West Elk owner Arch Coal, based in St. Louis, Mo., praised the decision for its job-saving potential. Environmental groups blasted the USFS ruling for its possible industrialization of the pristine Sunset Trail roadless area adjacent to the West Elk Wilderness Area.

The Sunset Trail roadless area.

While the West Elk mine expansion would be mostly underground, Arch Coal would have to construct up to 48 well pads and 6.5 miles of roads in the Sunset Trail area in order to vent methane gas from the mine.

“The 350 employees at our West Elk mine are grateful that the Forest Service has decided to allow these coal reserves to be leased,” Arch Coal spokesman Greg Schaefer said of Tuesday’s expansion approval. “This decision will help ensure that the West Elk mine can continue to produce high-quality, super-compliance coal and sustain high-paying jobs in the North Fork Valley of western Colorado.”

But Earthjustice attorney Ted Zukoski questioned the USFS ruling so soon after the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the 2001 National Roadless Rule, which prohibits road construction on more than 4 million acres of inventoried federal roadless land in Colorado.

“The Forest Service is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” Zukoski said. “The administration should not be paving the way for an incursion into roadless lands when a court has just upheld its authority to protect those lands. This administration promised to protect Colorado roadless areas as well or better than the 2001 Roadless Rule required. It doesn’t look like they intend to live up to that promise.”

Methane ventring at the existing West Elk coal mine.

The state of Colorado has proposed its own roadless rule, which includes exemptions for coal-mine road building on about 20,000 acres of public land. However, the recent ruling in favor of the 2001 national rule casts some doubt on the Colorado petition effort that was started during the Republican Bush and Gov. Bill Owens’ administrations.

Another conservation organization was critical of the refusal by the Forest Service to mandate the capture of methane gas, which the EPA says is 20 times more potent as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – making the West Elk mine one of the biggest contributors to climate change in Colorado.

“This project is a lose-lose-lose proposition,” said Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy coordinator for WildEarth Guardians. “The public loses a fantastic wild area, loses millions in potential royalties from methane that is wasted instead of captured, and loses due to the massive pollution the mine causes. It’s time the Forest Service stood up to Big Coal and said no to this kind of damaging expansion.”

Federal regulators have increased their inspections at 89 coal mines with poor safety records, including Loveridge. They have also upped their use of orders to shut down mines until safety problems are fixed.

But despite their efforts, five men were killed by heavy machinery; four were killed by falling rock. They died in mines where safety citations had increased about 31 percent after the Upper Big Branch blast.

The story sheds light on the flawed mining oversight process. When companies are cited for safety violations, they often appeal them, resulting in a massive backlog. In turn, penalties often aren’t paid for long periods of time.

Here’s an example from the story:

At Consol, for instance, the company has contested 31 percent of the safety citations issued to its mines since January. That’s more than 1,000 citations, with fines totaling $2.6 million, which won’t be paid until the cases are resolved.

Mike Lillis, who has since left The Washington Independent for The Hill, did some great work on mining safety for TWI. You can read his stories here.

Separately, The Huffington Post notes today:

In one of the most bizarre Big Coal public relations ads yet, online readers of the Washington Post today were forced to view a fatuous “clean coal” ad prior to viewing an extraordinary photo galley on “Death at American coal mines.”

Mike Lillis, who did a ton of great reporting on mine safety during his time at TWI, quotes MSHA chief Joseph Main as saying:

These standards are not voluntary and every mine operator in the country is on notice that MSHA will not tolerate violations of ventilation standards.

And some context, again from Lillis:

Among the most damning charges, a number of Massey miners — both current and former — have said that company managers habitually encouraged workers to tear down line curtains, sheets of plastic designed to direct fresh air from vents into underground work chambers.

Main said last week that he still doesn’t know if methane monitors were tampered with before the explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine, which killed 29 people.

During yesterday’s visit — which was initially aborted due to toxic gases — inspectors reconnected communications lines that had been destroyed in the April 5 explosion. The blast, which killed 29 miners and almost killed a 30th, was the deadliest mining disaster in 40 years.

If conditions permit, the inspectors will push even further underground Friday, with hopes of reaching the longwall area of the mine, where the explosion is thought to have originated.

Two teams entered the mine this morning at approximately 10 a.m. The teams were withdrawn after air quality samples indicated the presence of adverse air conditions. These samples were analyzed further and it was determined that the teams could safely reenter the mine again. The teams are continuing their examination of mine conditions at this time.

