Upper Big Branch: twenty-nine men and a mine that was allowed to run

MONTCOAL, W.Va. — At 3:02 p.m. on April 5, 2010, methane ignited at the Upper Big Branch mine and the flame front picked up coal dust, which is what turned an ignition into a blast that ran the entries for miles. Thirty-one miners were underground. Twenty-nine were killed. Two were brought out alive.

Upper Big Branch, operated by Massey Energy's Performance Coal Company, was one of the largest underground mines in the country. It was also, in the years before the explosion, one of the most cited. Federal records showed repeated citations for the same conditions — inadequate water sprays, broken dust controls, ventilation that did not move enough air where it needed to go.

Coal dust is the multiplier in an underground explosion. A methane ignition by itself can burn a crew. Pulverized coal dust, if it is not rock-dusted and wetted, carries the flame thousands of feet, which is what happened at Montcoal. The rock dusting and water spray requirements in the book are not housekeeping. They are the difference between a fire and a catastrophe.

The two-year investigation produced three major reports: MSHA's own, a state-funded independent panel chaired by former MSHA chief Davitt McAteer, and a congressional review. All three found the same thing in different words. The mine was run with a hostility to regulation, the conditions that caused the explosion had been cited and paid for rather than fixed, and the enforcement system did not stop it.

The consequences ran further than any previous mine disaster. Alpha Natural Resources, which had bought Massey, agreed to pay and spend $209 million to settle the criminal case. Two mine officials went to prison. Six years later a federal jury in Charleston convicted former Massey chief executive Don Blankenship of conspiring to violate mine safety standards.

Upper Big Branch changed enforcement practice. It changed the dust and silica standards. It changed the pattern-of-violations rule. What it did not change quickly enough were the twenty-nine names, and for the miners who worked that seam it remains the reference point for what a mine looks like when production is the only number anyone is measuring.