Bush administration more relaxed about mine safety

Less than half of the fines levied between 2001 and 2003 have been paid.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON -- Since the Bush administration took office in 2001, it has been more lenient 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 Newspapers investigation has found.
At one point last year, the Mine Safety and Health Administration fined a coal company a scant $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 earlier this 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, even though deaths and injuries from mining accidents have hovered near record low levels in the past few years.
Points
The analysis shows:
UThe 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.
ULess than half of the fines levied between 2001 and 2003 -- about $3 million -- have been paid.
UThe budget and staff for the enforcement office also have declined, forcing the agency to make do with about 100 fewer coal mine enforcement personnel.
UIn serious criminal cases, the number of guilty pleas and convictions fell 54.8 percent since 2001. In the first four years of the Bush administration, the federal government has averaged 3.5 criminal convictions a year; in the four years before that the average was 7.75 per year.
Officials at the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the Department of Labor didn't respond by Friday evening to a list of 13 e-mail questions or to a request for an interview.
Davitt McAteer, who headed the mine safety agency during the Clinton administration, said it has become a "paper tiger."
"The numbers indicate that they haven't had as much in the area of enforcement," said McAteer, now a vice president at Wheeling Jesuit University. "It suggests that the whole system is kind of bogging down."
McAteer said that without the stick of high fines, mandated payments of those penalties and consistent follow-up inspections, there's little incentive for companies to repair safety problems.