From the Archives- Roanoke Times Profile
Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 22, 1994 TAG: 9402220247
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORTON LENGTH: Long
ACTIVIST TAKES OVER MINE SAFETY
WHEN DAVITT McATEER was confirmed as federal mine safety chief, he became the first full-time safety activist to take on the job. His goals, however, are less political than they are practical.In 1973, when he was three years out of West Virginia University's law school, Davitt McAteer wrote an article for The Humanist entitled "There Are No Pay Toilets Down Here."
It was prefaced with a couple of verses from "Dark as a Dungeon," Merle Travis' classic coal-mining song.
"There is no running water in McAteer mines, nor portable toilets; but these matters are less essential to miners than the problem of staying alive," McAteer wrote.
McAteer - a former solicitor for safety for the United Mine Workers and executive director of the Occupational Safety and Health Law Center - is a different kind of leader for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.
McAteer is the first person to lead the agency since it was created in 1978 whose background is one of advocacy for miners and occupational health and safety. Those who preceded him have come either from industry or the world of politics.
Nominated as assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health by President Clinton, McAteer was confirmed by the Senate on Feb. 8.
Immediately following his confirmation, McAteer took to the road to visit MSHA employees in district offices around the country. That brought him last week to the Southwest Virginia coal town of Norton.
He was in Norton, he said, to let MSHA employees get to know him, to tell them his plans and to ask for their participation in making the agency better.
The mine inspectors and other employees in the district offices "constitute the best thinking and the best brains we have in this business," McAteer said. "We can draw on these people and get good ideas . . . to make our enforcement scheme effective."
Safety officials with the UMW and other mine safety crusaders have been buoyed by McAteer's appointment.
"I think he's a straight-up guy," said Max Kennedy, a UMW safety official from Southwest Virginia and member of the state Mine Safety Board. "I think his intentions are for miners' safety, which we've not had in the past."
Tony Oppegard, a lawyer with the Mine Safety Project in Lexington, Ky., called McAteer's confirmation "a great day for coal miners."
Despite McAteer's background, the coal industry has not publicly opposed his appointment. "We simply look forward to working with him and his management team," said John Grasser, a spokesman for the National Coal Association.
"I don't think anybody is particularly nervous about [McAteer's appointment]. His background has provided him with a lot of knowledge," said Mike Karmis, chairman of the mining engineering department at Virginia Tech, which holds an annual conference on mine health and safety.
"I think the industry's public position . . . is that they were more comfortable with me because I'm a known commodity," McAteer said. He believes the industry sees him as fair, even though his decisions will not always be popular.
Although his history is unconventional, McAteer's appearance is not. Meeting reporters in Norton, he was dressed in a dark business suit and wore wire-rimmed glasses. His manner was relaxed and unguarded and he sat casually forward in the straight-backed hotel chair, sometimes talking directly to the reporters and sometimes leaning forward as if to bounce-pass his words off the hotel carpet.
The conversation turned inevitably to the Southmountain Mine No. 3 explosion, Virginia's last big mine disaster, which killed eight men Dec. 7, 1992.
At Southmountain, investigators found that improper mining methods led to the accumulation of explosive methane gas, which was ignited by a miner's cigarette that had illegally been brought into the mine. MSHA levied $439,172 in civil fines against the mining company and a company supervisor; a federal grand jury indicted the company and two company officials on criminal charges.
"Every time there is an accident . . . there are lessons to be learned," McAteer said. "It's our obligation to take those lessons and carry them on to folks in the mining industry."
The Southmountain explosion showed that some in the mining industry are not prepared to deal with sophisticated mine-ventilation systems, he said. It also revealed the need for improvements in safety inspections before shifts begin and training for mine supervisors, he said.
"In addition to that, we find that we can't have smoking underground. We knew that, but we haven't kept that problem in the forefront of the mining community."
McAteer said MSHA could have done some things better in its routine inspections of the Southmountain mine before the explosion. But he rejected the tendency by some companies involved in mine disasters, including Southmountain Coal Co. of Coeburn, to try to lay part of the blame on his agency.
"It is not our obligation - nor do we intend - to operate mines," he said. "It is not our obligation - nor do we intend - to tell the company how to operate mines. It is our obligation to carry out the law."
McAteer endorsed a longtime MSHA goal of zero fatalities in the mining industry. But a reduction in fatalities is not accomplished through slogans, he said, but by practical action.
Dust is still a problem in the mines, even beyond the recent well-publicized cases of fraud in the sampling of coal dust, he said.
"We should in this year, 1994, have eradicated black lung, yet the medical community says we have not. . . . That's why we have to look at and examine our role," he said.
McAteer wants to see an improvement in the total health of the mining work force and plans to focus on such issues as repetitive motion injury. "I'd like somebody who goes in the mine at 18 to come out at age 60 and not have sacrificed [his] health for the job."
Both of McAteer's grandfathers worked for the coal industry. His involvement in mine safety issues began during law school, when the Farmington mine disaster prompted a study of mine safety in West Virginia by a Ralph Nader organization. McAteer directed the study.
He worked with Miners for Democracy, an insurgent faction within the UMW, and became the union's safety lawyer in 1972 after the faction took power.
He wrote the Miner's Manual, a legal guide for miners, and similar publications for the chemical and textile industries. In a recent issue of New Solutions, a journal of occupational health and safety, McAteer and a co-author used the fatal fire at the chicken processing plant in Hamlet, N.C., to demonstrate the need for an independent board to investigate industrial disasters - the same way the National Transportation Safety Board investigates transportation accidents.
McAteer said he wants to lead MSHA with a philosophy of openness "that permits issues to trickle up and permits our inspectors to come into their own.
"What I can bring to the agency is to try to bring some enthusiasm and try to bring some . . . direction," he said.
\ DAVITT McATEER\ New assistant U.S. secretary of labor for mine safety and health\ \ JOB: Overseeing $203 million budget and 2,500 employees.
\ AGE: 49
\ RESIDES: Shepherdstown, W.Va.
\ BACKGROUND: Native of Fairmont, W.Va. Graduate of West Virginia University Law School, 1970.
\ PERSONAL: Wife, Kathryn; five children, ages 3 to 12.
\ QUOTE: "I was an advocate for miners . . . and I worked for the United Mine Workers union. I'm not at all backing away from that position, but that was a different time and a different job."
by CNB
