The reason for the self-promotion is clear: Massey has been on the defensive ever since its Upper Big Branch mine exploded with deadly results in April, leaving the company in dire need of some good press.

Yet a closer examination of those awards leaves you wondering if they’re truly anything to crow about.

Four Massey facilities were honored last month with safety awards presented by the Joseph A. Holmes Safety Association, a 94-year-old non-profit made up, in its own words, “of representatives from state and federal government agencies, mining organizations and labor.”

Yet the United Mine Workers Association, the largest miners’ union, isn’t affiliated at all, according to UMWA spokesman Phil Smith. ”We don’t have anything to do with that organization,” he said Tuesday. “And we didn’t have anything to do with Massey getting any awards.”

The contact number on the Holmes Safety Association’s website directs callers to an official in the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which is also under fire for its role in the deadly UBB blast. (MSHA critics contend that the agency has grown too close to the coal companies it’s supposed to monitor, and that officials should have closed the doomed UBB mine based on its long record of safety violations.) That official has yet to return a call.

Furthermore, only one of the four mines receiving a Holmes award is an underground operation (like the UBB), and according to MSHA, it’s no longer producing any coal.

On top of the Holmes awards, five Massey-owned facilities took home MSHA’s “Pacesetter” safety award last month — a sign, Massey said, of “their outstanding safety records during 2009.”

Yet one of those mines, the Roundbottom Powellton operation in Boone County, W.Va., was also among the 32 mines singled out by MSHA in August 2009 as having so many safety problems that it should have received a “pattern of violations” status. (Only the high number of company appeals prevented MSHA from issuing those 32 mines a pattern of violations letter.)

Which raises the question: How could the same agency consider the same mine to be eligible for both a safety award and a pattern of violations status in the same year?

It’s not a question with which Massey has wrestled. “All of these awards are well deserved recognition of how our members are committed to working safely and that Massey’s safety culture is effective throughout the organization,” CEO Don Blankenship said in a statement.

Whether lawmakers believe Blankenship or their own eyes is another issue altogether.

Dingus, a longtime Appalachian coal miner, told West Virginia Public Broadcasting that Massey’s safety rhetoric didn’t extend to the company’s practices underground. He cited his experiences at Massey’s Lower Cedar Grove mine in the late 1990s.

“To be honest that was one of the most dangerous mines that I’ve ever been in. The way they run it and the conditions of the mine, it was pretty sad to put people in there. I know they had to make money but…”

“I stayed scared to death. This is the god’s honest truth: I would go to work crying and come home crying because my nerves was so messed up over doing things that was unsafe and the way they treated ya. They treated ya awful, no respect.”

Dingus also noted a common (but rarely mentioned) occurrence in Appalachia: the practice of blasting the coal fields on top of mountains at the same time that miners are tunneling inside the same range.

“We had a strip job at one time was right over top of us or real close to us,” he said. “When they put a shot off you could feel it it would shake the mines inside the ground and stuff and the roof.”

Also noteworthy, Dingus said that Massey supervisors discouraged the miners from hanging ventilation curtains, which channel fresh air underground and prevent methane from accumulating. Those curtains can get in the way of the heavy equipment, slowing production.

“I would try to hang the ventilation the curtain to keep the dust out and away from me and he would jump on me,” he said. “(He would) say ‘no you can’t do that; it will mess the curtain up.’”

Massey has been under a microscope since April 5, when its Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, W.Va., exploded, killing 29 miners and all but killing a 30th. Behind its bellicose CEO Don Blankenship, the company has defended its safety record since the incident. But its side of the story grows less and less credible each time a new Randy Dingus emerges with horror stories from underground.

Most of the citations related to violations MSHA inspectors found in the mine’s electrical systems — presumably problems that could be discovered without going underground — or to surface facilities at the Raleigh County operation.

Ward counts 23 new violations since May 14; we count 30. Regardless of the number, the mine is still seen as a safety threat, and it’s not yet clear how or why.

We’ve got calls in to MSHA. Hopefully we’ll have an update shortly.

Mourners hold a vigil on April 10 for the miners who died in the Upper Big Branch explosion. (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

Driving out of Charleston, south on Rte. 119, you can’t miss it: an enormous billboard, on the left side of the road, with a message from the Patriot Coal Corporation: “Be Proud of Where You Work.”

Not merely self-promotional, the statement is also a thinly veiled shot at Massey Energy, Appalachia’s dominant coal producer — and one with a reputation for putting profits above worker safety. The billboard message implies that, unlike its larger rival, Patriot’s approach to safety ensures innocuous conditions in its mines and the well-being of its workers.

