The federal agency charged with regulating mine safety has consistently failed to crack down on the most dangerous mining sites, a new report from the Labor Department’s inspector general says.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration has come under fire recently for its failure to prevent disasters such as April’s Upper Big Branch explosion in West Virginia, which killed 29 miners. But the picture painted by the new report is that of an agency that for 30 years has neglected to show its regulatory teeth.
For instance, the agency took more than 13 years to establish a definition of ‘pattern of violations’–which is supposed to trigger more stringent safety enforcement — and then failed to apply the definition, the report says. From 1990 to 2007, despite some mines having hundreds of citations, the agency never put a mine on its list of pattern offenders, according to the report.
The Labor Department’s assistant inspector general for audit, Elliot P. Lewis, the author of the report, wrote that the MSHA has suffered from “a lack of leadership and priority in the Department across various Administrations, which in turn allowed the rulemaking process to stall and fall victim to the competing interests of the industry, the operators, and the unions representing the miners.”
MSHA’s current leadership appeared receptive to the criticisms from the inspector general’s office. In anticipation of the report’s release, the agency announced new screening procedures which will give it more tools for enforcement and concentrate more on mines with a consistent record of violations.
“We have known for some time that the current system is broken and needs to be fixed,” said Joseph Main, chief of the MSHA. “This new screening process improves upon the old one, which cast too broad a net and did not distinguish mines with the highest levels of elevated enforcement.”
