outlined a two-year proposed project to find ways to elevate the safety culture of America's coal mines. Explained in a March 31 Federal Register notice, the project would involve surveys, observations, interviews, and other collections of data at six underground coal mines to assess their current culture.

The agency asked for public comments within 60 days on whether the proposal will be useful and how to ensure the collected information is highly useful. The notice says 1,080 surveys and interviews would be conducted. The only cost to the participating mine personnel would be their time.

"In recent years, coal mining safety has attained national attention due to highly publicized disasters," the notice states. "Despite these threats to worker safety and health, the U.S. relies on coal mining to meet its electricity needs. For this reason, the coal mining industry must continue to find ways to protect its workers while maintaining productivity. One way to do so is through improving the safety culture at coal mines. In order to achieve this culture, operators, employees, the inspectorate, etc. must share a fundamental commitment to it as a value. This type of culture is known in other industries as a 'safety culture' and can be defined as the characteristics of the work environment, such as the norms, rules, and common understandings that influence facility personnel's perceptions of the importance that the organization places on safety."

For more information about the proposal or a copy of the data collection plans, call 404-639-5960. Send comments to Maryam I. Daneshvar, CDC Acting Reports Clearance Officer, 1600 Clifton Road, MS-D74, Atlanta, GA 30333 or send an e-mail to omb@....

ZHONGLOU, China — When an underground fire killed 35 men at the bottom of a coal shaft last year, the telltale signs of another Chinese mining disaster were everywhere: Black smoke billowed into the sky, dozens of rescuers searched nine hours for survivors, and sobbing relatives besieged the mine’s iron gate.

But though the owner and local government officials took few steps to prevent the tragedy, they succeeded, almost completely, in concealing it.

For nearly three months, not a word leaked from the heart of China’s coal belt about the July 14 explosion that racked the illegal mine, a 1,000-foot wormhole in Hebei Province, about 100 miles west of Beijing.

The mine owner paid off grieving families and cremated the miners’ bodies, even when relatives wanted to bury them. Local officials pretended to investigate, then issued a false report. Journalists were bribed to stay silent. The mine shaft was sealed with truckloads of dirt.

“It was so dark and evil in that place,” said the wife of one miner who missed his shift that day and so was spared. “No one dared report the accident because the owner was so powerful.”

Indeed, the Lijiawa mine tragedy might still be an official non-event, but one brave soul reported the cover-up in September on an Internet chat site. The central government in Beijing stepped in, firing 25 local officials and putting 22 of them under criminal investigation. The results of the inquiry are expected this month.

Such a wide-ranging cover-up might seem unusual in the Internet age, but it remains disturbingly common here. From mine disasters to chemical spills, the 2003 SARS epidemic to the past year’s scandal over tainted milk powder, Chinese bureaucrats habitually hide safety lapses for fear of being held accountable by the ruling Communist Party or exposing their own illicit ties to companies involved.

Under China’s authoritarian system, superiors reward subordinates for strict compliance with targets set from above, like reducing mine disasters. Should one occur, the incentive to hide it is often stronger than the reward for handling it well. A disaster on a bureaucrat’s watch is almost surely a blot on his career. A scandal buried quietly, under truckloads of dirt, may never be discovered.

China’s lack of a free press, independent trade unions, citizen watchdog groups and other checks on official power makes cover-ups more possible, even though the Internet now makes it harder to suppress information completely.

Work-safety officials in Beijing complain that even more than in other industries, death tolls from accidents at coal mines are often ratcheted down or not reported at all. That is because of the risky profits to be made — by businessmen and corrupt local officials — exploiting dangerous coal seams with temporary, unskilled workers in thousands of illegal mines.

Just two weeks after the Lijiawa disaster, for example, officials in neighboring Shanxi Province announced that 11 people had been killed in a natural landslide. After another Internet-lodged complaint, investigators discovered that 41 villagers had been buried under a torrent of rocks and waste from an iron mine.

Even if underreported, the official death rate for China’s coal mines is astronomically high. On average, nine coal miners a day died in China last year — a rate 40 times that of the United States, according to the State Administration of Work Safety. Small mines, legal and illegal, accounted for three-fourths of the deaths but only a third of the production.

To be sure, the mines are much safer than just six years ago. Huang Yi, the deputy administrator of the work safety agency, said stricter scrutiny, regulations and the closing of 12,000 mines had cut the death rate by three-fourths since 2002. “There are some illegal coal mines that still operate because they are protected by local officials,” Mr. Huang said, but “fewer and fewer.”

Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, argues that Beijing’s top-down approach can only do so much to make local officials more accountable.

“We don’t have the grass-roots democracy; we don’t have independent labor unions; we don’t have checks and balances; we don’t have any system of official accountability,” he said.

Work-safety officials are trying to fill the gap with hot lines, a Web site link, and even rewards to informants. But in a country that relies on coal for most of its electricity, powerful financial incentives lie behind unsafe mines.

China Labor Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based nongovernment group that advocates workers’ rights, estimates that even a small Chinese coal mine producing just 30,000 tons a year of coal can make up to $900,000 a year in profit. In 2005, the central government ordered officials to divest themselves of their holdings in mines that they supervised. But Professor Hu said, “Many officials still own shares.”

Here in Yu County, where roads divide towering pyramids of coal and the poor rake the ravaged land in search of loose chunks, local officials were widely assumed to be in league with mine operators. According to one local government official, nearly half of the county’s 200 mines operated illegally last year. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the subject is politically delicate.

“Everyone in Yu County thinks this accident was very typical,” he said. “If Mao was still in power, these local officials would be executed.”

The Lijiawa mine’s single shaft was no secret. Even though its owners lacked all six required licenses, it operated on state property in full view of a state-owned mine for more than three years, the official said.

Zhou Xinghai helped recruit migrant workers from hundreds of miles away to work the seams. The $600 monthly salary was high for migrant labor, but so were the risks.

In May, he said, miners were dismayed to discover that 59 mules had died from unventilated mine gas. Some oxygen cylinders were on hand in case of emergencies, he said, “but we didn’t know how to use them.”

Before the August Olympics, Beijing officials ordered all nearby mines shut down to reduce pollution. But Lijiawa continued its three shifts a day.

When five tons of explosives stored illegally in the mine caught fire in July, workers were trapped hundreds of feet underground with only a megaphone to summon help. Many suffocated trying to crawl out of the tunnel, Mr. Zhou said. Only three or four survived.

Mr. Zhou said the mine owner, Li Chengkui, enlisted him to deal with the victims’ families. He wanted the relatives split up so they would not “kick up a row,” Mr. Zhou said.

Over the next few days, Mr. Li or his managers struck deals with the families: 800,000 yuan, or about $120,000, if the miner was local; half that much if the miner was a migrant worker. The relatively high sums reflected the owners’ eagerness to suppress complaints. Locals were given more because they could cause more trouble, Mr. Zhou said.

The widow of the miner Yang Youbiao said she was hustled from the mine to a local hotel, then to another county and finally to a third county. There, she picked up her husband’s ashes even though she had wanted to bury his body. She asked that her name not be published for fear of retribution.

“They just gave us the ashes and told us to go,” she said, quietly weeping. “I don’t even know if the ashes belong to my husband.”

Zhou Jianghua’s brother survived the explosion, but suffered severe brain damage from lack of oxygen. At 37, he is now a semi-invalid, said Mr. Zhou, who is no relation to Zhou Xinghai. He said his family was offered 200,000 yuan, about $29,000, if they agreed not to sue the mine owner or speak to reporters, but an agreement was never reached.

In September, an Internet posting pleaded for justice. The writer said he had repeatedly reported the accident to the authorities.

“No feedback for over 70 days!!!!” he wrote. Instead, callers threatened him.

Hebei’s governor finally disclosed the accident in October. The Beijing news media subsequently reported that 25 officials had been fired, that an official report had been faked and that dozens of journalists had taken bribes. Now the central government is busily trying to make an example of Yu County by shutting down illegal mines. A new cast of officials is in charge.

But Yang Youbiao’s widow says she does not believe culpable officials will be punished.

“They can find ways to avoid it,” she said.” There won’t be any end to this kind of tragedy.”

The spokesman for the State Committee for Industrial Safety, Labor Protection and Mining Supervision's office in Donetsk region, Maryna Nikitina, told the publication that the miners had practically reached the surface by themselves before being rescued.

As reported a shaft roof collapsed at a depth of 477 meters on Saturday, April 11. Two miners were working at the scene at the time of the accident.

NIOSH asked coal mining companies yesterday to provide a list of mine sites where the agency can conduct studies on the composition of atmospheres within sealed areas. This research will test whether potentially explosive methane mixtures are present in those areas, how gas concentration changes over time and is affected by barometric pressure changes, and whether methane layering exists. The composition of atmospheres behind seals inside coal mines became a focal point after the Jan. 2, 2006, Sago Mine explosion in West Virginia in which 12 miners died.

