After two miners were killed at the Equality Boot Mine near Centertown, Kentucky in October, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D) issued a statement calling for a thorough investigation into the cause of the tragedy. “Mine safety is of paramount importance,” Beshear said. “Investigative teams will begin work immediately to determine the cause of this accident and whether there are any steps that can be taken to ensure such an accident does not occur again.”

Less than three months later, the “paramount importance” of mine safety seems to have disappeared. When Beshear unveiled his two-year budget proposal last week, the agency that oversees mine safety was slapped with a 4.2 percent budget cut, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported. Though the cut is smaller than those faced by other state agencies, the budget for the mine permitting agency, tasked with approving new mining sites (including those used for mountaintop removal), went untouched.

Mine safety, and the enforcement of mine safety regulations, has repeatedly taken a backseat to expanded mining under Beshear, despite repeated accidents in Kentucky mines that had been cited for safety violations. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) cited Armstrong Coal, the operator of the Equality Boot Mine, with 15 safety violations between its 2010 opening and the October deaths. In 16 months preceding a deadly accident at the Dotiki Mine in Providence, Kentucky, MSHA issued 840 safety violations to its operator, Alliance Resource Partners.

Days after the Dotiki Mine disaster, Beshear appeared at the opening of another Alliance-owned mine and made no mention of mine safety. In 2011, Beshear appointed one of Alliance’s top safety officials to the Kentucky Mining Board, even though at least nine miners have died at Alliance-owned mines since 2005.

During his 2011 re-election campaign, Beshear took more than half a million dollars in campaign contributions from the coal industry, begging the question ThinkProgress has asked of his state’s elected officials before: Is Beshear putting the interests of his Big Coal campaign contributors ahead of actual human lives?

A western Kentucky mine where two miners were trapped and killed by the collapse of a highwall Friday has been repeatedly cited for safety violations in the two years it has been operated by Armstrong Coal. The miners died at Equality Boot Mine in Centertown, Kentucky Friday after an unexcavated face of an exposed strip-mining site — known as a highwall — collapsed on their truck as they were driving.

In April, the Mine Safety and Health Administration cited Armstrong Coal for an incident involving the stability of a highwall at the same mine, the Associated Press reported Saturday. Though a company spokesman said that citation was unrelated to last week’s collapse, Armstrong Coal has a history of safety violations at the site. MSHA has cited Armstrong for at least 15 safety violations in the two years it has operated the mine, the Louisville Courier-Journal reports:

Armstrong has operated the Equality mine since December 2008 and has been producing coal there since 2010.

As of the end of September, the mine employed 129 people and had produced 1.5 million tons of coal for the year to date, MSHA records show.

The mine was cited for nine safety violations with $1,531 in penalties in 2010 and 6 violations carrying $1,394 in penalties this year, according to MSHA’s citation database.

Some of the citations were for violations of regulations governing the placement of materials on the tops of pits or highwalls and the operation of mining equipment, the records show.

Armstrong isn’t the only coal company to experience a fatal accident at a mine where it had been repeatedly cited for safety violations. Massey Energy amassed thousands of safety violations at its Upper Big Branch mine near Beckley, West Virginia, before an explosion there killed 29 miners in 2010. Days later, two miners died in a roof collapse at the Dotiki Mine in Providence, Kentucky. Federal inspectors had cited owner and operator Alliance Resource Partners with 840 safety violations in the 16 months preceding the accident.

Still, many of Kentucky’s politicians continue to look the other way when it comes to enforcing and strengthening mine safety laws. After the 2010 accidents, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) and other Kentucky politicians largely avoided questions about the efficacy of the nation’s mine safety laws. Just days after the Dotiki explosion, Gov. Steve Beshear (D) appeared at the opening of another Kentucky mine owned by Alliance but made no mention of mine safety or of Alliance’s shoddy safety history. Before that, Beshear fired Ron Mills, head of Kentucky’s mining permit agency, for refusing dozens of Alliance’s permits, and Beshear also appointed one of Alliance’s top safety officials to the Kentucky Mining Board, despite the fact that at least nine miners have died at Alliance-owned mines since 2005.

Most infamously, Sen. Rand Paul (R) — who issued a statement on the accident Friday — suggested during his 2010 campaign that the coal industry should be able to regulate itself, as ThinkProgress noted at the time:

“The bottom line is: I’m not an expert, so don’t give me the power in Washington to be making rules,” Paul said at a recent campaign stop in response to questions about April’s deadly mining explosion in West Virginia…“You live here, and you have to work in the mines. You’d try to make good rules to protect your people here. If you don’t, I’m thinking that no one will apply for those jobs.”

