Are more mine safety regulations needed?
April 12, 2010 by Fred HosierPosted in: Fatality, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, New rules and regulations, What do you think?
PDF It happened after the Sago mine disaster in 2006, and it will most likely happen again, after 29 miner fatalities in an explosion in the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia: Lawmakers will seek new mine safety regulations.
But the question is: Will more regulation prevent more fatalities?
The New York Times sought commentary from various experts on the Upper Big Branch story.
The real lesson of this tragedy may be that the best way to make mines safer is to make politics cleaner, writes Jeff Goodell, author of Big Coal: the Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future.
Goodell says one reason mine safety reforms have failed is the political power of the coal industry. Politically connected coal operators make the case that reforms would be too onerous, too expensive and too difficult to implement, the author writes.
“In West Virginia, you mess with Don (Blankenship, head of the company that owns Upper Big Branch mine) at your peril,” according to Goodell.
On the other hand, a professor of Economics at the University of Arizona doubts more regulation will prevent more fatalities.
Price Fishback writes in the Times that several economic studies of workplace safety regulations show that accident rates fall very little after new regulations are passed.
Fishback says new laws establish practices that leading companies have already adopted. So the new requirements only improve safety for a small number of workers.
Bad publicity, stock price declines and higher workers’ compensation insurance premiums are bigger financial incentives for mines to work harder to prevent injuries and fatalities, according to Fishback.
What do you think? Let us know in the Comments Box below.
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April 12th, 2010 at 11:15 am
[...] Are more mine safety regulations needed? | SafetyNewsAlert.com … [...]
April 13th, 2010 at 9:09 am
Until the regulators get some backbone and the legislators start doing the job they were elected to do, the mines will remain unsafe. We don’t need more regulations, we need the regulations that are in place to be enforced. According to NPR news, Massey has $7 million in safety violations over the past five years of which they have paid less than a third and their safety violations are about 30% higher than other mining operations in the United States. This is unacceptable for our miners, their families and this country.
April 13th, 2010 at 9:19 am
I work in the mining industry. I feel the regulations we already have are sufficient if they are enforced properly.
2008 was a bad year for my company, we received a total of 40 citations at our 10 locations and had to pay about $5,000 in fines. Massey already has more than 2000 citations in the first three months of 2010! So I don’t think more rules are going to make a difference. Companies that don’t want to follow them won’t. Big companies like Massey have the resources to pay big fines or contest the citations to draw it out as long as possible.
This accident should never have been allowed to happen. Massey has such a dismal safety record, they should have been shut down a long time ago.
http://www.msha.gov/PerformanceCoal/PerformanceCoal.asp
http://ohsonline.com/blogs/the-ohs-wire/2010/04/massey-defends-safety.aspx
April 13th, 2010 at 9:26 am
I think in Safety as in Society, we probably have enough regulations. What we need is enforcement of the laws currently in place. Facilities that ignore regulations currently in place will ignore any additional regulations as well.
April 13th, 2010 at 1:58 pm
MSHA and the legislative branch do not have the expertise to create and enforce effective safety regulations. MSHA inspections are often focused on trivial violations, arbitrary interpretations of the CFR, and inconsequential trivia. The inspectors feel like their job is to generate citations, not to make the mines safer. More regulation would only serve to make the situation worse.
April 13th, 2010 at 2:01 pm
No enforcement equals no compliance. In my 20 years in EHS, I have been through numerous inspections with state and federal health, safety and environmental regulators. There are plenty of violations under existing regulations but they aren’t getting cited. Some of the inspectors don’t know or care what they are looking at, but the issue appears to start with campaign contributions by industry to elected officials. And we think government corruption only exists in other countries.
April 13th, 2010 at 5:04 pm
With a record like Massey’s, they should have been under a “Pattern of Violations” Program. Paid-or- not violations should have nothing to do with it. My goodness - look at their record. Lots of unwarrantable citations (management know of the violations existing) There should have been a couple inspectors camped there around the clock until they straightened out. I worked for MSHA for almost 25 years - I was in coal for 1 year. I know what goes on. That accident should not have happened. Safety needs to be first. It goes hand in hand with production. Look how much production they are loosing from this explosion. Management and miners get complacent “because nothing has happened”. The regulations are there and they work - if they are followed…and vigorously enforced as they should be.
April 19th, 2010 at 11:48 am
Massey did not enforce a safety culture in his mines. He paid workers well in a state that struggles economically and was apparently a force to be reckoned with - which only encourages employees to ignore safety violations. Perhaps it’s not an increase in regulations, but encouraging workers to use common sense and to abide by the regulations already in place, and forcing business owners to take responsibility for their employees’ safety. Massey took advantage of these people to the fullest extent possible - claiming that mining is inherently a dangerous job and accidents and violations are unavoidable.
Driving cars is dangerous as well, so why do we bother putting lines on the road?
April 20th, 2010 at 10:14 am
I think the existing regulations need to be reviewed and the obsolete regulations be revised or updated.
Why did the accident occur and how could it have been prevented?
Just keep in mind that when underground you’re at the mercy of mother nature. None of the man made safety precautions are strong enough to withstand mother nature’s fury. All it takes is the ground shifting a little from the materials removed. They can’t forsee all the dangers.