MSHA's single source page on Sago is available here, and its conclusion that lightning triggered the Sago blast is here. Sandia National Laboratories' April 2007 report ("Measurement and Modeling of Transfer Functions for Lightning Coupling into the Sago Mine") on its test of the hypothesis that a lighting stroke caused the methane blast is available here.

Many resources about Sago and sealed areas are available at www.msha.gov. The agency last Friday launched a new Web server and a more powerful search tool for users.

NIOSH wants to sequentially test three or four underground coal mines of at least one square mile that produce medium to high volumes of methane. To be accepted, a mine site must be installing 120 psi seals that meet the current design standard. NIOSH asked companies to send letters of interest within 90 days to R.G. Gurtunca, Ph.D., NIOSH Pittsburgh Research Laboratory, 626 Cochrans Mill Road, P.O. Box 18070, Pittsburgh, PA 15236 (phone 412-386-6601, e-mail GGurtunca@...). Either longwall or room-and-pillar mines are acceptable, and a soon-to-be-abandoned coal mine is an option, it said.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — A Massey Energy subsidiary was fined $2.5 million fine Wednesday after a federal judge accepted the company's guilty plea to 10 criminal charges for a fire that killed two West Virginia coal miners.

U.S. District Judge John Copenhaver approved Aracoma Coal Co.'s plea deal despite a provision sparing Massey officials and the Richmond, Va., coal company from prosecution. The agreement also required Aracoma to pay a $1.7 million fine for civil violations found by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

The charges center on a Jan. 19, 2006, fire at Aracoma's Alma No. 1 mine about 60 miles from Charleston in West Virginia's southern coalfields. Aracoma pleaded guilty to violating several federal safety requirements.

Miners Don Bragg and Ellery Elvis Hatfield got lost when thick smoke entered what was supposed to be a sealed escape route. While other crewmembers escaped through a secondary tunnel, Bragg and Hatfield got separated and perished. Government investigators later faulted Aracoma for removing two air-control walls that allowed smoke into the escape tunnel.

Separate state and federal investigations concluded an overheated conveyer belt caused the fire.

The Aracoma fire — along with methane gas explosions that killed 12 men at the Sago Mine in West Virginia and five at the Kentucky Darby mine in eastern Kentucky in 2006 — prompted sweeping changes to federal and state coal mine safety laws.

U.S. Attorney Charles Miller said the government is giving up little by agreeing to limit the prosecution to the subsidiary.

"The evidence simply did not support a criminal prosecution of Massey or its officers," Miller said after the sentencing. "The violations were limited to Aracoma."

He said the investigation continues.

Last week, Aracoma foreman David R. Runyon pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of failing to conduct safety drills at the mine and his sentencing is scheduled for July 9.

Miller also noted federal law limits criminal prosecutions of mining accidents to willful violations of safety standards and falsifying records.

"It may not be adequate to make the victims whole, but that's all we have," Miller said.

He said he told that to attorneys representing the widows of Bragg and Hatfield during the sentencing hearing. He added that he can't legally ask Congress to change the law but victims' relatives are free to lobby their lawmakers.

"I tell them they're under no constraints to talking to their congressmen," he said.

Attorney Bruce Stanley, who represents the widows, asked Copenhaver to reject the plea deal, saying it protects Massey and Chief Executive Don Blankenship. Massey, the nation's fourth-largest coal producer by revenue, settled a separate lawsuit brought by the widows in November. Terms were not disclosed.

"The West Virginia delegation ought to heed the words that were said here today," Stanley said after the hearing. "There is absolutely no excuse for what happened at the Alma mine."

Besides West Virginia, Massey operates coal mines in Virginia and Kentucky.

SHIJIAZHUANG, April 16 (Xinhua) -- Five of the six workers trapped in a flooded iron mine in north China's Hebei Province were rescued Thursday morning, rescuers said.

Their conditions were described as "stable" after being trapped underground for almost 48 hours. Rescuers are continuing to search for the missing miner.

More than 260 workers and 20 experts are helping in the rescue operation.

The flooding occurred early Tuesday at the iron mine in Huzhuangzi Village, Zunhua City, while eight miners were underground. Two managed to escape.

The Zunhua municipal government received a tip-off about the flooding Tuesday afternoon. Zunhua is under the administration of Tangshan City, one of China's major producers of iron and steel.

The iron mine has no production license. Police have detained the mine owner pending their investigation into the cause of the accident.

HAZARD, Ky. — For at least a year, Betty Sue Whitaker allegedly lived a lie that threatened coal miners’ health and safety, as well as the reputation of the state agency that employed her.