Federal investigators determined that both the Upper Big Branch and Dotiki disasters could have been prevented, and given the recent safety violations, a similar verdict at Equality would not be a surprise. Still, little has emerged from those tragedies to improve mine safety laws, with political leaders instead using industry-wide talking points to decry others of waging a “War on Coal.” It’s enough to beg the question: Are Kentucky’s political leaders putting their Big Coal campaign donors ahead of actual human lives?

Directed by supervisors, miners at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine commonly disabled monitors that could detect methane gas before the explosion that killed 29 in April. An investigation by NPR has “documented an incident in February 2010 in which an Upper Big Branch electrician was ordered to circumvent the automatic shutoff mechanism on a methane detector installed on a continuous mining machine.” Ricky Lee Campbell, a 24-year-old coal shuttle driver and roof bolter who witnessed the incident, told NPR they circumvented the safety device so that they could “continue to run coal”:

Everybody was getting mad because the continuous miner kept shutting off because there was methane. 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.

There were dozens of such incidents, NPR reports. Maintenance foreman Clay Mullins told NPR he “believed miners could run mining machines temporarily with disabled monitors because that’s what the mine’s foreman and superintendent told him.”

Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, was caught with a 2006 memo that told workers faced with safety rules, “you need to ignore them and run coal” because “coal pays the bills.”

Gov. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) special investigator has found that the April 5 explosion “was so large and powerful that it ripped through more than 2 1/2 miles of underground tunnels ‘in an instant.’” No charges have yet been brought against Massey Energy or its management for the fatal incident.

Meanwhile, four activists — 22-year-old Kathryn Huszcza, 22-year-old Colin Flood, 20-year-old Sophie Kern and 22-year-old James Tobias — “are in jail following a protest in which two chained themselves to a highwall miner at a Massey Energy surface mine in Raleigh County.” Massey Energy is the largest mountaintop removal company in the United States.

Coal baron Don Blankenship is pushing back against calls for his resignation, following the deadly explosion at his company’s Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, WV, the worst US coal disaster in 40 years. In an extended interview with the Charleston Daily Mail, the Massey Energy chairman and CEO challenged the idea that anyone should be held accountable for the mine explosion, which killed 29 miners:

I don’t think anybody’s head has to roll. I think that’s misplaced emphasis right now. The guys that are running these coal mines, they’re heartbroken, and they’re distressed and despondent, and the last thing they need is anybody pointing fingers at them right now. We don’t need anybody to be more impacted than they already have been.

Gone was the partisan, anti-regulatory, science-denying, unrepentant right-wing capitalist Don Blankenship. The Blankenship in the Daily Mail interview was conciliatory and cautious, though flashes of his high self-regard and combative spirit appeared.

The Wit and Wisdom of Don Blankenship
THEN	NOW
There’s so many of the laws that are, if you will, nonsensical from an engineering or a coal mining viewpoint. A lot of the politicians, they get emotional, as does the public, about the most recent accident, and it’s easy to get laws on the books that are not truly helping the health or safety of coal miners. [6/23/09]	We really need more cooperation rather than one side, i.e. the government, either the state or the federal government and the companies being at loggerheads.
We also endure a Mine Safety and Health Administration that seeks power over coal miners versus improving their safety and their health. . . . I also know Washington and state politicians have no idea how to improve miner safety. [9/7/09]	There are things that when you are in my role you have to take come comfort you have professionals, the federal government has professionals, the state has professionals, and you have to at some extent rely on what they are doing.
What you have to accept in a capitalist society, generally, is that I always make the comparison it’s like a jungle, where a jungle is survival of the fittest. Unions, communities, people, everybody’s going to have to learn to accept that in the United States you have a capitalist society. [1986]	If you know me, I’m a pragmatist. I believe in pragmatism.
I think climate change is a normal course of history, that there is not any correlation that can be shown between man-made CO2 emissions and climate. . . . I don’t believe the scientists look at the mathematical logic to it. They’ve looked at different periods of history and geology and science and all this. They look at temperatures. [11/16/09]	I believe in finding causation, and I believe that physics and chemistry and so forth are the same every day regardless of what the political atmosphere is.
This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills. [10/19/05]	I have no interest in the money aspects of it or anything, I’m just trying to get the job done.
We don’t pay much attention to the violation count. [5/26/03] Violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process. [4/6/10]	We’re not operating any mine that we think needs to be shut down; otherwise it would be shut down. I did idle several mines yesterday and maybe some more this week on the basis of violations since this accident to make sure we use the violations at one particular mine to assess all similar circumstances at all of our mines.

“It would be a big disappointment to everybody else involved if I were to walk away from [the job],” Blankenship concluded, ignoring the calls for his resignation coming from shareholders, workers, and consumer advocates.

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