Shafted: how the Bush administration reversed decades of progress on mine safety.

• Author: Ward, Ken, Jr.

On the afternoon of September 23, 2001, thirty-two miners were repairing drilling machines and hoisting tunnel supports into place in the No. 5 mine of Jim Walter Resources Inc., in Brookwood, Alabama. The No. 5 is North America's deepest coal mine, tracking the six-foot-high Blue Creek seam almost half a mile beneath the rolling hills just east of Tuscaloosa.

At about 5:20 p.m., a chunk of ceiling dropped onto a battery charger deep in the mine's tunnels. The impact set off a spark, which ignited a pocket of methane gas. The small explosion injured four miners, including Gaston Adams Jr., who was hurt so badly that he could not walk. When coworkers rushed to his aid, a second, much larger blast ripped through the mine, killing Adams and twelve of his would-be rescuers.

It was the nation's deadliest coal mine accident in seventeen years.

The September 23 tragedy came less than two weeks after the terrorist attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon. At a memorial service for the dead miners, Elaine Chao, President Bush's secretary of labor, compared the miners' rescue efforts to those of the firefighters and police officers who died trying to save 9/11 victims.

"In the deepest darkness of these tragedies, we have also seen the best that America has to offer," she said, before making a promise to the miners' families. "Whether it be the terrorist attack on September 11 or the mine disaster that claimed thirteen lives this last weekend, we are determined to do everything we possibly can to keep it from ever happening again."

More than five years later, the Bush administration can claim that, indeed, no more terrorist attacks have occurred on American soil. But its record on mining safety is decidedly more troubling. As of mid-January of this year, 165 coal miners had been killed on the job since the Jim Walter disaster--some blown apart by gas explosions, others suffocated under cave-ins, still others crushed by runaway mining machines. Last year, forty-seven coal miners died on the job, the most in any full year since 1995, when forty-seven also were killed. A dozen perished last January at the Sago mine in north-central West Virginia. For two days Americans watched and waited for word of the miners' fate; they breathed a collective sigh of relief after hearing that all were alive, only to find out that the information was incorrect. Two more miners died two weeks later in a fire at the Aracoma mine in southern West Virginia. On May 20, an explosion in eastern Kentucky killed five more mine workers--making 2006 the first year since 1981 in which more than one accident killed at least five miners each.

While administration supporters can point to a steady drop in the number of coal mining deaths through 2005, when a record low of twenty-two occurred, those numbers don't tell the whole story. Fewer miners work today than a decade ago, and mine operators have shifted production to the largely mechanized and substantially safer strip-mining operations of Wyoming. Progress toward safer mines has lagged in places like West Virginia, where the death rate for miners has more than doubled since 1997 and increased by 50 percent in the last five years.

Chao's promise to the families of Brookwood was not, as many probably assumed, a call for tighter rules and stricter enforcement. Instead, it was a signal for greater cooperation with mining companies. Under the Bush appointee Dave Lauriski, a former mining executive, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has stressed cooperating with mine operators over policing them. During his tenure, he filled the agency's top jobs with former industry colleagues, dropped more than a dozen safety proposals initiated during the Clinton administration, and cut almost 200 of the agency's 1,200 coal mine inspectors. Mine-safety experts have linked many of these actions to the causes of deadly mine accidents since 2001.

Under pressure from miners' widows and their allies in Congress, President Bush signed a mine-safety bill last June. It provides for better-trained rescue teams, more oxygen supplies underground, and stiffer fines for safety violations. But for an industry that has lost more than 104,000 workers to accidental death since 1900--and continues to lose scores more every year--it will surely not be enough.

Accidents happen

There are a couple of versions of an old coalfield maxim. One says that mine-safety laws are written in the blood of miners; the other that dead miners make the best lobbyists. Both are true.

On January 27, 1891, 109 miners died in an explosion at the Mammoth mine in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania. At the time, it was one of the deadliest mining accidents in the nation's history. A little more than a month later, Congress...