More reaction and analysis continued over the weekend about U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin’s decision to settle potential criminal charges against Massey Energy — the company, not its executives or employees — related to the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster  in a $209.5 million deal with Massey’s new owner, Alpha Natural Resources.

We ran a lengthy story headlined, Upper Big Branch deal aimed at preventing future disasters, in Sunday’s paper, reporting, among other things:

U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin crafted the deal in an effort to push Alpha — and the rest of the coal industry — toward reforms aimed at avoiding a repeat of the April 5, 2010, explosion that killed 29 miners in the worst U.S. coal-mining disaster in a generation.

The key, according to Goodwin and his team, is the $80 million in safety improvements are specifically designed to address root causes of the Upper Big Branch explosion, such as poor ventilation practices and most specifically doing a better job cleaning up highly explosive coal dust that can turn a minor methane ignition into a horrific blast like the one at UBB.

“This started out by looking at what we could require them to do to do these things better,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Ruby, a lead prosecutor in Goodwin’s ongoing criminal probe of Upper Big Branch and the key architect of the Alpha settlement.

We quoted several supporters and several critics of the settlement, including David Uhlmann, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches law at the University of Michigan. Among the more significant reactions to the Goodwin-Alpha settlement came from Uhlmann, who wrote an analysis that appeared in the New York Times. The piece is headlined For 29 Dead Miners, No Justice, and it says:

… What jumped off the pages [OF THE MSHA REPORT] for me, as a former federal prosecutor, was the revelation that Massey had kept two sets of books at the mine: one for internal use, which recorded hazards, and a second for Mine Safety and Health Administration inspectors, which did not. In addition, Massey routinely gave its facilities advance notice of inspections, which is a crime under federal law, and intimidated its workers so that they would not report safety and health violations.

Based on the Labor Department’s investigation, the Justice Department could have criminally prosecuted Massey under the Mine Safety and Health Act for the violations that caused the explosion. Prosecutors also could have charged the company with conspiracy and obstruction of justice for the ways it thwarted regulation.

Instead, on the same day the devastating report was released, the Justice Department announced that it would not criminally prosecute Massey. The news release issued by the United States attorney misleadingly described its nonprosecution agreement with Massey’s new owners as “the largest ever criminal resolution in a mining investigation.”

Let’s be clear: this is not a criminal resolution. Massey will not be charged with any crimes and will not plead guilty before a federal judge. Nor will there be a sentencing hearing where Massey apologizes to the families of the victims and is punished for its crimes.

The piece continues:

The deal with Massey continues a disturbing trend whereby corporations can avoid criminal prosecution by entering deferred prosecution or nonprosecution agreements. Often the terms of these agreements are no better than what could have been achieved in a criminal case; worse, they create the appearance that justice can be bought.

Moreover, there is less to this settlement than meets the eye. The $209 million settlement requires payment of $35 million in previously assessed administrative penalties, but that sum includes just $10.8 million for the Upper Big Branch Mine tragedy. The remaining $174 million is likely to be tax deductible, including $80 million for investments in safety and infrastructure at Massey mines and an additional $48 million to establish a mine health and safety trust fund.

And:

We should not underestimate, however, the difficulty of prosecuting high-ranking officials in large corporations. This case may be an exception, but senior corporate officers rarely have sufficient personal involvement to be charged with crimes. To reach the boardroom, where policies are formed that can lead to tragedy, we must be willing to hold corporations criminally responsible.

During my 17 years at the Justice Department, we prosecuted corporations criminally in hundreds of cases that, while serious, did not involve the tragic loss of life at the Upper Big Branch Mine. The Justice Department did not live up to its name in agreeing not to prosecute Massey for its crimes.

(more…)

Earlier this week, I left the mine academy down in Beckley the same way I left West Virginia Wesleyan University and Chief Logan State Park after Sago and Aracoma a few years ago — with a huge binder under my arm, full of mine maps, charts and violations, a dry and complicated report telling in bureaucratic language how more coal miners met an early death deep under the ground.

Frankly, I felt a little guilty, like I was just playing my role in this little play. I’m the reporter, who comes in after the disaster to expose corporate negligence and government bungling, and to give the public a glimpse of the terrible toll the latest disaster to end all disasters took on more West Virginia families.

