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Utah mine owner's sketchy ties to the Department of Labor
The collapse of the Genwal mine in Utah was an easily prevented tragedy. From the first hours after yesterday’s cave-in, Robert Murrary, the owner of the mine, has been out in front, speaking to the press and throwing maps of the mine tunnels against the wall to show their exact plan to find the miners, as Murray puts, it “dead or alive.”
Unfortunately, the outspoken Murray hasn’t been such a fan of mine safety in the past. Buried in the CNN article is this revealing reality:
Inspectors have cited Genwal Resources, owner of the mine, for 30 violations in 2007, MSHA records show. Recommended fines in the 10 cases where penalties have been leveled so far range from $60 to $524.The mine was cited at least 300 times total in the past three years — with 118 of those citations for violations serious enough to cause death, records show.
Murray knew about his mines’ safety violations. So much so that he thought he could name-drop his way out of the problems. Unfortunately, it didn’t go over so well:
Millionaire coal magnate Bob Murray knew the name to drop in September 2002, when Mine Safety Health Administration inspectors confronted him about safety problems at his mines: Sen. Mitch McConnell.Murray, a large man with a fierce temper, is a huge donor to Republican senators. McConnell, R-Ky., rose through the ranks by raising money for those senators. And McConnell is married to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, whose agency oversees MSHA.
Shouting at a table full of MSHA officials at their district office in Morgantown, W.Va., Murray said: “Mitch McConnell calls me one of the five finest men in America, and the last I checked, he was sleeping with your boss,” according to notes of the meeting. “They,” Murray added, pointing at two MSHA men, “are gone.”
Ahem. Well now. Glad we got that out of the way. That outburst maybe helps explain why he called Al Gore a “shaman of gloom and doom”, and maybe also why Murray is frantically trying to blame an earthquake for the collapse of the mine, when in reality, Murray is trying to distract from his will to protect the workers who are deep in his mines (and that the ‘earthquake’ was the collapse of the mine).
And as for his connection to McConnell, look no further than his wife: Elaine Chao, Bush’s Secretary of Labor.
Few industries were happier to see Chao bring that philosophy to the Labor Department than mining, which has given more than $400,000 to McConnell’s Senate campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.In early 2001, industry magazine Coal Age listed the various mining executives invited to shape the agency’s agenda and wrote that they were “benefiting from high-level access to policymakers in the new administration.”
At the Mine Safety and Health Administration, Chao named Utah coal operator David Lauriski as director, assisted by former McConnell aide Andrew Rajec. (Lauriski resigned in 2004, citing family concerns, after the Labor Department’s inspector general questioned no-bid MSHA contracts that went to firms connected to him.)
Murray Energy could and should have prevented the collapse of this mine. It’s unfortunate that political money and cronyship won out over the safety of the six miners still trapped in Utah.
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Genwal makes 45 million dollars a year….
The “fines” are a drop in the bucket to them.
— Molly · Aug 8, 12:53 PM · #
I know, right? It’s easy for any mine owner to be lackadaisical about mine safety when he just has to write a $56 check at the end of the day. Pour on Murray’s vocal indifference to his workers’ safety, and we have a tragedy.
— michael · Aug 8, 01:57 PM · #
Up until 2006, this Crandall Canyon mine had been using longwall continuous mining methods (By Patty Henetz The Salt Lake Tribune- ) on North and South sides of this current “room and pillar” operation. Continuous mining leaves a lot of loose collapsed overburden (with many huge voids). “Retreat mining” bumps/collapses with this loose unstable/unsettled soil on each side, results in major (sesmic scale) (unpredictable) readjustments in the mountain above. One person interviewed by TV NEWS, said that these bumps occurred regularly and more frequently (10-15 times) than sesmic events in this area. So it would seem that if MSHA really wanted to really do their job and enforce mine safety rules they would ask for daily reports from the local Seismograph Stations. Although the Crandall Canyon mine operation had permission to do “retreat mining” they could only do it legally under certain conditions (measures as prescribed by soil/risk management consultants, training for the miners, additional safety/rescue precautions, emergency ventilation, and ADDITIONAL LIABILITY INSURANCE). He had the go ahead, but denies doing retreat mining, probably because he did not have the above conditions satisfied to be legal. Bob Murray’s misleading and disputed statements regarding what was going on, leads one to guess that the proper steps and precautions were not taken. And that the proper insurance was not in effect at the time of the collapse. Unfortunately disasters resulting from retreat mining cover essentially all incriminating evidence. This has the smell of another Katrine style bungling involving politics (MSHA administration) and Republican contributors.
— FRANKB · Aug 24, 09:28 PM · #