State Safety

Ron Wooten, the former head of the state Office of Miners’ Health Safety and Training during much of former Gov. Joe Manchin’s administration, said he did not believe his agency had the proper manpower, equipment or material to do its job.

Wooten’s brutally frank assessment of his own agency and the Legislature came during a February interview that was released last week.

James Beck, a member of the independent team appointed by Manchin to review the Upper Big Branch disaster, asked Wooten if he thought the agency had adequate resources prior to the explosion.

“No, I don’t, Jim,” Wooten said. “And I think the record will bear this out, that in every appropriation cycle, every single legislative session that I was involved with, I asked for more people, I asked for more money.”

Manchin appointed Wooten in September 2006 to head the miners’ safety agency. Earlier that year, 12 men died in the Sago mine disaster. Four years later, 29 miners died at Upper Big Branch.

Wooten said his work was hamstrung by inattention.

“I asked for more inspectors,” he said. “I was told, right or wrong, when I took the job, yeah, inspectors were important, but we’d never really held our feet to the fire.

“I asked the question – I said, ‘These inspections are legislative mandates; how can we not take them seriously?’ ”

later, Wooten said, “It was as though – in my opinion, if you were going to get anything, you had to blow something up first.”That’s just the way it was before the Legislature was going to act or react to do something about resources. And I’m just being brutally honest, but that’s the way I feel.”

Wooten was former safety executive at Consol Energy. He left the state agency in November 2010.

Three reports on Upper Big Branch have primarily blamed mine owner Massey Energy Co. for failing to prevent the explosion. But regulators from the U.S. Mine Health and Safety Administration are facing scrutiny of their own for failing to do enough to make sure Massey was following the law.

Wooten’s remarks include fresh criticism of federal regulators but also raise questions about what West Virginia officials could have done better.

Wooten said inspectors left the regulatory agency to take more money from coal companies.

Wooten also said he wished the state had more authority to look at mines’ ventilation plans. Mines need to be well ventilated or else combustible fuels can buildup. Investigators have said Upper Big Branch was poorly ventilated.

“And I don’t know that it would have made any difference, but it seems to me if you’ve got more people looking at the ventilation then perhaps someone may have seen something,” Wooten said. “Because the state – and I don’t mean any disrespect to my friend at (MSHA), but the state inspectorate is comprised, for the most part, of miners who have been around a good while and have a lot of experience.”

State lawmakers had a mixed reaction to Wooten’s comments.

Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, a native of the coalfields, had been the long-time president of the Senate in the years before Upper Big Branch.

Rob Alsop, Tomblin’s chief of staff, called Tomblin a “strong advocate” of making sure miners were safe and regulators had adequate resources.

“After Sago and Aracoma, then-Senate President Tomblin worked together with Governor Manchin to pass legislation – in one day – that overhauled a number of aspects of our regulatory program,” Alsop said in an email. “And last year he put additional resources in the budget for 12 additional inspectors and a $5,000 raise for inspectors for recruitment and retention purposes.”

House Majority Whip Mike Caputo, D-Marion, who is also a United Mine Workers of America representative, said, “I don’t recall a time when laws were passed just because it was the right thing to do, somebody had to die, or somebody had to get maimed before a law would get passed.”

He blamed the coal industry in general and the West Virginia Coal Association in particular for fighting regulations.

Among those efforts were two bills proposed earlier this year – in the first full legislative session since the Upper Big Branch disaster – that did not move very far, even in the labor-friendly House. One would have required machines to shut off automatically if methane levels rose to 1 percent of the atmosphere. A second would have strengthened whistleblower protections for miners.

 Caputo said the industry was “fighting this tooth and nail and had everybody confused.”

“Everybody was so confused because of the industry tactics – it just wasn’t going to happen,” Caputo said.