Come on, you all know the drill by now, given the string of disasters over the last five years: Sago, Aracoma, Kentucky Darby, Crandall Canyon and Upper Big Branch. First, there’s the waiting, with families, politicians and the media hoping and praying for survivors. Then there are the funerals, followed by investigations and congressional hearings. Then, we have events like this week — reports are released, settlements signed, maybe a few minor criminal charges are brought. At some point, there might be an “internal review” that explains in arcane double-speak just confusing enough for no one to understand it how the regulators we trust to keep an eye on the coal industry failed the miners.

I’m reminded of the words of the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd:

First, the disaster. Then the weeping. Then the outrage. And we are all too familiar with what comes next. After a few weeks, when the cameras are gone, when the ink on the editorials has dried, everything returns to business as usual. The health and the safety of America’s coal miners, the men and women upon whom the Nation depends so much, is once again forgotten until the next disaster. But not this time.

I don’t pretend to have the slightest idea how the families of the miners feel. Imagine having your husband, son, brother or father taken from you suddenly, in a terrifically violent way. And then you not only have to live with that loss, and face the burden of holidays, birthdays, anniversaries — all the horrors the simple calendar creates when you are grieving — but you have to keep going back to meetings and briefings, and getting cameras, microphones and notepads stuck in your face. It must be awful.

But it’s hard to escape the reality that those families are the only ones who are really living this nightmare. MSHA chief Joe Main has talked many times about how for the families, a mine disaster is never really over. Joe knows that no matter how much others of us care about mine safety, we just don’t experience this whole thing in anywhere remotely approaching what the families go through.

After every mine disaster down through history, we hear promises about never letting it happen again. Politicians make those promises. Coal industry officials sometimes make them. So do regulators. Editorial writers sometimes demand action to ensure the slaughter stops. But it goes on.

I wonder if one reason it goes on isn’t that the whole spectacle, the whole little plot that plays out, hasn’t become so familiar that — whether we want to or whether we even realize it — we all accept it as a fact of life in a world where we want cheap coal to make cheap electricity and cheap steel.

Even Joe Main, who has worked his whole adult life to make coal mining safer and healthier for workers, seemed a little bit too accepting, as this passage from a piece by NPR’s Howard Berkes makes clear:

Assistant Secretary of Labor Joe Main says MSHA has been investigating itself since 1989.

“I can guarantee you when you go back and look at those reports, there have been a lot of problems that have been found,” Main says. “And I think when we issue our [internal] report, it’s going be one that’s going to identify shortcomings that we need to address.”

And then there’s MSHA lawyer Derek Baxter, who shut down questions from independent investigator Davitt McAteer’s team about the previous methane incidents at Upper Big Branch, and what MSHA officials did — or didn’t do – about them. Exactly how were Baxter’s actions helping to improve mine safety, helping to make UBB the last disaster? Whose interest was he serving there?

I asked some lawmakers about this whole business with MSHA’s inaction on the prior methane problems, and the effort to cut off questions about it, and the responses didn’t appear to reflect the sort of outrage you might expect, given that the MSHA report basically makes clear that agency officials played a role in allowing this disaster to happen in the first place.

Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said:

We expect that the issues raised about these technical support documents will be fully and directly addressed by MSHA’s internal review. If there was any miscommunication or failure to act, we expect MSHA to take immediate corrective action. While we understand that this particular internal review will be subject to an independent review by NIOSH, there is a need to mandate fully independent investigations of all major mine disasters as safety experts like Davitt McAteer have recommended, and that is included in Rep. Miller’s legislation.

And Rep. Nick J. Rahall, D-W.Va., who lost 29 of his constituents at Upper Big Branch, said:

Of course we know that there were problems with MSHA’s oversight of the UBB Mine, and I fully expect that when MSHA’s internal report is released next month that will be made abundantly clear. I must note that I have called for the establishment of an independent panel to conduct such reviews in the future to help ensure their accuracy and the confidence of all who count on MSHA to keep our miners safe. But none of that should distract our attention from the fact that Massey Energy knowingly, willingly broke the law, purposely deceiving MSHA and putting the lives of its own miners at risk.

