Lawyers clash during opening arguments. Massey Energy neglected to repair a failing conveyor belt system and did not replace a crucial ventilation wall prior to a January 2006 fire that killed two miners, a Logan County jury was told Monday.
Massey President Don Blankenship is personally to
blame for the deaths because he emphasized increasing coal production over
proper safety precautions, a lawyer for the two miners' widows also told
jurors.
Charleston Gazette: Tuesday, November 11th, 2008-- LOGAN,W.Va. - Massey Energy neglected to repair a failing conveyor belt system and did not replace a crucial ventilation wall prior to a January 2006 fire that killed two miners, a Logan County jury was told Monday.
Massey President Don Blankenship is personally to blame for the deaths because he emphasized increasing coal production over proper safety precautions, a lawyer for the two miners' widows also told jurors.
"They were just going to work, trying to earn a living for their families," said Bruce Stanley, lawyer for the widows of miners Don Bragg and Ellery Hatfield.
Attorneys for Blankenship, Massey and subsidiary Aracoma Coal Co. called the deaths at the Aracoma Alma No. 1 Mine "a tragedy," but urged jurors not to blame Blankenship or the companies.
"There is no question there were mistakes, but there is also no question that those mistakes were not Don Blankenship's," said Tom Flaherty, a lawyer for Blankenship.
The lawyers clashed Monday afternoon during about three hours of opening arguments in a packed courtroom at the Logan County Courthouse, in a wrongful-death case filed over the high-profile fatal mine fire nearly three years ago.
Logan Circuit Judge Roger L. Perry is presiding over the jury trial, in which widows of Bragg and Hatfield - as representatives of the miners' estates - are not only suing mine operator and employer Aracoma Coal and parent firm Massey Energy, but also seeking to hold Blankenship personally responsible for the deaths.
Massey is already facing proposed fines of $1.5 million for 25 major violations cited by the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration, and a federal criminal investigation of the fire is ongoing.
Federal inspectors cited Massey for missing ventilation walls that investigators said were a major cause of the deaths. The missing ventilation walls, called stoppings, allowed smoke from the conveyor belt fire to enter the mine's primary escape tunnel.
During the Aracoma fire, a crew of workers ran into smoke in their escape tunnel and had to find another way out. Bragg and Hatfield became separated from the group, got lost, and eventually succumbed to the smoke.
Investigators also blamed Massey for not performing required safety checks, failing to quickly warn miners of the growing blaze, and not having a fire hose available that fit the mine's water supply lines.
During Monday's opening arguments, Stanley began by reading newspaper obituaries for Bragg and Hatfield, as family photos of both men were projected on a screen in front of the jury.
Stanley explained that there was a similar conveyor belt fire at Aracoma less than a month before the fatal Jan. 19 blaze. And, he said that the critical missing stopping had been intentionally removed two months before that, to make it easier to set up a new electrical installation underground.
Stanley said Aracoma was behind schedule on production and revenues, and the mine management was under increasing pressure - especially from Blankenship - to focus on moving more coal.
Stanley showed jurors a series of memos in which he said Blankenship involved himself in "day to day decisions" about how the Aracoma Mine would be run, including an October 2005 note in which Blankenship told mine managers to ignore anyone who tells them their job is to do anything except "run coal."
A week later, Blankenship sent out a follow-up memo to clarify that he didn't intend for "safety to be a secondary responsibility," and his lawyers have argued the original memo didn't have anything to do with Aracoma.
James Crockett, a lawyer for Massey, told jurors that the company has led the way with safety reforms - such as glow-in-the-dark stripes on miners' clothing - that other companies and government regulators have copied.
"You know the stripes - you can't go out to Wal-Mart without seeing someone wearing the stripes," Crockett said.
He said that jurors would learn that the deaths at Aracoma occurred "in spite of, not because of" Massey's corporate safety policies.
"They call these parent companies, and they're a lot like real parents," Crockett said. "Real parents try their best to tell their children or those underneath them how to do their jobs, but they can't be there every minute."
Niall Paul, the lawyer for Aracoma Coal, focused on arguing that the company did not deliberately intend for the miners to die - a reference to the legal standard of "deliberate intent," necessary to win a wrongful-death case against an employer like Aracoma.
Under the law, deliberate intent means that, to rule against Aracoma, jurors must find that the company knew in advance of specific unsafe working conditions that caused Bragg and Hatfield's deaths. That tougher standard does not apply to Massey or Blankenship.
Paul noted several times that Bragg and Hatfield's 12-person crew had been trained recently in mine escapes and on how to use their emergency breathing devices. The other 10 miners, Paul noted, were able to escape the mine fire safely.
"I'm not here to judge these brave men who go underground every day and risk their lives to dig our energy," Paul told jurors. "But I'm here to promise you that they were trained."
"They call them 'self-rescuers' for a reason," Paul said. "Aracoma did what it could to train the men to do what 10 did. It's just that the decision to put it on came too late for two."