Citations without penalties

Friday, Feb. 1, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Federal regulators say they have failed to assess penalties for thousands of citations for mine safety violations since at least 2000.

Federal law requires that monetary fines be levied for health and safety citations of mines. And Matthew Faraci, spokesman for the Mine Safety and Health Administration, told the Associated Press on Sunday that the agency’s failure to punish mine operators may date to before 2000.

Moreover, this failure may even go “back far beyond 1995, but because of a lack of electronic records before that year, I can’t verify that,” Faraci said.

The Charleston Sunday Gazette-Mail, a West Virginia newspaper, reported Sunday that no penalties had been imposed for about 4,000 citations federal regulators issued from 2000 to 2006.

The agency’s failure to issue fines was revealed after a Kentucky newspaper published a series of stories regarding a 2005 coal mine incident in which a worker bled to death after failing to receive proper first aid. The Kentucky mine’s operator was cited but not fined. The mine agency reviewed the case after the news reports and fined the company $60,000 last month.

In light of all this, it should be noted that two weeks ago President Bush threatened to veto proposed legislation that would strengthen federal oversight of mining. In November a U.S. Labor Department inspector general’s audit showed that the Mine Safety and Health Administration has failed to complete inspections at 15 percent of the nation’s mines.

Federal records show 241 coal mine workers have died since 2000 33 of them last year, including six workers whose bodies remain buried under a mountain of rubble in Utah’s Crandall Canyon.

It is bad enough that federal regulators have failed to complete annual inspections of these operations. But it is inexcusable that even when regulators have discovered safety violations they have failed to penalize those responsible.

Mine oversight legislation proposed in Congress would give MSHA additional powers, including the authority to increase penalties. But such increases would work only if federal regulators actually punish mine operators who allow unsafe conditions to exist.