[Environment1] Well, not quite.

Since April 5, when the Massey-owned Upper Big Branch mine exploded, killing 29 workers inside, Patriot’s 11 underground coal mines in Appalachia have racked up roughly 350 safety violations, according to a review of federal records by TWI. The violations include scores of citations indicating problems with ventilation systems and the accumulation of combustible materials — the very conditions thought to have caused the deadly blast at the UBB project. Of those 350 violations, 120 were deemed “significant and substantial,” indicating that they are “reasonably likely to result in a reasonably serious injury or illness.”

Patriot’s Highland 9 Mine, in Union County, Ky., for example, has tallied 83 violations since April 6, of which 19 fall into the S&S category, according to Mine Safety and Health Administration data. In Monongalia County, W.Va., the company’s Federal No. 2 mine has been hit with 74 safety citations over the same span, including 28 deemed an immediate threat to miner safety. The list goes on.

Patriot, based in St. Louis, did not respond to calls last week requesting comment.

The figures are a cogent reminder that, though the spotlight might currently be on Massey in the wake of the UBB disaster, the corporate attitude of wringing the most profits from Appalachia’s coal mines — even if, at times, it means sacrificing worker safety — is hardly limited to just one company. Indeed, Maria Gunnoe, an environmental activist with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, said Friday that the Massey model — an extremely successful one from a perspective of strict business — is starting to spread throughout the industry, at the potential threat to the miners underground.

“Companies see Massey getting away with things,” Gunnoe said, “so they start doing those things themselves.”

Patriot’s track record hasn’t been overlooked by officials at MSHA, who are cracking down on lax mine-safety practices in the wake of the UBB tragedy. Indeed, of the 57 troubled mines that MSHA identified last month as significant or repeat safety violators, five were Patriot-owned operations in either West Virginia or Kentucky. (Only Massey had more mines on the list, with nine.)

Yet in at least some cases, the additional scrutiny doesn’t seem to be improving conditions. Indeed, federal officials last week forced the closing of the Harris No. 1 mine, a Patriot-owned project in Boone County, W.Va., over a faulty ventilation system — a vital tool that prevents the accumulation of toxic gasses and combustible coal dust.

Leslie Fitzwater, spokeswoman for the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training, told Reuters that MSHA officials had warned mine operators about low oxygen levels in some parts of the Harris mine. But the company hadn’t fixed the problem when regulators reinspected the project last Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Congress is taking a closer look at the nation’s mine-safety rules as well, with the Senate Appropriations Committee’s subpanel on labor scheduled to hold a hearing on the issue on Thursday. Massey CEO Don Blankenship is scheduled to testify. No one else representing the coal industry, however, was expected to speak.

In a report out today, several environmental groups rank nine of the biggest players on Wall Street based on their stated policies toward mountaintop removal coal mining, a process in which companies blast away Appalachian peaks to access the coal seams held inside. All told, since the start of 2008, the nine banks have provided nearly $4 billion in loans and bonds to companies involved in mountaintop mining operations.

The worst offenders? PNC, GE Capitol Corp, JP Morgan Chase and UBS, which all got Fs, according to the analysis conducted by the Sierra Club, the Rainforest Action Network and BankTrack.

The reasons?

Well, PNC has bankrolled about half of all MTR mining since the start of 2008, the groups found, charging the company with a “total failure to take environmental risks into account in its lending practices.”

JPMorgan Chase and UBS both have environmental policies, but neither mentions MTR, the report says. And GE Capitol Corp has no environmental policy at all, the environmentalists found.

At the other end of the spectrum, Credit Suisse ranked best with an A-. Bank officials said they “explicitly do not finance the extraction of coal in a mountain top removal setting,” though their public policy doesn’t mention the practice, the report notes.

Other banks have policies that are more nuanced (veiled?). Bank of America, for example, says that it “will phase out financing of companies whose predominant method of extracting coal is through mountain top removal.” That’s a good first step, environmentalists argue, but not as complete as eliminating financing for companies practicing MTR at all. They gave BoA a C.

The other companies were Wells Fargo (B), Morgan Stanley (C) and Citigroup (C-).

The environmental groups said they’ll be watching for further developments.

“When it comes to protecting America’s mountains and clean drinking water, we don’t grade on a curve,” Amanda Starbuck of the Rainforest Action Network said in a statement unveiling the report. “When banks stop funding mountaintop removal they will move to the head of the class.”