The closest we got to outrage came from House Labor Committee Chairman — and Republican — John Kline:

The report released this week documents how Massey Energy’s reckless disregard for critical safety protections resulted in the death of 29 miners. The families of the Upper Big Branch miners deserve the whole story of what went wrong. That is why I am interested in the findings of MSHA’s internal audit, which should help answer whether enforcement lapses played a role in this devastating disaster. If MSHA failed to act on critical information that may have improved the safety of those miners, the people of West Virginia deserve to know why.

Of course, there might be a bit of partisan politics going on here, what with a Democrat in the White House and a former labor union official running MSHA. It didn’t take long for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to find a way to use the MSHA Upper Big Branch report as a partisan issue. They sent out a quick press release today to attack Rep. David McKinley:

Massey Energy’s parent company has agreed to pay a record $209 million settlement related to the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, but Congressman David McKinley (WV-01) is still not supporting a bill to strengthen penalties for violating mine-safety laws. The Robert Byrd Mine and Workplace Safety and Health Act has the support of Senator Joe Manchin, Senator Jay Rockefeller, and Congressman Nick Rahall. In light of the recent settlement, will Congressman McKinley continue to oppose these common sense safety measures that could save lives?

Congressman McKinley is the only Member of Congress to receive a contribution from Massey PAC this year. He is also a past recipient of the maximum legal contribution from Don Blankenship, the former Massey Energy CEO that many blame for the 2010 mine disaster. Is Congressman McKinley opposing the bill to help his big donors?

“Thousands of West Virginians go to work in the mines every day trying to put food on the table in this tough economy, but it is clear that Congressman McKinley is not looking out for their safety and well being,” said Adam Hodge of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Is Congressman McKinley jeopardizing the lives of his own constituents to protect his sugar daddy, Don Blankenship?”

Oddly, there was no mention in there of whether Democrats in Congress ought to be asking tougher questions of their friends at the Labor Department and MSHA.

Perhaps this partisan political stuff is all part of the play, too, though it’s true that Rep. Miller has proposed legislation that would do much to improve mine safety in this country, and the Republican leadership in the House has ensured it hasn’t really gone anywhere.

And what about our good friend, U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin and his lead Upper Big Branch investigator, Steve Ruby? Their settlement with Alpha includes strong provisions to improve mine safety, and it doesn’t stop them from bringing charges in the other crimes they say they’ve found at Upper Big Branch. We’ll have to wait and see how much of that is just talk, or whether their probe reaches higher up than an hourly miner who pretended to have a foreman’s card and a security director. WVU law professor Pat McGinley, a member of Davitt McAteer’s independent team, says serious charges against top management is a key thing to stopping this sort of tragedy:

In the past mine disasters like Buffalo Creek, Monongah and Farmington netted zero criminal prosecutions of the corporations or individual managers. As significant as this monetary settlement may be, the impact of losing a huge sum of money pales in comparison to the deterrence that criminal prosecution and jail time would provide.

I’m confident that the group of highly professional, dedicated prosecutors who made the monetary settlement possible will continue to pursue every lead. They need to, and I believe they will, bring to justice any and all Massey corporate managers who they find have engaged in criminal conduct leading to the horrendous deaths of 29 UBB miners.

Drunk drivers are required to do mandatory jail time. Coal company managers and executives whose willful conduct causes the death of even one coal miner need to be held criminally accountable and if criminal prosecution and jail time becomes a real possibility for those corporate officials who place profits above miners’ lives – I can guarantee that the nation’s coal mines will quickly become significantly safer.

Are more prosecutions the answer? Most experts agree they’re part of it … but so are lots of other things — Things like an investigation that really gets to the truth of any culpability by anyone either at Massey or the government, things like improvements to mine safety laws and regulations, more and better trained inspectors, newer technology, and on and on and on.

But perhaps the biggest secret to making Upper Big Branch be the last mine disaster is for everyone involved not to, as Sen. Byrd said, return to business as usual — for everyone who cares about mine safety, from politicians to mining engineers and newspaper reporters — to make ourselves live with this every day, like those 29 families who lost someone on April 5, 2010.

