This Mine Explosion Brought To You By JPMorgan Chase

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010041408/mine-explosion-brought-you-jpmorgan-chase

By Natasha Chart April 8, 2010 - 10:52am ET

Shortly before 3 AM this morning, I watched a press conference held by Kevin Stricklin of the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Mr. Stricklin had clearly not slept in a very long time, and he announced to the watching reporters that because the explosive atmosphere at the bottom of the shaft had dropped below dangerous levels, four teams of eight rescue workers would be going down to resume their search for the four missing miners of the Upper Big Branch Mine.

The rescue workers were all equipped with about 30 lbs of oxygen and breathing apparatus to compensate for pockets of bad air. The rescue teams will be making for two safety chambers, which, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, have enough air, food and water to last four days. If any of the missing miners made it to either chamber, there's a chance they're still alive. Also from the LAT:

... The cause of the explosion is undetermined, although the mine owner, Massey Energy Co., has come under increasing fire for a spotty record of safety operations at Upper Big Branch, including 10 citations this year for inadequate ventilation of explosive gases.

The mine was cited for two safety violations on Monday, the day of the disaster. But Stricklin said he was "very confident" that the infractions played no role in causing the explosion because they occurred several miles from the blast site.

This mine has had 3,000 safety violations since 1995, 53 of them just this March. Alongside these safety violations, which were allowed to persist and recur as a pattern across Massey Energy properties because it was cheaper to risk people's lives than give them safe working conditions, have been a host of environmental violations, all financed by JPMorgan Chase:

... By underwriting MTR, JPMorgan ties itself to some of the nation's biggest polluters. Take Massey Energy, which leads the nation in MTR mining. In 2008, the company extracted more than 21 million tons of coal using mountaintop removal mining, according to opensourcecoal.org, an online database for coal production statistics. That same year, JPMorgan acted as lead manager on a $690 million bond offering by Massey, according to financial records.

Over the past decade, Massey has mined nearly 190 million tons of coal in Appalachia using mountaintop removal, according to opensourcecoal.org—and it has essentially disregarded the law and surrounding landscape to do so. Between 2000 and 2006, Massey violated the Clean Water Act more than 4,500 times by dumping sediment and leftover mining waste into rivers in Kentucky and West Virginia, the EPA said in 2008. (Environmental groups say the EPA's tally is a lowball figure; they estimate that the true number of violations is more than 12,000.) As a result of these breaches of the law, the company agreed to pay the EPA a $20 million settlement. ...

FULL story at link.