Coal Tattoo is taking a couple of days off for the Memorial Day holiday … in the meantime, readers might want to spend some time with this, the Mine Safety Pastoral Letter, from the Rev. Michael J. Bransfield, Bishop of the Wheeling-Charleston Catholic Diocese. You can download a .pdf copy of it here.

On this day, the Memorial of Saint Joseph the Worker, the Church honors Joseph in his role as a worker and, in so doing, seeks to highlight the dignity of human labor. In West Virginia, the Memorial of Saint Joseph the Worker should be a day of celebration. Human labor and the spirit of the working man making a living for himself by his labor are emblazoned on the Great Seal of our State: the two proud figures, a pioneer farmer wielding an ax and a miner with his pick on his shoulder. The symbol of this State celebrates hard-working people who have wrested a living from the Mountain State’s beautiful but challenging landscape. The events of recent weeks also turn our thoughts about workers in a somber direction.

Just over a century ago, the community of Monongah was devastated by the worst mining disaster in American history. Hundreds of men and boys were killed by a devastating explosion in the Monongah Mine, likely triggered by the ignition of methane which in turn ignited the coal dust in mines 6 and 8. In a few short minutes, whole families of men were killed and hundreds of widows and orphans were created at a time before modern welfare support. Bishop Patrick J. Donahue went to Monongah to join the community in its grief and to help them commit the souls of their dead fathers and sons to their eternal rest. The disaster occurred on the Feast of St. Nicholas, December 6, 1907, but there was nothing of Christmas joy amid the cries and tears of widows and orphans.

The Monongah Mine Disaster, and the other deadly mine explosions which soon followed in Pennsylvania and Alabama, were so shocking to the nation that we spurred on to create the Bureau of Mines in 1910. This U.S. Government Agency was charged with the investigation of the methods of mining, especially in relation to the safety of miners and the prevention of accidents, with the hope of preventing workplace fatalities. During the years of its existence, the U.S. Bureau of Mines’ work into the prevention of mine explosions has led to great improvements in mine safety and the Mine Safety and Health Administration has continued to identify opportunities for improved safety, but clearly more needs to be done.

A few short weeks ago, I joined parishioners at Whitesville to pray for the miners and their families involved in the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster. The explosion occurred on Easter Monday. While the readings at Mass spoke of Mary Magdalene’s joy at seeing the Risen Savior, I had to speak to the people also of Magdalene’s tears as she approached the tomb that morning. West Virginians are a people of faith, but this Easter Week was a difficult time for our Mountain State, a time of sorrow and dashed hopes. The Montcoal community experienced the sort of suffering we had all hoped would never be repeated after the Sago disaster four years ago. In the 21st century, there should be a greater span between accidents than just four years.

In my first pastoral letter, A Church That Heals, I acknowledged that “we are far from the place called health: a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being.”

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Scott Shearer, president of CSE Corp., says his company has not actually “recalled” any of its potentially defective emergency coal-mining breathing devices.

The Associated Press has picked up on the story covered here and in the Gazette previously (see here, here, here and here) concerning problems with the most widely used emergency breathing device in the U.S. coal industry.

But the AP story focuses on questions about whether any action by MSHA or NIOSH to get potentially defective CSE Corp. SR-100 devices out of the mines would cause a problem for mining companies seeking to comply with requirements that they provide such devices for their miners.

The real issue here, though, is probably why MSHA and NIOSH aren’t saying more about this problem publicly, and whether the mining community and the public have been misled about the severity of the problem and what is being done about it.

Earlier this month when I was preparing this Gazette story, I interviewed CSE President Scott Shearer to try to follow-up on the new “User Notice” his company had issued warning that problems with the SR-100′s quick-start mechanism might not work if miners needed the devices to help them escape a fire or explosion.

A couple of interesting things came up during our chat.

First, Shearer kept mentioning the figure 11,000 units … and I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about — since the initial reports from CSE a few months earlier were that 4,000 units were affected by the problem. When I asked him about this big discrepancy, Shearer suggested that I got the number wrong in the initial story — that his company never said 4,000 units were involved.

Huh … I make plenty of mistakes, but I didn’t think I’d made that one. So I checked the news release that CSE issued back in February and here’s what it said under the heading of  “Frequently Asked Questions”:

How many units are affected by the recall?

CSE is being proactive and withdrawing the entire production lot of over 4,000 SR-100s from the field but estimates that less than one percent of this production lot may be affected.

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More bad news this morning from the coalfields of West Virginia:  James Robie Erwin, 55, of Delbarton, died at about 6 a.m. from injuries received in a May 10 incident at Massey Energy subsidiary Spartan Mining Co.’s Ruby Energy Mine in Mingo County.

According to the state Office of Miners Health, Safety and Training, Erwin was a continuous miner operator and the incident involved him becoming pinned between a shuttle car and the mine wall.

That makes 36 coal miners dead on the job in 2010, including 31 in West Virginia — the most in our state since 1980, when 33 miners were killed.

As for the Ruby Energy Mine, Ellen Smith at Mine Safety and Health News had written for The Huffington Post that this operation might have been “even more unsafe” than Upper Big Branch.

In its big post-disaster inspection sweep, MSHA cited Ruby Energy for 29 mine safety and health violations, including 12 that inspectors considered serious and substantial.

Spartan Mining paid MSHA $142,500 in fines following the February 2004 death of miner Kenneth Adrian McNeely at the Ruby Energy Mine. MSHA investigators concluded that the company had not protected McNeeley from potential electrical hazards. The MSHA report described the incident this way:

During a mine-wide power outage, the victim and the continuous mining machine operator were repairing the damaged area of a continuous mining machine trailing cable. While the victim prepared the third and final power phase to be spliced together, electrical power was restored to the underground mine and the electrical circuit breaker was closed causing a fatal electrical shock. The visual disconnecting device, or cable plug, for the continuous mining machine trailing cable was not disconnected, locked-out, or suitably tagged from its receptacle on the power center.

And MSHA investigators concluded:

The continuous mining machine trailing cable was not adequately protected to prevent damage while moving the continuous mining machine. The accident occurred because management did not ensure that persons were protected against potential electrical hazardous after the left continuous mining machine damaged the trailing cable. The section foreman did not direct the section electrician to remove the trailing cable to the out-of-service mode (disconnect, lock and tag) until troubleshooting, testing and restoring the trailing cable to a safe condition was completed. The certified person performing electrical work did not disconnect the trailing cable plug from the circuit breaker receptacle, lock the disconnect device and tag. The accident occurred when the unlocked and untagged trailing cable was re-energized while repairs were being performed and without first ensuring that all persons were in the clear of the cable.