No Explosion Necessary: How Upper Big Branch Would Have Killed Its Miners
On May 19, an independent panel commissioned by the former governor of West Virginia released a report detailing what went wrong at Massey Energy Co.'s Upper Big Branch mine.
Davitt McAteer, who authored the report, has called the disaster "an accident waiting to happen", describing the disaster as a product of failure of both management and safety protocol.
McAteer discussed with Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now" another aspect of Massey's failure -- the health of its employees. According to test results on the 29 miners killed at Massey's Upper Big Branch Mine, 26 were found with some sign of black lung, a deadly respiratory disorder completely preventable in modern mining.
These are quite young miners, and these are some miners who don't have much experience underground. So it was disturbing to us, and it is disturbing to us, that we have this potential problem, and it's something that we need to look at very carefully.