But don’t tell that to Jordan Freeman. The West Virginia-based filmmaker and environmental activist recently conducted this interview with a Massey deep miner. And while the identity of the miner is concealed, his message is nonetheless pretty damning.

“Production was the name of the game,” he says. “At all costs we’ve got to get X amount of footage outside at the end of every shift — for what they would say to be, to where they could stay in the business, to keep the revenue rolling.

“For me, I felt like that lump of coal was important than a human being’s life.”

With more and more stories appearing like this, it’s getting tougher and tougher for Massey to lay a credible claim to their alleged commitment to safety.

A sign outside a West Virginia vigil for coal miners who lost their lives in the Upper Big Branch explosion on April 5 (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

Charleston, W.Va. — Two weeks after the horrific explosion that killed 29 coal miners in southern West Virginia, it’s business as usual for the owner of the project.

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) (Zuma Press)

In 2006, after Congress passed the most significant mining reforms in three decades, a small group of Democrats offered a terse warning: The legislation, they said, didn’t go nearly far enough to prevent accidents and protect miners.

[Congress1]“Much more remains to be done to keep the nation’s miners safe,” Rep. George Miller said at the time. The California Democrat was urging additional measures designed to prevent explosions and make it easier for federal regulators to close mines when safety violations become persistent. His proposal eventually passed the House but was dropped in the Senate due, at least in part, to opposition from coal-country lawmakers, including Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.).

Four years later, as West Virginia is burying 29 of its coal miners following last week’s horrific Montcoal explosion, the calls for additional safety measures appear to be prophetic. Though the cause of that disaster might not be discovered for weeks, experts suspect that an accumulation of methane — combined with high levels of combustible coal dust — is the likely culprit. Massey Energy, the Virginia-based coal giant that owns the mine, had racked up 124 safety violations this year alone, including dozens of citations indicating problems with ventilation and the accumulation of combustibles.

Now, as investigators launch their probe into the cause of the blast — and congressional leaders are mulling their own legislative response — some lawmakers, worker advocates and mine-safety experts say they know a good place for Congress to start: Miller’s failed bill. Some even suggest that the proposal, dubbed the S-Miner Act, just might have prevented the West Virginia disaster altogether.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) — who, like Miller, opposed the 2006 reforms for being too weak — said through a spokeswoman Tuesday that Congress’ failure to pass the stronger safety measures represented “a tragic missed opportunity.”

Added Phil Smith, spokesman for the United Mine Workers of America: “If S-Miner had been passed, [federal officials] would have had the authority to close this mine down.”

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

After a string of deadly coal mining accidents ravaged Appalachia in 2006, Congress stepped in to install new safety measures that were sold as the most sweeping mining-industry reforms since 1977. The bill — the 2006 Miner Act — hiked the maximum penalty for safety violations; forced mine operators to build emergency underground shelters stocked with food, water and oxygen; required installation of updated communication devices; and created stricter flammability requirements for heavy equipment and lifelines.

Yet those provisions are aimed largely at making it easier for workers to survive accidents after they occur.

“There is next to nothing in that legislation that does anything to address keeping incidents from happening in the first place,” Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, said in a statement endorsing further reforms.

Enter Miller’s S-Miner Act. That proposal would have hiked the penalties for safety violations further; strengthened the requirements for sealing mined-out chambers to prevent methane from leaking into active sections; required that metal screening be installed on all mine roofs to prevent roof falls, which can spark explosions; required studies into the effectiveness of efforts to curb the combustibility of coal dust; and, perhaps most significantly, empowered the Mine Safety and Health Administration, a branch of the Labor Department, to close problem mines more easily when patterns of safety violations are found.

In short, supporters say, it was aimed at preventing mining accidents from happening at all. And after last week’s West Virginia tragedy, “almost everything in the S-Miner Act is still needed,” said Peter Galvin, a former Education and Labor staffer who helped write the legislation.

Galvin noted another weakness in the current law: It requires MSHA officials to consider the effect of any penalty “on the operator’s ability to stay in business” – a consideration the S-Miner Act would eliminate.* “If you can’t comply with the law, you shouldn’t be in this business,” said Galvin, who was an MSHA official before joining the Education and Labor panel.

Although House Democrats passed the S-Miner bill in January 2008, the legislation never got far in the Senate, where a series of factors conspired to kill it. President Bush, for example, was waving a veto threat over the proposal, arguing that it would undermine the reforms of two years earlier. The mining industry was lobbying furiously to kill the bill. And the Senate’s lead sponsor — Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) — had been newly diagnosed with the terminal brain cancer that would eventually kill him.

