Case Study 2: Upper Big Branch — A Preventable Disaster

April 5, 2010

The morning shift at the Upper Big Branch Mine began like every other morning shift. Miners descended into the earth, passed through the entries and crosscuts that led to the working faces, and began the familiar routines of cutting, loading, and moving coal. The mine was operated by Performance Coal Company, a subsidiary of Massey Energy, which was in turn controlled by its chairman and CEO, Don Blankenship — a man known throughout the coalfields for his obsession with production, his hostility to regulation, and his willingness to spend enormous sums of money to influence West Virginia's political system.

At approximately 3:02 p.m., something ignited in the mine. The most likely source was a spark from a longwall shearer — the massive cutting machine that moved along the coal face, ripping coal from the seam. The spark ignited a pocket of methane gas — the same invisible, odorless gas that had been killing miners since the earliest days of underground mining.

In a properly maintained mine, a methane ignition would have been a small event — a flare, quickly extinguished by the rock dust that is supposed to be spread throughout the mine to suppress coal dust and prevent the propagation of explosions. Rock dust — finely ground limestone — is the coal miner's primary defense against catastrophic explosions. When properly applied, it renders the coal dust that coats every surface of an underground mine incombustible, containing any ignition before it can spread.

At Upper Big Branch, the rock dust was not properly applied. The coal dust that coated the mine's entries and passageways — the fine, combustible particles that are an unavoidable byproduct of coal mining — had not been adequately neutralized. The methane ignition found fuel. The small flame became a fireball. The fireball raced through the mine's passageways, igniting the coal dust that lay everywhere, feeding on it, growing, accelerating. The explosion tore through more than two miles of mine entries in seconds, generating pressures and temperatures that no human body could survive.

Twenty-nine men died.

The Mine's History

The Upper Big Branch Mine was not a rogue operation in an otherwise well-regulated industry. But it was, even by the standards of Appalachian coal mining, an outlier in its disregard for safety.

In the two years preceding the explosion, the mine had been cited for 515 safety violations by MSHA, including 39 closure orders — instances where conditions were so dangerous that the inspector ordered mining to stop until the hazard was corrected. The violations included: excessive levels of methane gas, inadequate ventilation, accumulations of combustible coal dust, faulty electrical equipment, and failures to maintain required safety equipment.

These were not minor technical infractions. They were the specific conditions that cause mine explosions. Every miner in the industry knew this. Every mine safety expert knew this. Every MSHA inspector knew this. The conditions at Upper Big Branch were, collectively, a recipe for disaster — and the recipe had been documented, in writing, hundreds of times.

The fines assessed for these violations were trivial. The total fines imposed on Performance Coal Company for the 515 violations amounted to approximately $897,325 — less than two thousand dollars per violation, for conditions that were, in the aggregate, going to kill twenty-nine men. The fines were a cost of doing business, and a cheap cost at that. The production value of the coal mined during the period of those violations far exceeded the fines. The economic incentive was clear: it was more profitable to violate the law and pay the fines than to comply with the law and accept the production delays.

The Culture at Massey Energy

The independent investigation led by J. Davitt McAteer — a former head of MSHA and one of the most respected mine safety experts in the country — documented a corporate culture at Massey Energy that subordinated every other consideration to production.

Internal documents revealed a system in which mine managers were evaluated primarily on their tonnage numbers. Managers who met or exceeded production targets were rewarded. Managers who fell short — even if the shortfall was caused by time spent on safety compliance — were criticized, demoted, or fired. The message from corporate headquarters was unambiguous: produce coal. Everything else is secondary.

This message was understood by every worker in the mine. Miners who raised safety concerns were met with hostility. Several miners testified (after the disaster, with legal protections) that they had reported dangerous conditions to supervisors and been told to keep working. Some said they had been threatened with termination. The culture of intimidation was so pervasive that many miners simply stopped reporting hazards. They went to work, did their jobs in conditions they knew were dangerous, and hoped that today would not be the day their luck ran out.

Don Blankenship was the architect and enforcer of this culture. His personal involvement in the day-to-day operations of Massey's mines was unusual for a CEO of a major corporation. He was known to call mine superintendents directly, demanding explanations for production shortfalls. He sent memos that explicitly prioritized production over other concerns. He cultivated a reputation as a tough, no-nonsense leader who would not tolerate excuses — and in the context of the coal industry, "excuses" included safety-related production delays.

Blankenship also cultivated extraordinary political influence. He spent more than three million dollars to elect Brent Benjamin to the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals in 2004 — a campaign that gave Massey a friendly vote on the court that would hear its legal cases. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled, in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. (2009), that Benjamin should have recused himself from a case involving Massey — but the ruling came too late to undo the damage.

The Aftermath

The explosion at Upper Big Branch produced the most thorough and damning investigation of a mine disaster in American history.

The McAteer report, the MSHA report, and the West Virginia Office of Miners' Health Safety and Training all reached the same fundamental conclusion: the explosion was preventable. It was not caused by an unforeseeable geological event. It was not the result of an unavoidable hazard of mining. It was the direct, predictable consequence of specific safety failures that had been documented, cited, fined — and allowed to continue.