Following up on yesterday’s Coal Tattoo post, Why didn’t MSHA prevent the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster, we published a story in our print edition this morning with more details about the federal agency’s failure to protect Massey Energy miners from the clear and well-understood dangers of methane leakage from the floor of the Raleigh County mine.

Among other things, the story contained new information from a previously undisclosed transcript of testimony by Bob Hardman, who was MSHA’s Southern West Virginia district manager at the time of the April 5, 2010, explosion that killed 29 miners. Among the more bizarre revelations was that Hardman claimed to have started a project to examine the potential for other mines having similar methane leakages — but MSHA claims to have no records about such an effort.

MSHA hasn’t formally released the Hardman transcript, but the agency did post on its website on Tuesday the transcript of testimony of longtime MSHA employee Steve Gigliotti, who had been acting district manager and was listed as the recipient of one of the two key methane outburst memos that outlined this problem and made recommendations for a fix.

Some readers may recall that Gigliotti was originally appointed by MSHA to its “internal review team” to investigate the agency’s actions — and inactions — at Upper Big Branch.  But just days after we broke news of the earlier methane incidents in 2003 and 2004, MSHA removed him from that team “to avoid the potential for a conflict of interest.”

Well, a reading of Gigliotti’s testimony is certainly interesting …

First, Gigliotti reveals that top MSHA officials at agency headquarters in Arlington, Va., were talking about the earlier incidents — and worrying about what MSHA might have done or not done about them — long before someone slipped the methane outburst memos under Bob Hardman’s door on May 21, 2010. During a previously confidential interview on June 25, 2010, Gigliotti told investigators, when asked about the memos:

… The first time I saw it was after the explosion at Upper Big Branch in April of this year. Charlie Thomas sent an e-mail …

Gigliotti reveals that Charlie Thomas was — and is — acting deputy administrator for MSHA’s coal division, making him to top aide to coal administrator Kevin Stricklin. Gigliotti continued:

… There were a bunch of e-mails flying around, but I remember Charlie sending it. But it was after the explosion. That the first time I saw it … Right after the explosion, you know, a couple days after. So you know, within a week or two, something like that.

Now, keep in mind. Upper Big Branch blew up on April 5, 2010. Top MSHA officials were talking about these previous incidents within days of that happening. Bob Hardman, the local district manager, testified someone stuck the memos under his door on May 21. Hardman, who didn’t come to the district until August 2006, testified that he hadn’t heard about the previous methane incidents until he found them that morning. Hardman was first interviewed by the investigation team on May 27.

It’s not clear when Gigliotti was appointed to the internal review team, but the transcript makes it sound like top MSHA officials had to have known about Gigliotti’s involvement in the earlier incident at the time they appointed him — and Gigliotti himself told investigators he didn’t understand why he was taken off the internal review team. He describes getting that news from Sticklin:

… He told me that you’re going to have to … we’re going to have to remove you from the Internal Review Team, because I was here six years ago and my name showed up on this report. And I was kind of in disbelief, and I sent him an e-mail and said, I was already gone by the time the report even hit my desk. I was gone five — you know — and he said, well, we cannot — you know, I don’t remember his exact words, but we have to … it’s so sensitive a situation because, you know, MSHA is investigating itself, and it’s controversy right there. And to have you — for you to get interviewed about this report or your time at — when you were down here, it wouldn’t be good that you would be a signatory on the Internal Review Report, so we have to move you off.

To be clear: Gigliotti was only acting district manager for a short while, from June 3, 2004, until July 10, 2004. He was not acting district manager when the 2004 incident occurred, back in February, and he had left by the time the memo hit the district manager’s desk on July 15, 2004.

Now, this is where things get really interesting … Gigliotti continues his testimony:

And in that same conversation [Stricklin], he told me that he spoke to the one geologist that was — he may have — I think he wrote the March report, I think, Sandin Phillipson … and Sandin said there’s a chance — I don’t know his exact words, but he said something like you can draw a straight line. There might be a — there’s a fault line or something he can see or something that — you know, that fault line runs right through that area that they were mining at the time. So there’s that possibility that the geology would be similar to what they had six years prior.

