Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumDon Blankenship Trial: Secret Tapes Reveal Arrogant, Amoral Bully Who Knew Mine Ops Dangers Well
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The tapes offer a peek into the mind of a man seemingly consumed with his own wealth and frustrated with federal regulators and company officials who pushed for more attention to safety. The prosecution hopes to offer three more recordings, but on Thursday, defense lawyers asked Judge Irene C. Berger, who is presiding over the case, to block them.
In one conversation, Mr. Blankenship complains that Masseys top safety official is too concerned with the social aspects of her job: Youve got to have someone who actually understands that this game is about money. In another, he frets over a confidential internal safety memo central to the prosecutions case that warned, among other things, of poor ventilation at mines and said Massey was plainly cheating in sampling coal dust, a health hazard and a fire accelerant. He worries how things will look if Massey is sued. If that was a fatal today, or if we had one, Mr. Blankenship says, an apparent reference to an accident, itd be a terrible document to be in discovery.
Discussing inspectors from the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, he complains that they pay too much attention to black lung disease, caused by excessive coal dust exposure. (Autopsies would find that 71 percent of the 29 miners killed at Upper Big Branch suffered from black lung, compared with an industry average of 3.2 percent, according to a 2011 state inquiry that attributed the blast to a failure of basic coal mine safety practices.) The truth of the matter, Mr. Blankenship is heard saying, is black lung is not an issue in this industry that is worth the effort they put into it.
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The defense also contends that Mr. Blankenship was far removed from daily life at Upper Big Branch. But Michael B. Hissam, who worked on the early stages of the mine investigation as a federal prosecutor and now represents coal-industry clients, said the audiotapes are the answer to the busy C.E.O. defense, because they show Don Blankenship having hands-on micromanagement involvement. Mr. Blankenships recordings are a gift he gave to the families of the dead miners, said Judy Jones Petersen, a Charleston doctor whose brother Dean Jones, a mine foreman, was killed. The jury gets an opportunity to hear this snively character whining about his stock options, she said. Its rather pathetic.
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http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/17/us/coal-barons-trial-may-turn-on-his-secretly-recorded-conversations.html?referer=https://www.google.com/
Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)Coal mine owners of today are the robber-barons of the past.
And guess who pretends to care about "the jobs, what about the great jobs" every time health and safety are uttered.
Why are these mass homicide by criminal negligence guys not in jail???