Worker safety

The House Education and Labor Committee will mark up its mine safety bill next Wednesday, the panel announced this week.

The move is indication that lower-chamber Democrats hope to act quickly on the legislation, perhaps with the intention of passing the bill through the House before lawmakers leave town at the end of July for a month-long recess.  

Sponsored by Education and Labor Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.), the proposal would expand whistleblower protections to miners, empower federal regulators to close unsafe mines more easily and extend worker protections to nearly all workplaces nationwide.

Republican leaders have opposed the measure, arguing in particular that the broad expansion of workplace protections is unrelated to mine safety, and therefore has no business in the bill.

The legislation came as a response to an explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in southern West Virginia, which killed 29 miners in April.

Senate Democrats are weighing similar reforms. But Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who chairs the Senate labor panel, says he’s holding out in hopes of crafting a bipartisan bill.

An electrician at a Massey coal mine was instructed to dismantle a methane sensor two months before an explosion there killed 29 workers, NPR News reported Thursday. The safety sensor — wired to shut down a coal harvesting machine when methane levels hit a certain threshold — was doing just that, prompting a mine supervisor to order the device disabled to keep the project moving, witnesses to the Feb. 13 incident told NPR.

"Everybody was getting mad because the continuous miner kept shutting off because there was methane," Ricky Lee Campbell, a Massey worker who witnessed the episode at the Upper Big Branch mine, told NPR. "So they shut the section down and the electrician got into the methane detector box and rewired it so we could continue to run coal."

The accusation is similar to that from Chuck Nelson, a former Massey miner, who sat down with this reporter for a long interview a few weeks after the deadly blast at the Upper Big Branch.

"They had sniffers — what they called sniffers — and whenever you hit a pocket of methane [above a certain level], it shut the power off the [coal harvester]. … But I’ve seen these sniffers bridged out," said Nelson, now a volunteer with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

The NPR report arrives two days after the House Education and Labor Committee met to examine a Democratic proposal designed to protect miners by reining in companies that prioritize coal production above worker safety.

Rep. Shelley Moore Capito will soon be offering a GOP alternative to the mine-safety bill introduced this month by House Democrats. The West Virginia Republican said Tuesday that the bill being pushed by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House labor committee, isn’t focused enough on the safety problems plaguing the mining industry.

“Passing sweeping regulatory reform does not in itself ensure the safety of the miners,” Capito said Tuesday during a hearing on Miller’s bill. 

Capito said her proposal, due out this week, will expedite the citation appeals process, bolster the training of mine inspectors and create a new, independent federal agency to investigate mining accidents. 

Capito described her proposal as a bipartisan “good-faith effort to give everyone involved in mine safety, from inspectors to operators to the miners themselves, the resources they want, need and deserve to run a safe mine.” 

Miller, meanwhile, has similar things to say about his proposal. That bill — introduced in response to a deadly mine explosion in southern West Virginia in April — would bolster whistleblower protections for workers complaining of unsafe conditions; grant regulators subpoena power when performing investigations; and empower inspectors to close troubled mines more easily.

“It is simply unacceptable for mine workers to die or be injured in preventable accidents,” Miller said Tuesday.

Testifying before the House panel, Stanley “Goose” Stewart, a West Virginia miner who survived April’s deadly blast, said his employer, Massey Energy, systemically ignored safety procedures in order to harvest more coal.

“In my years of working for Massey, I feel they have taken coal mining back to the early 1900s using three principles: fear, intimidation and propaganda,” Stewart said. “A coal mine is the worst place in the world to work with no rights, and at Massey you have very little rights.”

The House Education and Labor Committee is meeting Tuesday afternoon to examine newly introduced legislation designed to bolster protections for the nation’s miners. But the most controversial provision of the proposal has nothing to do with mines.

Rather, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the panel, has used his mine-safety bill to push for a broad, jurisdictional expansion of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a branch of the Labor Department.

The provision has prompted Republicans on the committee to attack the bill for overreaching. And on Tuesday, a long list of business groups — uniting as the Coalition for Workplace Safety (CWS) — filed their opposition as well. In a letter to members of the committee, the group argues that Congress shouldn’t saddle businesses with new workplace safety rules without also providing resources to help those businesses meet the new requirements. 

“Instead of improving workplace safety,” the group wrote, “this bill will only increase the adversarial nature of the relationship between Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and employers, and create more confusion leading to increased litigation and compliance costs. This bill contains no support or assistance for employers to help them implement better safety programs or understand better their obligations.”

The CWS includes business groups as diverse as the International Foodservice Distributors Association and the Society of American Florists.

Miller’s mine safety bill arrives as a response to a West Virginia mine explosion, which killed 29 workers in April. Senate leaders, who are eying similar reforms, have yet to introduce their proposal.

