What on earth is happening?<\/p>\n
Today, two more miners were killed in separate mine accidents. (CNN<\/a>) (Charleston Gazette<\/a>)<\/p>\n One accident was in an underground mine and occurred when a wall collapsed (Long Branch Energy’s No. 18 Tunnel Mine in Boone County). The second accident was at a surface mine, and occurred when a bulldozer struck and ignited a gas line (Black Castle Surface Mine in Boone County).<\/p>\n This makes sixteen deaths in West Virginia since the start of the year. Last year there were 22 coal mine accident deaths in the entire nation for the entire year.<\/p>\n The Black Castle in Boone is run by Elk Run Coal Co, which is a Massey subsidiary. The Alma mine is also a Massey mine. <\/p>\n On the 26th, ICG was forced by a federal judge<\/a> to allow UMWA<\/a> representatives to accompany federal mine inspectors into the mine to help with the investigation. (Their response was, unsurprisingly, a nasty little piece of work that should have been beneath them. But then blocking the UMWA<\/a> from assisting in the inspection should also have been beneath them.)<\/p>\n Earlier, Governor Manchin has called for every mine in the state to conduct detailed safety reviews and inspections. I will be very curious to see how mine operators like ICG and Massey respond to this. (Cecil E. Roberts has also put out a same call<\/a> in support of Governor Manchin.)<\/p>\n My personal hope is that these disasters allow the UMWA<\/a> to regain a place in all underground mines, because it seems as if mine operators in non-union mines are not paying as much attention to safety issues as they should. <\/p>\n (Again<\/a>, I highly recomend WVPR’s recent reporting on mine safety<\/a>.)<\/p>\n ADDENDUM the First:<\/strong> (Previous content was edited for accuracy)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What on earth is happening? Today, two more miners were killed in separate mine accidents. (CNN) (Charleston Gazette) One accident was in an underground mine and occurred when a wall collapsed (Long Branch Energy’s No. 18 Tunnel Mine in Boone County). The second accident was at a surface mine, and occurred when a bulldozer struck […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-west-virginia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pefxA-jx","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nHere’s more from the NY Times<\/a> and the Washington Post<\/a> as well as Ken Ward’s article in the Charleson Gazette<\/a>.<\/p>\n