The reports identified multiple proximate causes: the methane accumulation that provided the initial ignition, the coal dust accumulation that propagated the explosion, the failed ventilation system that allowed methane to build up, and the inadequate rock dusting that failed to suppress the coal dust. But behind these proximate causes was a root cause: a corporate culture that treated safety as an obstacle to production and a regulatory system that lacked the tools, the resources, or the political will to enforce compliance.

The Trial of Don Blankenship

In November 2014, a federal grand jury indicted Don Blankenship on charges of conspiracy to willfully violate federal mine safety standards, securities fraud, and making false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The trial, held in Charleston, West Virginia in 2015, lasted approximately five weeks. The prosecution presented evidence of Blankenship's personal involvement in the culture of safety neglect — the memos demanding production, the intimidation of workers who raised safety concerns, the systematic flouting of regulatory requirements. The defense argued that Blankenship was a hands-off executive who delegated mine operations to subordinates and was not personally responsible for conditions underground.

The jury convicted Blankenship of the conspiracy charge — a misdemeanor — and acquitted him of the felony counts. The misdemeanor conviction carried a maximum sentence of one year in prison. The judge imposed the maximum.

One year. For twenty-nine deaths.

The sentence was widely criticized as inadequate — a judgment that seemed to confirm the miners' long-held belief that their lives were valued less than the coal they dug. The structural problem was not the judge's sentencing decision but the law itself: the crime of conspiracy to willfully violate mine safety standards was classified as a misdemeanor, not a felony, carrying a maximum penalty that was, by any standard of justice, incommensurate with the harm caused.

Legislative efforts to strengthen penalties for mine safety violations — to make the knowing endangerment of miners a felony carrying meaningful prison time — have been introduced in Congress repeatedly since 2010. None have passed. The coal industry's political influence, while diminished from its peak, remains sufficient to block legislation that would hold executives personally accountable for the safety conditions in their mines.

The Twenty-Nine

Their names should be part of the historical record:

Carl Acord, 52. Jason Atkins, 25. Christopher Bell, 33. Gregory Steven Brock, 47. Kenneth Allan Chapman, 53. Robert Clark, 41. Charles Timothy Davis, 51. Cory Davis, 20. Michael Lee Elswick, 56. William I. Griffith, 54. Steven Harrah, 40. Edward Dean Jones, 50. Richard Lane, 45. William Roosevelt Lynch, 59. Nicholas Darrell McCroskey, 26. Joe Marcum, 57. Ronald Lee Maynor, 31. James E. Mooney, 50. Adam Keith Morgan, 21. Rex L. Mullins, 58. Joshua S. Napper, 25. Howard D. Payne, 53. Dillard Earl Persinger, 32. Joel R. Price, 55. Deward Allan Scott, 53. Gary Quarles, 33. Grover Dale Skeens, 57. Benny Willingham, 62. Ricky Workman, 50.

The youngest was Cory Davis, twenty years old. The oldest was Benny Willingham, sixty-two. They were fathers, sons, husbands, brothers, grandfathers. They were coal miners. They went to work on the morning of April 5, 2010, and they did not come home.

Every one of them deserved to come home.

The Larger Meaning

Upper Big Branch is not an anomaly in the history of Appalachian coal mining. It is, in many ways, the culmination of a pattern that has been documented throughout this textbook: the pattern in which outside capital extracts wealth from the land, in which the costs of extraction are borne by the people who live on the land, in which the regulatory systems that are supposed to protect those people are weakened by the political influence of the industries they are supposed to regulate, and in which, when disaster strikes, the accountability is inadequate.

The difference between Upper Big Branch and Monongah (1907) or Farmington (1968) is not the pattern. The pattern is identical. The difference is the degree of knowledge. In 1907, the science of mine safety was rudimentary, and the technology of explosion prevention was limited. In 2010, every aspect of mine safety that could have prevented the Upper Big Branch explosion was understood, documented, regulated, and — at Upper Big Branch — systematically ignored.

Twenty-nine men died not because the knowledge to save them did not exist, but because the will to apply that knowledge was subordinated to the imperative of production. That is the meaning of Upper Big Branch. That is what the twenty-nine men's deaths teach us. And if we do not learn the lesson, the next twenty-nine men are already underground, working in conditions that someone, somewhere, has decided are an acceptable risk.

Discussion Questions

1. Upper Big Branch had been cited for 515 safety violations in the two years before the explosion. The total fines were approximately $897,000. If the fines had been one hundred times larger — $89 million — would the explosion have been prevented? What level of financial penalty is sufficient to change corporate behavior?

2. Don Blankenship was convicted of a misdemeanor and served one year in prison for crimes that contributed to twenty-nine deaths. He subsequently ran for the U.S. Senate. What does this tell us about accountability in the American legal system? Should corporate executives who knowingly endanger workers' lives face the same criminal penalties as individuals who commit violent crimes?

3. The investigation found that miners who reported safety concerns at Upper Big Branch were intimidated or threatened with termination. What protections should whistleblowers in dangerous industries have? How can a reporting culture be established in workplaces where the employer has an economic interest in suppressing safety complaints?

4. The chapter argues that Upper Big Branch is not an anomaly but a culmination of a pattern visible throughout Appalachian mining history. Do you agree? What would have to change — in law, in corporate culture, in political practice — to break the pattern?