BEAVER, W.Va. – Coal company managers pressured miners to generate a second set of reports omitting chronic safety problems to mislead inspectors before an underground explosion killed 29 men last year, federal regulators said Tuesday.
Kevin Stricklin, coal administrator for the Mine Safety and Health Administration, said top management at the Upper Big Branch mine was required to countersign safety inspection books that collect miners' daily reports on conditions. The mine was owned by Massey Energy until Alpha Natural Resources bought its rival this month.
"The investigation team concluded that the managers were aware that chronic hazardous conditions were not recorded," he said during a briefing on the federal investigation. Testimony from some of the 266 witnesses MSHA has interviewed also "indicated that management pressured examiners to not record hazards in the books."
Federal investigators first revealed they had found two sets of books — one focused on safety, the other on production — during a private meeting with the victims' families Tuesday night. It's one of the few revelations to come from the ninth briefing since the investigation began last summer into the deadliest U.S. coalfield disaster in four decades.
Alpha Natural Resources spokesman Ted Pile said Wednesday the company was hearing about the faked reports for the first time.
"It's a claim I'm sure we'll look into as we conduct our own review of what happened," Pile said in an email to The Associated Press.
In a public briefing Wednesday, Stricklin showed side-by-side comparisons of records that purported to document the same shift on three different dates in the month before the accident. In each case, the official book that inspectors would have seen showed few, if any, hazards, while the production reports indicated various problems with faulty machinery, explosive methane gas and bad roof conditions.
"If a coal mine wants to keep two sets of books, that's their own business," Stricklin said. "They can keep five sets of books if they want. But what they're required to do is list all the hazards in the official book.
"This is the book that not only MSHA looks at ... but it should be the book that miners and other people who are going into the mine should look at so they would be aware of any conditions in the mine before they go in," Stricklin said.
On April 5, 2010, the day of the blast, a pre-shift inspection report identified very few hazards. But Stricklin says other documents showed six of 10 conveyor belts needed to be coated with pulverized limestone to prevent coal dust from exploding, and five belts needed cleaning.
Bobbie Pauley, the only woman who worked underground at Upper Big Branch, said she was not surprised by MSHA's revelation.
"You put in an inspection report what you wanted the inspectors to see," said Pauley, who lost fiance Howard "Boone" Payne in the blast.
"Zero, zero, zero deters MSHA from coming back. If they see a potential problem recorded in a book, then they're going to come back and investigate it time after time after time," she said. "Well, no coal operator wants to be pounded by MSHA every day.
Pauley returned to Upper Big Branch only briefly after the explosion and now works aboveground at another former Massey operation bought out by Alpha. She was among some 200 people attending Wednesday's briefing.
MSHA has drafted its final report but told victims' families it likely won't be delivered until October.
The explosion also remains the subject of a criminal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, and MSHA has said it won't release some information to avoid hindering that probe. It largely reiterated its past public statements, offering more detail but no new theories.
So far, only one Massey employee has been indicted. Security chief Hughie Stover is charged with three federal crimes for allegedly lying to the FBI and MSHA and obstructing justice by ordering a subordinate to throw away thousands of pages of security documents from the mine.
MSHA contends the explosion started with a small, naturally occurring release of methane or natural gas that was then fueled by coal dust into a devastating inferno that tore through the mine in a series of explosions over a few minutes. The agency has blamed a poorly maintained cutting head on a piece of mining equipment for sparking the blast and a malfunctioning water sprayer for failing to douse it.
An independent investigation commissioned by former Gov. Joe Manchin reached the same conclusion last month.
That study accused Massey of ignoring the most basic safety practices in the industry, allowing highly explosive coal dust and methane gas to accumulate, and failing to provide either enough fresh air flow or enough pulverized limestone on the mine's walls to render coal dust inert.
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