Massey Energy, the Appalachian coal giant, blasted the federal mine safety agency on Thursday, claiming that officials visiting the site of the deadly April 5 West Virginia mining accident this week have compromised the probe into the disaster’s cause. Yet, not only was it Massey that initiated the visit, according to e-mails obtained by The Hill, but Massey officials joined the tour, according to a spokeswoman for the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). 

On Thursday, several high-profile players surrounding the Upper Big Branch (UBB) disaster went underground to observe conditions there. The figures included Joe Main, head of MSHA; Davitt McAteer, a mine safety expert who’s heading the state’s investigation into the blast; and Cecil Roberts, head of the United Mine Workers of America.

The tour prompted an immediate rebuke from Massey, which issued a press release accusing MSHA of potentially trampling on evidence. 

By conducting their tour, said Massey CEO Don Blankenship, “MSHA continues to undermine the integrity of the data collected from UBB.” Massey General Counsel Shane Harvey weighed in as well, saying it’s “unheard of for MSHA to parade non-technical political operatives through critical areas of the UBB mine without first having key pieces of evidence in these sections properly secured.”

“Individuals are literally stepping on potential evidence before it has been photographed, mapped or preserved,” Harvey said in a statement.

Yet a recent e-mail to MSHA from another Massey attorney, David Hardy, reveals that it was Massey that requested the tour.

“Don Blankenship, Pete Hendrick, together with two other Massey representatives, would like to go underground at UBB on Tuesday, June 29th,” Hardy wrote on June 25. “We suggest that they go underground at 9:00 AM, which should not interfere with the investigation teams.”

MSHA officials set up the visit for Thursday, and included Main, Roberts and McAteer “to be fair to all of the organizations making up the mine investigation team,” according to an MSHA release. 

“Ironically,” MSHA continued, “Blankenship indicated a desire to visit the longwall area, and the investigation team denied his request because that area has not yet been investigated. He subsequently declined to participate, although Massey Energy was permitted to have other officials travel underground, under escort, and observe conditions at the mine.”

Massey did not immediately return a call for comment Thursday. 

Next Tuesday, the House Education and Labor Committee will meet to examine a new bill designed to bolster the nation's mine safety laws. On Thursday, the panel announced the witnesses to that hearing.

They are:

— Joe Main, head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration; 

— David Michaels, head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA);

 — Patricia Smith, Solicitor of Labor;

— Larry Grayson, professor of mine engineering at Penn State University;

— Lynn Rhinehart, general counsel at the AFL-CIO;

— Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America;

— Jonathan Snare, partner, Morgan Lewis, testifying on behalf of the Coalition for Workplace Safety;

— Stanley “Goose” Stewart, West Virginia coal miner;

— Bruce Watzman, senior vice president of regulatory affairs at the National Mining Association. 

Massey Energy on Thursday charged federal mine safety officials with undermining the investigation into a deadly explosion in West Virginia earlier this year.

The Virginia-based coal giant claims evidence might literally have been trampled when political appointees at the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) toured the Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine this week.  

"By conducting a tour of an accident scene before proper investigatory protocols have been complete, MSHA continues to undermine the integrity of the data collected from UBB," Don Blankenship, Massey's CEO, said in a statement. 

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Energy and Commerce Chair Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), head of the consumer protection subcommittee, have sent a letter to administration officials demanding answers on the use of contaminated trailers to house oil spill clean-up crews along the Gulf of Mexico. The letter follows similar missives sent last week by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and by Energy and Commerce members Charlie Melancon (D-La.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chair of the environment subpanel.

In particular, the latest letter points out that representatives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the General Services Administration (GSA) told Rush's panel in April that "rigorous measures" had been put in place to ensure the trailers would not be used for housing. The representatives also suggested that the trailers no longer contained dangerous levels of formaldehyde because of the passage of time since they were first used to house victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 — a claim that could not be verified since the agencies didn't test the trailers.

"Why did FEMA decide not to test the trailers ... before deciding to sell them to the public?" the letter asks. "What would have been the cost to the Agency of conducting such tests?"

More than 100,000 FEMA trailers were auctioned off earlier this year, despite evidence they were contaminated with formaldehyde and unsuitable for people to live in. The letter is addressed to FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate and GSA Administrator Martha Johnson.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Tuesday bolstered its protections against lead paint poisoning, eliminating an exemption that had allowed the owners of some older homes to opt out of lead-safe rules during renovation or repair. 

A 2008 EPA rule forced construction contractors to follow lead-safe guidelines for all pre-1978 homes, schools and child care facilities, but owners could opt out of the requirement if no pregnant women or children under the age of six lived there. The new rule simply removes that opt-out option. 

The lead-safe guidelines require painters, renovators and other construction contractors to contain and clean up their work if the job will disturb lead-based paint, which can damage the brain and nervous system, particularly in children. 

The change takes effect immediately.

The trailers were initially provided to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.