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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/14/1352240Ellen Smith, owner and managing editor of Mine Safety and Health News. She has been covering mining-related issues since 1987 and has won numerous journalism awards for her reporting. snip// AMY GOODMAN: What is Bob Murray's history? Explain exactly who he is, what he owns. ELLEN SMITH: You know, Mr. Murray has a fairly checkered history. He's got twenty-seven mines right now that are working or temporarily idled for one reason or another.
We've written about him. He first came to my attention in 1993, and it's because it was a fairly sad case, where a mine foreman lost his arm in one of Mr. Murray's underground coal mines, and he bled to death before they could get him to the surface. Now, according to a witness, about a week before this accident occurred, Mr. Murray had said to forty miners that under no circumstances were they to turn off the beltline, because if you can't move coal out of the mine, you're not making money. And he said, “I don't want that belt turned off unless there's a man in it.” A week later, there's a problem on the beltline. A foreman goes to see what's wrong. He didn't turn the belt off, and his arm got caught in the conveyer belt and ripped off. I mean, it was a very, very sad case. Now, they weren't arguing the point of law of what Mr. Murray said, but the point of law was whether or not this foreman was doing repair and maintenance to the belt, where it should have been turned off. And that was really unclear in the case. But what wasn't disputed was what Mr. Murray said in front of these miners.
He had another mine called KenAmerican Resources, where the supervisors were found guilty of felony Mine Act violations for trying to cover up an accident, lying to investigators, giving advanced warning to the miners underground that mine inspectors were coming in. They would say, “Company's coming,” and so that way the miners could try to get some of the safety features in place, like the ventilation curtains, up. Putting up ventilation curtains, of course, takes more time when you're mining. And those, they were found guilty. Now, Mr. Murray, you have to understand, has never been found guilty himself. It's been supervisors, foremen. But we always say in this industry that safety starts from the top down.
At his Powhatan No. 6 mine he was in big arguments with the Mine Safety and Health Administration officials over problems they had there, over citations he got, over the fact that they wanted to close down a longwall section to make the mine safer. And we have meeting notes where he was screaming, "You're costing me $15,000 an hour! I’m losing tens of millions of dollars!" So, you know, he really does have a checkered past.Now, we have to temper this whole accident scene right now at Crandall by saying that it appears that they were following the mining plan, and that mine plan was approved by the government, by the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and a very well-known engineering company was the one that designed that plan. more... http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/14/1352240
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