Pat McGinley, a WVU law professor working on McAteer’s independent investigation team, tried to continue this line of questioning — about what MSHA officials knew about the methane floor leaks, what they did about it, and what the whole issue could have mean in the context of the Upper Big Branch explosion.

But Derek Baxter, a Labor Department lawyer working as part of MSHA’s disaster investigation team, stepped in:

I don’t think we should go into conversations with the accident investigation team. This is material —

McGinley responded:

Well, this is material to our investigation.

Then, here’s what happened:

Attorney Baxter: Can we go off the record, please?

Mr. McGinley: I’d like to stay on the record.

Attorney Baxter: No, I want to go off the record right now.

Mr. McGinley: No. Just put on the record the reason.

Attorney Baxter: The reason is because you’re starting to go beyond the facts that this witness knows and you’re starting to ask questions of his conversations with team members during our investigation.

Mr. McGinley: Well, we’ve been trying to find out information about these memoranda and what happened now for — it’s going on a month, and his testimony is helpful in that regard.

Attorney Baxter: Can we go off the record, please?

Mr. McGinley: That’s fine.

During the off-the-record discussion that followed, MSHA officials insisted that questions about all of this be limited, and as we reported yesterday, there is still much that the public doesn’t know about how and why federal mine safety regulators didn’t take action to prevent methane floor leakage that they knew was a problem — and that their own report now concludes was a major contributing factor in the worst U.S. coal-mining disaster in nearly 40 years. The new transcript discusses emails between various MSHA officials about all of this, but those were never turned over — despite a specific request — to the McAteer independent team.

After seeing the Gigliotti transcript on MSHA’s website and reading it several times, I called Davitt McAteer this morning and asked him about all of this. Here’s what he told me:

It is a problem, and it is unfortunate. The outcome of the report that was released two days ago by MSHA suggests these were very pertinent questions and a very important line of questioning. It’s absolutely essential that we have independent teams and people who don’t have a stake in this taking a hard look at what happened. It’s truly unfortunate that the agency for whatever reason tried to move away from this line of questioning.

This is the video released today by the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration. I’ve posted it on YouTube for easy viewing by everyone.

It’s raining this morning here in Charleston. The fog was hanging over the Kanawha River on my drive in. Like always, there was a Friend of Coal ad on the local radio station. But over at the Robert C. Byrd United States Courthouse, the lights were already burning.

In a few hours, U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin will announce details of a landmark settlement in the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster, a deal that calls for Alpha Natural Resources — which bought UBB mine owner Massey Energy in June — to spend $200 million on major safety initiatives, civil penalties related to the mine disaster and other former Massey mines, and restitution to the families of the 29 miners who died and the two miners who were hurt in the April 2010 explosion.

UPDATED: Here’s a link to our news story with details of the settlement, and you can read the agreement for yourself here.

We first reported the broad scope of the settlement last night, based on information provided by sources who have been briefed on the government’s deal.  More media stories have followed from the Wall Street Journal and from our friend Howard Berkes at NPR, whose story early this morning indicated some displeasure with the deal from the families and their lawyers:

“It’s so wrong,” says Judy Jones Petersen, a Charleston physician whose brother Dean Jones died in the explosion. Petersen is upset by what she sees as a release of some criminal liability for the deaths of 29 men in exchange for a $200 million payment. “It’s so absolutely wrong on the very deepest level of what is moral and right.”

Attorneys Rachel and Mark Moreland, who represent two families of Upper Big Branch victims, also reacted with anger.

“$200 million for the lives of 29 men certainly doesn’t bring justice to the families of those dead miners,” says Mark Moreland.

The families and everyone else will be better able to judge the Justice Department’s deal later today, when more details are provided to families during a conference call at 9:30 a.m. and to the rest of us at an 11 a.m. press conference.

This much we do know: This settlement is unprecedented. Nearly two-thirds of the settlement money is dedicated to mine safety improvements and to advancing the cause of mine safety research. Some of the improvements would implement recommendations made by the independent Upper Big Branch investigation team, led by longtime safety advocate Davitt McAteer.

