Coal Tattoo

IG: MSHA emergency phone list wrong

JoeMainHouseMarch2012

While I’ve been focused the last two weeks on the ongoing criminal trial of former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, I also realized the other day that the 10th anniversary of the Sago Mine Disaster is fast approaching.

As most Coal Tattoo readers probably recall, both our reporting on Sago and the McAteer report on the disaster outlined serious issues with mine emergency response systems that played a role in those deaths.  Congress responded with the MINER Act, signed by President George W. Bush, to beef up the nation’s mine rescue infrastructure.

The Department of Labor’s Inspector General has been looking into one aspect of the MINER Act — coal company emergency response plans — and in the process of doing that they discovered this:

We found mine operators were not consistently updating telephone numbers in the local coordination section of the ERP. Moreover, MSHA’s periodic ERP review process has not been correcting this issue.

As part of our audit, we statistically sampled 124 ERPs from mines listed in MSHA’s system as “active” and “nonproducing/active” as of March 27, 2015.1 From those 124 ERPs, we judgmentally selected 51 to verify the accuracy of telephone numbers listed in the local coordination section. From each ERP, we randomly selected telephone numbers that included mine rescue teams, fire departments, hospitals, police, suppliers, mine personnel, and federal and state officials.

We called 779 emergency contact telephone numbers listed in the ERPs, and found many incorrect numbers. We verified our results by calling each of the incorrect numbers on three separate occasions. From these calls, we found:

— 3 mine rescue team numbers were incorrect;
— 98 fire department and ambulance numbers were incorrect;
— 4 hospital numbers were incorrect;
— 3 police department numbers were incorrect; and
— 69 other (e.g., suppliers, federal and state officials, mine personnel, etc.) numbers were incorrect.

In addition, 83 phones were not answered and/or did not offer a means of identification, such as a personalized voicemail greeting. These 83 primarily consisted of numbers listed in the ERPs as fire department and ambulance (35) and other as defined above (45).

In total, 260 (33 percent) of the emergency contacts we tried to reach were incorrect or unidentifiable. Additionally, many of the same emergency contacts were included in more than one ERP. As a result, 44 of the 51 ERPs (86 percent) we tested included at least one incorrect or unidentifiable number.

MSHA responded that many of the numbers the IG identified were actually working numbers, but simply weren’t staffed 24/7, and that many of the mines at issue were not operating.

The IG replied:

We question whether a fire or ambulance service would have no contact number that is monitored 24/7 to respond to emergencies. Regardless, we are particularly concerned MSHA would consider this an acceptable response to our finding, particularly because the regulation on arrangements with ambulance services does require 24-hour operation.

And:

Nothing in MSHA’s interim response changes the findings in our Alert Memorandum. Obviously, the status of mines can and does change from time to time. However, our sample clearly shows a significant number of call lists contained in ERPs were incorrect as of the point in time covered by the sample. If even one employee may be underground in a mine, it is imperative that complete and accurate emergency call lists be maintained and that there be no inconsistencies between call lists.