Massey this afternoon also reiterated its call for the investigation to be public — a call that the Obama administration has so far rejected.

About one hour into their descent, the investigators hit toxic gases that forced them back to the surface, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.

The mine rescue teams advanced for about an hour 1,000 feet into the mine, before high levels of carbon monoxide and methane forced them to retreat, said Amy Louviere, a spokeswoman for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. She said the teams took air readings with hand-held monitors, along with bottle samples to be evaluated Wednesday.

It’s unclear, the Journal added, when the team will make a second try.

The Gauley River, among the top white water rafting destinations on the East Coast — and one estimated to bring the state $16 million each year — is now among the most imperiled rivers in the country as a result of the mountaintop coal mining in its watershed, according to American Rivers, an environmental group that ranks the nation’s most endangered rivers each year.

For 2010, the Gauley ranks third, behind only the Upper Delaware River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The reason?

Mountaintop removal mining has buried nearly 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams, contaminated drinking water, impaired water quality for river recreation, increased water treatment costs for industry, displaced some communities and increased susceptibility to flooding for others. Despite escalating environmental and community costs, more mountaintop removal mining projects have been proposed to access the remaining coal seams in Appalachia.

Ward points out the congressional angle to this tale:

In 1988, the Gauley received some federal protections as the Gauley River National Recreation Area, under legislation pushed through by Rep. Nick J. Rahall, D-W.Va. Rahall, though, has opposed EPA’s efforts to crack down on pollution from mountaintop removal mining.

Indeed, in February, Rahall single-handedly took credit for blocking legislation to prevent mining companies from burying Appalachian streams with mine waste.

“I blocked it,” he told the Beckley-based Register-Herald.

“I kept [supporters] from even having a hearing on it. It would have passed Congress overwhelmingly. It was a freebie. Republicans would have voted to end mountaintop removal.”

Since it’s not an issue in their districts, he said, “they’d have voted to abolish it in a heartbeat.”

Another means of wiping out the practice would be to amend the surface mining and reclamation law which Rahall authored in his first year in Congress in 1977.

“Guess where that has to go?” Rahall asked, according to the Register-Herald. “The Natural Resources Committee.

“Guess who’s chairman? Me.”

In a front-page feature, reporter Kimberly Kindy takes a close look at the Tiller No. 1 Mine, a Massey-owned operation in Tazewell County, Va., that federal regulators consider one of the most unsafe mines in the country. Indeed, they’re trying to put the mine under a “pattern of violations” status — a rarely used tool that would allow inspectors to close the entire mine until it was deemed safe for the workers inside.

The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration says the injury rate at Tiller is 40 percent higher than at Upper Big Branch and twice the national average. Even as MSHA inspectors prepare to reenter Upper Big Branch on Wednesday for the first inspection since the fatal accident, the agency has focused much of its energy in recent weeks on the infractions at Tiller. MSHA officials say they have spent more than 1,000 hours building a case that Tiller deserves to be the first mine in the country to face the toughest enforcement tool available to regulators.

The mine’s owners and operators have devoted equal effort to fighting off the sanctions.

And it’s not just Massey fighting the sanctions. It’s the workers as well. That’s counterintuitive on the surface, considering that it’s the miners who are putting their lives at risk by going underground everyday. But in Appalachia’s coal country — among the most destitute nooks of the U.S. — the miners’ fears of losing their jobs often trump their fears of working in unsafe conditions. (This is largely due to the fact that, aside from flipping burgers, there aren’t many other employment options in coal country — a condition that the industry has fostered for decades in order to have greater leverage over its workforce.)

One Tiller miner, Randy Lester, told Kindy that the safety inspectors are “nitpicky.”

He fears that government regulation of the mine ultimately would shut it down — taking his job with it.

And it’s not just permanent closures that the miners fear. In non-union mines, even a temporary shutdown means that the workers don’t get paid until the hazards are cleared — not exactly a system that would encourage a miner to complain about the safety conditions in his or her mine.

The district where the Tiller No. 1 is located is represented by Rep. Rick Boucher, a 14-term Democrat who’s taken more money from the coal industry than all but four of his Capitol Hill colleagues, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Since April 5, when the Upper Big Branch mine exploded, Boucher — like a number of other coal-country lawmakers — has remained silent on the question of whether Congress should intervene to tighten the nation’s mine-safety laws. In the wake of the Post story, we’ve posed that question again. Updates as they arrive.

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.