At 3:02 p.m. on April 5, 2010, a massive explosion tore through the Upper Big Branch mine near Montcoal, West Virginia, operated by Performance Coal Company, a subsidiary of Massey Energy. Twenty-nine miners were killed and two were injured. It was the deadliest disaster at an American coal mine since 1970.
The explosion began at the longwall face, where the shearer was cutting into sandstone with worn cutting bits and broken and missing water sprays. The bits most likely ignited methane released from cracks in the mine floor; the sprays that should have doused the ignition were not working. The initial methane explosion raised coal dust into the air throughout the mine and transitioned into a coal dust explosion, which propagated through miles of underground entries with devastating force.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration’s final report (December 6, 2011) concluded that the 29 deaths were preventable. The operator had failed to take proper measures to detect methane, had not complied with its approved ventilation plan, and had allowed accumulations of loose coal, coal dust and float coal dust to build up instead of cleaning them. Most critically, the mine had not been adequately rock dusted — the standard defence that renders coal dust inert: of 1,353 dust samples taken in the affected areas, 90.5 per cent did not comply with the law. MSHA identified as the root cause a pattern of management practices that produced systematic non-compliance with the Mine Act, including the intimidation of miners and the unlawful advance notice of inspections.
MSHA issued the largest fines in its history to that point against the operator, including a series of flagrant violations. Massey Energy was acquired by Alpha Natural Resources in 2011, and Alpha agreed to a $209 million settlement with the Department of Justice, funding mine safety improvements, restitution and penalties. In 2015, former Massey chief executive Don Blankenship was convicted in federal court of conspiring to violate federal mine safety standards and sentenced to a year in prison — the highest-ranking American coal executive ever convicted over a mine disaster.
The explosion led MSHA to expand its programme of surprise “impact inspections” at mines with poor safety records and to strengthen enforcement against operators showing a pattern of violations, and it remains the defining American mine-safety case of its era: a disaster investigators agreed did not require any new technology to prevent — only compliance with protections that had been on the books for decades.