And as for the question I heard most often from sources and observers last night and this morning, I’m told the settlement most absolutely does not give a pass to any employees, officers, board members, executives — you name it — of the former Massey Energy who are found to have committed crimes related to the disaster, mine safety problems at Upper Big Branch, or impeding the government’s investigation of the explosion.

Keep in mind how different this is from the deal Massey Energy got from prosecutors following the deaths of two miners at its Aracoma Alma No. 1 Mine in Logan County in January 2006.  Under a plea agreement with Massey’s Aracoma Coal Co., then-U.S. Attorney Charles Miller agreed never to prosecute any officers or employees of the Massey parent company for any actions related to the fatal fire. Interestingly, Miller’s office also signed documents in which they said the government just didn’t have any evidence against anyone from Massey, despite possessing a memo that raised questions about what Massey CEO Don Blankenship knew about the condition of conveyor belts at Aracoma prior to the belt fire that killed miners Don Bragg and Ellery Hatfield.

This time, there’s no promise not to go after individuals who committed mine safety crimes, and no statement from the government that they don’t have any evidence of such crimes — and the U.S. Attorney’s criminal probe will continue after today’s deal.

Over the weekend, we published a story outlining questions about what Massey’s board knew about conditions at Upper Big Branch, about what the board was being told, and what — if any — actions were taken as a result of safety problems pointed out by a former MSHA inspector Massey hired to audit the operation before the disaster.  When I asked U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin last week about these issues, and about whether his investigation would end with the release today of the MSHA report on the disaster, he told me:

Any information of that nature that would come to light would be of interest to us. We’re not limiting the focus of our investigation at all. We are not slowing down at all. If anything, certain aspects of our investigation are going into high gear.

Various media outlets are posting late-breaking stories about tomorrow’s release of the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration’s report on the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster.

Kris Maher at The Wall Street Journal is reporting that MSHA is expected to levy a record safety fine, and Ellen Smith from Mine Safety and Health news is reporting that the government has reached some sort of a global settlement with Alpha Natural Resources. Not surprisingly, Ellen is right, and we’ve got some of the details posted in this exclusive Gazette story:

Alpha Natural Resources will spend $200 million on fines, victim restitution and mine safety improvements to resolve enforcement actions and some criminal matters arising from the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster, the Gazette has learned.

Federal prosecutors are set to announce the deal this morning, just hours before the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration is to brief families on the agency’s long-awaited report on the April 2010 explosion, according to sources who have been briefed on the settlement.

The groundbreaking, “global settlement,” covers civil penalties and some limited criminal liability assumed by Alpha when it bought Massey Energy in June, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal hadn’t been officially announced.

Importantly:

Under the settlement, civil penalties for the Upper Big Branch Mine operators, Performance Coal Co., would be resolved. So would potential criminal liability for the company.

But unlike a previous government deal with Massey, the deal does not resolve any potential criminal violations by any officers or agents of Performance Coal or Massey, sources said.

When then-U.S. Attorney Charles Miller in December 2008 settled civil and criminal matters concerning the January 2006 Aracoma Mine fire, the deal included an unusual promise not to prosecute any officers or employees of the Massey parent company.

UPDATED:

U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin has scheduled a press conference for 11 a.m. to announce the deal and provide more details.

Given the scheduled release next week of the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration’s report on the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster, I wondered what was going on with the state Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training’s investigation of the April 2010 disaster.

I checked in with office spokeswoman Leslie Fitzwater, and this is what she told me:

The Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training plans to have its UBB report completed by the end of January 2012.

UPDATED:

I’ve changed the headline on this story to correct my misunderstanding of the agency’s plans … here’s an updated note I received from Leslie Fitzwater —

You did quote me correctly; however, the headline stating the report will be issued before the end of January is misleading.  We plan to complete the report by that date, but we will not decide until that date when to issue it.

The Labor Department announced earlier today that its Mine Safety and Health Administration would be releasing the report of its investigation into the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster on Dec. 6.

MSHA has scheduled a media briefing for 3 p.m. at the National Mine Health and Safety Academy outside of Beckley, W.Va.

It’s certainly an interesting date, being the 104th anniversary of Monongah, the worst mining disaster in U.S. history.

Stay tuned …