How MSHA, mine safety should be reshaped in 2025--Margo Lopez and Bill Doran Published Dec 20, 2024 --Pit & Quarry

How MSHA, mine safety should be reshaped in 2025--Margo Lopez and Bill Doran Published Dec 20, 2024

Photo: Alexandr Baranov/iStock / Getty Images Plus/Getty Images

As the new year gets underway, everyone has goals and aspirations.  

Maybe the garage needs to be cleaned out. Or you want to commit to being more forgiving to the person who cuts you off in traffic.

There are always things we wish we could do better or accomplish. In our world of mine safety, we also have some things we’d like to see done in 2025. Here is our short 2025 wish list.

MSHA’s direction

With the outcome of November’s presidential election, the leadership at all federal agencies will change when the new administration takes over Jan. 20. The Mine Safety & Health Administration (MSHA) is no exception in this transition.  

Keeping politics out of this discussion, our wish for the next assistant secretary for MSHA is simply that he or she originate on the metal/nonmetal side of the mining community. It’s just time.  

This is not in any way a criticism of the assistant secretaries whose backgrounds and experience were in coal country – Chris Williamson, David Zatezalo, Joe Main, David Lauriski and Davitt McAteer, to name a few. It’s simply a recognition of the fact that the mining industry’s demographics have changed.  

Based on our less-than-scientific review of National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health statistics, there are fewer than 1,000 coal mines and more than 12,000 metal/nonmetal mines in the U.S. Metal/nonmetal miners outnumber coal miners five to one.

Of course, this does not mean coal mine safety and health issues are any less important. It just means it’s time that metal/nonmetal miners have a voice at the top who has a greater understanding of their industry.

Workplace exams

Additionally, the workplace examination standard needs to be reined in from the “gotcha” regulation that it is turning into.  

During ramp-up and stakeholder outreach for the revised standard back in 2019, the industry was assured that the regulation would not be the basis for a default, follow-on citation anytime multiple citations were issued at an operation. In some districts, however, this clearly is now the case.  

The boiler plate language that has become all too familiar is this: “Based on the number of citations issued during this inspection, it is clear that adequate workplace examinations are not being conducted.”

There need to be clearer guidelines for inspectors on what factors must be in place for this catch-all citation to be issued. For instance, more emphasis should be placed on the operator’s workplace exam training efforts and actual workplace exam performance (i.e., exams conducted, as well as adverse conditions documented and corrected) rather than just numbers. 

We have seen this citation following the issuance of six citations – two S&S and four non-S&S. That should not happen.

Press release tactic

Also, the agency’s monthly impact inspection press release practice must end.  

This release that shares the findings of the inspections and singles out specific mine operators for their inspection results is a snapshot in time. It often does not relate to the enforcement picture that exists after informal conferences and contests.

At a minimum, the agency should follow up after the end of that process with the changes that have been made in informal and formal proceedings. That is probably a bridge too far, but ending the process altogether certainly is not.

Safety spirit

Finally, while the mining industry rebounded in 2024 from the 41 fatal accidents that occurred in 2023, the 28 that did occur (as of press time for this month’s edition) set a significant target for the industry.

During its 2021 fatality spike, the industry doubled down in its training and compliance efforts to tackle the problem and emphasize safe work procedures. Our hope is that this spirit and commitment, supported by best practices and strong leadership, will reduce the number even further.

The miners, supervisors and mine safety professionals that we are regularly around have a laser focus on keeping each other safe. That level of care and support, with cooperation and encouragement from MSHA, can only get the industry closer to its goals.

If the downward trend in the fatality rate can continue in 2025, it really will be a happy new year.

Related: A look back and what’s ahead for MSHA

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Bill Doran and Margo Lopez are with the national labor, employment and safety law firm Ogletree Deakins. They can be reached at william.doran@ogletree.com and margaret.lopez@ogletree.com.

