Mine safety relaxed, lest we forget what the previous 8 years

had brought us.

More at link: http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13087

US: Under Bush, mine-safety enforcement eased

by Seth Borenstein and Linda J. Johnson, Philadelphia Inquirer
January 8th, 2006

Since the Bush administration took office in 2001, it has been more lenient than its predecessors toward mining companies facing serious safety violations, issuing fewer and smaller major fines and collecting less than half of the money that violators owed, a Knight Ridder investigation has found.

At one point last year, the Mine Safety and Health Administration fined a coal company $440 for a "significant and substantial" violation that ended in the death of a Kentucky man. The firm, International Coal Group Inc., is the same company that owns the Sago mine in West Virginia, where 12 workers died last week.

The $440 fine remains unpaid.

Relaxed mine-safety enforcement is widespread, according to a Knight Ridder analysis of federal records and interviews with former and current federal safety officials, while deaths and injuries from mining accidents have hovered near record-low levels in the last few years. Knight Ridder is the parent company of The Inquirer.

The analysis shows:

The number of major fines over $10,000 has dropped by nearly 10 percent since 2001. The dollar amount of those penalties, when adjusted for inflation, has plummeted 43 percent to a median of $27,584.

the Dept of the Interior which was riddled with Bush political appointees before the Obama adminstration took over and many of those appointees are still in place and their actions are weakening mine safety.

Tell Sec'y Salazar to clean out the place. I've told him a number of times.