But even after determining that Whitaker had falsified more than two dozen inspection reports — pretending to evaluate workers at mines that she visited briefly or not at all — the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet allowed her to resign last month without making her repay the thousands of dollars in salary it had concluded she did not earn.

The cabinet also has not asked a prosecutor to review the case for possible criminal charges, despite one official’s earlier suggestion that such a referral might be appropriate.

Whitaker, a former miner and coal-company employee, had worked as a safety analyst in the Hazard district of the state’s Office of Mine Safety and Licensing since July 1999.

Her primary responsibility was to prevent accidents and fatalities by observing and assessing miners’ work habits, then submitting detailed reports on her findings to her supervisors.

But the state alleged that in late 2007 and throughout last year, Whitaker rarely visited any the mines she claimed to have inspected, instead concocting phony reports and forging company officials’ signatures on them.

And she escaped detection, the state found, in part because coal-company officials who knew of her absences from their mines did not report them, and because her longtime former supervisor either did not notice or challenge what she was doing.

During a recent, brief but profanity-laden telephone interview from her Perry County home, the 50-year-old Whitaker insisted that she did her job and resigned because of an array of physical ailments that rendered her barely able to walk.

“The state’s full of crap,” she said. “They’re just full of crap. I did not falsify nothing.”

When state investigators sought to interview Whitaker in late December, she told them she was on medication and her “nerves” would not allow her to talk with them, according to their 20-page report, a copy of which was obtained by The Courier-Journal from the Office of Mine Safety and Licensing.

Late warning signs

The alleged fraud came to light late last fall, when David Mullins, Whitaker’s new boss, found several troubling items in a report she had just submitted on the Perry County Coal Corp.’s E4-1 mine.

In the report, Whitaker stated that she had observed two miners who, Mullins knew, couldn’t have been there when she said she inspected the operation.

One had been suspended for a drug violation and was no longer employed by the company; the other was in the hospital after breaking a bone in his neck a day earlier. And the report was signed with the name of a foreman who was not working at the E4-1 mine.

Two days later, Mullins — who had been in charge of the mining office’s Hazard district for only about two months — was at the E4-1 mine asking questions, including: Has anyone seen Betty Whitaker lately?

The answers Mullins got led him to share his concerns with state mining officials in Frankfort. The full investigation they ordered ultimately found that Whitaker had “completely fabricated” 26 reports last year and at least three more in 2007.

Those reports, some a dozen or more pages in length, spoke of personal contacts Whitaker supposedly had with scores of miners, who were listed by name.

The documents recounted the conditions underground that Whitaker said she’d noted, the unsafe acts she’d allegedly observed, the training records she’d purportedly audited, the safety meetings she claimed to have held.

Was ventilation adequate? Did equipment have excessive amounts of oil and grease? Was the roof-control plan being followed? Was the mine clean, and rock-dusted well? Did company personnel know how to properly sample for the presence of potentially explosive gases?

Whitaker noted all that, and more. But the state determined that it was bogus, leading investigators to recommend that the reports be purged from state records.

The investigators also found that Whitaker submitted to the state more than 1,200 hours she had not worked and received more than $33,000 in salary she had not earned.

They also concluded that her neglect had placed miners at “greater risk of being seriously injured or killed.”
The consequences

Based on those findings, the cabinet’s deputy secretary, Henry List, told Whitaker in a Feb. 16 letter that she would be fired.

“Your conduct may have irreparably damaged the integrity of the Office of Mine Safety and Licensing,” List wrote. He also raised the possibility that Whitaker’s conduct was criminal and warranted review by prosecutors.

Whitaker resigned during her pre-termination hearing March 2.

In response to questions from the newspaper about the state’s handling of the case, cabinet spokesman Dick Brown said in a recent e-mail that there was no agreement to forgo a criminal investigation in exchange for Whitaker’s resignation.

There is “nothing further to be gained by seeking prosecution,” Brown said. “She (Whitaker) resigned, rather than face termination. That, in and of itself, is appropriate punishment.”

Brown also said the state has no plans to seek repayment of the salary investigators concluded she had fraudulently collected: “We believe our time is better spent concentrating on providing a safe working environment for Kentucky coal miners.”

Curtis Hall, Mullins’ predecessor in the mining agency’s Hazard office, was Whitaker’s boss for more than seven years until he retired last July — a few months before Mullins began checking into Whitaker’s work.