READ ARTICLE here>>> www.pitandquarry.com/how-msha-mine-safety-should-be-reshaped-in-2025/

www.DavittMcAteer.com

Former mine safety secretary worries about NIOSH cuts- Jim Bissett/Inter Mountain 

JIM BISSETT

For The Inter-Mountain

There was an expression heard in San Giovanni in Fiore, and the other little mountain and coastal towns near the arch of the boot in southern Italy that have West Virginia coal-mining connections.  People would say it when they were on the way to work, an errand or evening with friends.

Roughly translated, it was: “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. It’s not like I’m going to Monongah.”

It meant that the loved one leaving through the front door at that moment fully anticipated safe travels and a routine return.

And, yes, they were referring to Monongah in Marion County.

On the morning of Dec. 6, 1907, in the ragged coal camp, hundreds of miners — many of whom were immigrants from San Giovanni — had gone out the door for their shifts at Fairmont Coal’s adjoining No. 6 and No. 8 mines.

A coupling snapped on a trainload of cars laden with coal coming up a shaft from the processing plant. Like a roller coaster ride, the cars clanked and banged as they rolled down the slope and back into the mine.

Metal on metal in the ensuing crash created sparks, which ignited the very air. The highly flammable “black damp” coal dust was thick and ever-present, and the explosions that followed were horrific.

As many as 500 lives were lost that day, and 100 or better of the death toll, as it came out later, were boys — many not even out of their teens — working underage and off the books.

“And now, with one wave of the hand, this administration is going to put us right back to where we were,” J. Davitt McAteer said Tuesday.

Trapped?

McAteer was assistant secretary for the Mine Safety and Health Administration for most of the 1990s during the Clinton administration. Among his subsequent roles was a stint as vice president at the former Wheeling Jesuit University overseeing sponsored programs — including the National Technology Transfer Center. 

He’s a Fairmont native who grew up watching his father — who sailed to the U.S. from Ireland to carve his purchase of the American dream in coal — go out the door every day to a job that could have killed him in the blink of an eye.

In 1968, when the Farmington No. 9 Mine blew, McAteer was a WVU law student with an eye toward labor relations.

His resulting white paper on the disaster got him a job with consumer activist Ralph Nader and helped line the portal to the country’s first comprehensive miner safety and health legislation a year later.

McAteer has been watching with dismay while scientists and researchers who have been furloughed from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Morgantown have been swapping their lab coats and laminated employee badges in exchange for protest signs.

A total of 10,000 workers in NIOSH divisions in Morgantown, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Spokane, Wash., were told in early April by the Trump administration that their jobs are going away in June. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is carrying out the reduction in force mandates as part of ongoing initiatives to “right-size” government, which the president says is bloated by bureaucracy.

Other layoffs are reportedly looming at MSHA, which has McAteer doubly concerned.

“There’s nothing ‘right’ about compromising miner safety and health,” he said.

Life, death and other assessments

Following Monongah and other disasters, safety analysts had formulated a grim analogy about mining and the Mountain State in the 1920s.

If given a choice, they said, of spending a day in a West Virginia coal mine or a day on a World War I battlefield, you would have been statistically safer taking your chances in the war, those analysts determined — even with the bombs, bullets and mustard gas.

NIOSH in Morgantown has its beginnings in coal miner health, in particular, with its early research looking at the scourge of black lung, which robs miners of their lives — one breath at a time.

That includes providing regular chest X-rays, along with research and development of respirators and other protective equipment to quell the amount of coal dust a miner will take in during a shift.

Continuous “long wall” mining machines and other innovations in the industry move metric tons of coal like never before, that also means more potentially lethal coal dust, McAteer said.

And with the Trump administration wanting to increase coal production at the same time coal safety effects such as NIOSH and MSHA are being curtailed, that means, McAteer said, the inevitability of even more Monongahs to come — in an already tenuous industry.

“In mine safety, the lessons are in blood,” he said.

“The only way you can measure what you’re doing is by asking, ‘How many miners were hurt and killed last year? How many have been hurt and killed so far this year?'”

For full story click here>>>https://www.theintermountain.com/news/local-news/2025/05/former-mine-safety-secretary-worries-about-niosh-cuts/

www.DavittMcAteer.com