But there was another reason that bill didn’t move far in the Senate: The opposition of some powerful coal-country lawmakers. Indeed, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), representing the coal-laden state of Kentucky, was opposed. And while Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) had officially endorsed the proposal, West Virginia’s other institutional Senate Democrat — Jay Rockefeller — rejected it.

“I’m not sure that what you do is try to pass another bill, add some more things on,” Rockefeller told the Beckley, W.Va., Register-Herald at the time, adding that the problem lies more with the failure of the MSHA to enforce the laws than with the laws themselves. “I don’t need a federal law to tell me to do my best every day,” he said.

Despite clear signs that MSHA could do more on the enforcement side of things, Rockefeller has also changed his tune in the wake of last week’s disaster. On Tuesday, he took to the Senate floor to say that enforcement alone might not be enough to prevent the next tragedy.

“Right now, what we do know is that we need to enforce aggressively the provisions of the Miner Act at all mines,” he said. “And where they are needed, we must put new laws in place.”

The saga is emblematic of the pattern that’s dictated the country’s mining policies for decades: New safety measures often follow in the wake of the biggest disasters, but rarely have lawmakers acted to anticipate those tragedies.

“It’s unfortunate, but every mine safety law we have on the books today was written in the blood of coal miners,” Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) said last week.

Not that even the most ardent supporters of the S-Miner Act see it as a cure-all to the nation’s mining-safety gaps. Indeed, the bill does nothing to address the tremendous backlog of violation appeals that mining operators have filed in recent years in order to delay fines and prevent MSHA from establishing the “pattern of violations” required to close entire projects.

Lawmakers will have plenty of opportunity to examine the nation’s mining safety laws. Both Miller, who chairs the House Education and Labor Committee, and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who heads the Senate labor panel, have vowed to hold hearings on mine safety shortly. Harkin’s office said Tuesday that the Senate gathering, scheduled for April 27, will “not attempt to explore the specific causes of the recent disaster” because the White House investigation will still be ongoing. Instead, the hearing “will examine the weaknesses in our laws that provide incentives for companies to ignore health and safety — such as inadequate penalties and the excessive delays that employers can create in challenging citations.”

No dates have been set for the House hearing, Miller’s office said Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a number of journalists and government watchdog groups are urging the Obama administration to open up the investigation to the public — a step the Bush administration was criticized for refusing to take.

It’s worth noting that the S-Miner bill would have required such a public investigation.

*Clarification: An earlier version indicated that the S-Miner Act also would have eliminated another factor MSHA must currently consider when levying fines: the size of the mine operator’s business. S-Miner, however, would keep that consideration in place.

The Freedom # 1 Mine, a Massey-owned project in Pike County, Ky., has been cited with 54 safety violations in the four days since Monday’s explosion in West Virginia killed 25 miners, according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Twenty-two of those violations were deemed “significant and substantial,” meaning they  are “reasonably likely to result in a reasonably serious injury or illness under the unique circumstance contributed to by the violations.”

Of those so-called S&S violations, four are related to preventing roof falls; two involve problems with ventilation; two target maintenance of machinery; and one indicates a failure to maintain methane sensors.

Since the start of the year, the Freedom # 1 Mine has racked up 233 safety violations — tops among all Massey-controlled tunnel mines.

The district housing the mine is represented by Rep. Hal Rogers (R). Rogers’ office hasn’t responded this week to repeated calls and emails requesting comment.

Despite the disaster, Wall Street analysts still see strong earnings potential in Massey. ABC News reports today that analysts at Jefferies & Co. are encouraging investors to scoop up Massey shares. The reason?

“We believe Massey Energy is a well-capitalized Eastern coal producer and ranks as the largest, most diversified, and lowest-cost coal producer in Central Appalachia,” they wrote in a research note.

That “lowest cost” could in any way be related to a history of safety problems at Massey’s mines, of course, is of no interest to the barons of Wall Street. But it has caught the attention of Congress. As Aaron pointed out earlier, Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), the powerful chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee and a longtime defender of the coal industry, is calling for “accountability” surrounding the explosion.

Rahall might want to take a look at this short video clip, in which a young Don Blankenship, now Massey’s outspoken CEO, outlines his business philosophy.

“Unions, communities, people — everybody’s gonna have to accept that, in the United States, we have a capitalist society,” Blankenship said. “And that capitalism, from a business viewpoint, is survival of the most productive.”

h/t: Gooznews.