Hall initially consented to an interview with the newspaper, but said the next day that he had changed his mind. Instead, he sent an e-mail saying that he had not been “officially made aware” of the allegations against Whitaker, and that “my ministry and family has been my main focus since my retirement.”((i don’t think the grammatical mistake is so bad that we need a ‘sic’/rrs))

Coal companies knew

The state’s report also contains an assertion by Rick Campbell, superintendent at the Leeco 68 (67) mine, that he had informed Mike Eldridge, an inspector in the mining agency’s Hazard office, “about not having an analyst here for eight months.”

But the report does not say when he told Eldridge, or what, if anything, Eldridge did about it.

Campbell and Eldridge declined to be interviewed, and Brown wouldn’t comment on the matter.

“We are not going to discuss what someone may or may not have said or heard as off-handed comments in regards to this case,” he said.

The report also indicates that besides Campbell, more than a dozen other coal company officials and supervisors told investigators that they knew Whitaker had not been doing her job.

For example, Don Hacker, a Perry County Coal Corp. official, said Whitaker had been to the company’s E3-1 mine just once during the past year. That visit occurred after the state’s investigation began.

And Larry Begley, superintendent of the ICG Flint Ridge No. 2 mine, said: “I do not know of her ever going underground here,” according to the report.

Whitaker said that Hacker, Begley and the other company officials were lying about her because mine inspectors and analysts “piss off everybody … by makin’ them do their job.”

She concluded the conversation by stating: “They’re every one full of ----(shit), OK? And that’s all I’ve got to say.”

Then she hung up.

Bill Caylor, president of the Kentucky Coal Association, asserted in an interview that company personnel had no responsibility to report Whitaker’s prolonged absences, even though they may have compromised safety.

“I don’t think the operator has any obligation. I think the state has the obligation to send them (analysts) out,” Caylor said, adding: “There are so many inspectors on a regular basis, maybe they (the operators) didn’t notice.”

But Tony Oppegard, a Lexington attorney and a former federal and state mine-safety official, said that while coal companies probably had no legal obligation to inform the state about Whitaker, “if they were concerned about mine safety, that would have been the proper thing to do. They have a moral obligation.”

He also contends that miners in Eastern Kentucky “are already taught by operators that inspectors are their enemies, that inspectors are trying to shut the mine down and put them out of a job. So when you have a corrupt inspector, that reinforces the stereotype that inspectors can’t be trusted. Miners feel there’s no one they can turn to.”

Twin Lakes native Harry Lovely, a mine safety instructor for Colorado, will be featured today in an episode of “Disaster Lab” on the National Geographic Channel.

Lovely, 46, who sets up lifelike disaster drills for rescue workers in an underground mine about 40 miles west of Denver, was called upon to help test a new, state-of-the-art search-and-rescue robot.

The testing is part of “Disaster Lab: Collapse,” which will air at 4 p.m. The robot is initially being tested for use in building disaster rescue efforts.

“If it works out well enough for homes then maybe it will have applications in the mining industry,” Lovely said during a break in training Wednesday.

Lovely helped create a scenario in the Edgar Mine that sends the robot through an opening too narrow for a rescue worker, into a smoky, dark space where it then uses a thermal-imaging camera to locate people behind piles of rubble. Further tests of the robot were conducted in Texas and West Virginia.

For disaster specialist Tim Samaras and a team of engineers, getting the robot to overcome the rubble was a huge stumbling block. Prior to the Colorado test, the robot failed to climb loose rock. But, outfitted with new vulcanized rubber wheels, the robot performed well in the mine.

Lovely was pleased with the robot’s ability to locate people in such conditions. Had the smoke been real, the actors would have been unconscious.

“Knowing where the people are is very, very crucial,” he said.

Lovely started working for the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety in 2006, the same year 12 people were killed in the Sago mine disaster in West Virginia.

The Edgar Mine, located in Idaho Springs, Colo., is the only underground facility of its kind in the United States. Rescue workers are exposed to cave-in situations, fire, smoke and communication breakdowns during the exercises.

Five miners were killed in a colliery flooding in central China's Hunan Province, a local official said Wednesday.

A shaft of Pijing Coal Mine in Anhua County flooded at about 11 a.m. Monday when 10 miners were working underground, said Zou Xiongbin, deputy magistrate of the county.

Four workers escaped, but six were trapped.

Rescuers had been removing water using eight pumps.

Xiang Fuquan was rescued Tuesday night after being trapped for 36 hours.His was conscious and in a stable condition under medical observation.

Three bodies were recovered early Wednesday and the last two were found at about 6 p.m..

An initial investigation showed that workers dug through a discarded shaft by accident, where the water flooded in, said Zou.