Construction Management Books

Upper Big Branch Disaster: Massey Kept Two Sets Of Safety Books!

I am going to start today by asking for a little leeway in my post. You see my uncles and cousins have been and are coal miners in West Virginia. To keep my father out of the mines his mother moved the entire family to Michigan when he was an early teen. So when we talk about the (probably) criminal acts of the Massey Energy company I tend to be a little less than objective.

Let’s lay out the facts, shall we? Massey was known for its obsessive focus on production above all else. This obsession came directly from the CEO, Don Blankenship. After he managed to break the union at the Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine he immediately increased the production quota’s by 70% and moved from three 8 hour shifts to two 12 hour ones.

The saying around the mine about workers was “A man is like a tool. If it gets bent or broken, get rid of it and get a new one”. That is the kind of depraved disregard for workers that is the hall mark of mine run by Don Blankenship.

It is not even close to an isolated incident. Blankenship, who had no background in mining, but was a finance and accounting trained guy, was also the one that wrote the now infamous memo in 1995 saying:

Overcasts are a safety measure that keeps air flowing correctly in the mines to avoid the build up of methane and coal dust. Both of these contaminates are highly combustible and are major hazards of coal mining. Basically Blankenship was telling his mine managers that they should ignore the safety recommendations of his engineers and just “run coal”.

Mine owner Massey Energy kept two sets of records that chronicled safety problems. One internal set of production reports detailed those problems and how they delayed coal production. But the other records, which are reviewed by federal mine safety inspectors and required by federal law, failed to mention the same safety hazards. Some of the hazards that were not disclosed are identical to those believed to have contributed to the explosion.

Think about that for a second. This company actually had an institutionalized fraud in place to deceive Federal mine safety inspectors. This is a huge deal as it seems that there were conditions similar to the ones believed to have caused the explosion and death of 29 miners, in their hands in advance of the accident.

The investigators are also saying that areas of the mine were not kept wet to keep the highly explosive coal dust from building up because the tunnels or entryways were not cut out of the rock big enough to get the equipment in. This goes directly to the kind of “leadership” that Blankenship was known for; spend as little as possible on everything except getting coal out of the ground. It would have been a minor expense to widen these tunnels and entryways, but it would not have gotten a single piece more of coal out of the mine, so it was not done.

Fundamentals of Building Construction: Materials and Methods | AZ ...

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Simply put, this is one of the best technical textbooks I’ve ever read. It’s basic stuff for someone just starting out in the discipline of architecture, but I’m keeping it as a reference for future professional use. It is clearly written and well illustrated and worth it’s high price. I wish Allen would now write a book on Environmental Control Systems–everything in that field is too dry and too technical.

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