A total of 27 M/NM miners lost their life on the job in FY
2014, 10 more fatalities than occurred during FY 2013. MSHA’s first public
acknowledgement of the disturbing trend came in May 2014 when the agency called
attention to a “spike” in M/NM miner deaths. By then, 10 M/NM miners had perished
since the beginning of that year; 18 since October 2013. In a press release, Assistant
Secretary Joe Main committed MSHA to a
reinvigorated fatality prevention initiative that would “engage all of our
tools: enforcement, education and training, and technical support, to respond
to this trend."
On the day Main released his statement, May 1, another
miner died, and by the time the 23-month uptick ended in August 2015, the grisly
death toll had risen to 53 M/NM miners.
Yet in the remaining five months of that fiscal year, only
11 M/NM mines received impact inspections. The period included August 2014, when
not a single M/NM mine was visited. For all of FY 2014, only 29 M/NM mines were
impact-inspected, down sharply from 49 in FY 2013 (see Figure 1). The
percentage of alleged violations considered serious; i.e., significant &
substantial (S&S), also declined from an average of 39% in 2013 to 36% in
2014. The figures are surprising considering that MSHA’s monthly impact
inspection tool is aimed at mines
the agency’s believes merit increased enforcement due to their poor compliance
history or particular compliance concerns, such as fatalities.
Figure
1
MSHA Impact Inspection Results1
Metal/Non-Metal FY'13 – FY'16
Fiscal Year '13
'14 '15 '16
Total Mines 49
29 56 62
Total C/Os2 620
628 773 714
Ave. C/Os/Mine 13
22 14 12
# S&S 218 233 273
266
Ave. %S&S3 39 36 37
36
Spec. Enf.4 31 72 23
29
Spec. Enf %
5 11 3 4
_____________________
1Some figures are rounded.
2C/Os = citations and orders.
3Calculated by summing monthly S&S percentages from MSHA’s
impact inspection spreadsheets, then dividing the total by 12.
4Special enforcement consists of citations and orders other
than under Sec. 104(a) of the Mine Act.
Nonetheless, two
statistics do suggest a subtle upswing in enforcement was underway. First,
during FY 2014, MSHA inspectors issued an average of 22 citations and orders
per mine, up from 13 in FY 2013. The 2014 figure is not as impressive as it
appears, however, for it is skewed as a result of outsized enforcement actions at five
operations, which together accounted for 280 of the 628 citations and orders
(45%) issued to the 29 mines.
More
significantly, though, enforcement officers wrote 72 special tickets during FY
2014, a big jump from 31 issued the previous year. Forty-seven of those actions
went to mines other than the five mentioned in the previous paragraph. Special
enforcement actions include, but are not limited to, alleged failure-to abate,
unwarrantable failure, imminent danger, and lack of training.
Although the
upward fatality trend in M/NM continued through August 2015, a period that
included two additional fatality prevention initiatives by MSHA that year (February
and August), MSHA continued to exert a relatively mild enforcement footprint under
its impact inspection program. The agency did drastically step up the number of
M/NM mines it inspected in both FY 2015 and FY 2016 ‒ 56 and 62, respectively ‒
still, the number of citations and orders per inspected mine dropped to 14 and
12, respectively. In addition, the average percentage of S&S paper in those
two fiscal years held steady at about 36%, while the amount of special paper
plummeted to 23 citations and orders in FY 2015 and 29 in FY 2016.
Perhaps a more
revealing picture of MSHA enforcement comes from comparing M/NM’s impact
inspection statistics over the past four fiscal years with those from the Coal
sector. The number of Coal mines impact-inspected annually during the period exceeded
the number of M/NM operations by more than a factor of two; in FY 2014, over
four times more Coal mines as M/NM operations were inspected (see Figure 2).
However, M/NM has exceeded Coal since FY 2014 in the average number of
citations and orders per mine, and since FY 2015 in the average percentage of alleged
S&S infractions. The difference was stark in FY 2016: 36% in M/NM versus
30% in Coal. In FY 2014 and 2016, a higher percentage of special enforcement
paper was written at M/NM mines than in Coal.
Our singular
focus in this article has been on just one of MSHA’s myriad enforcement tools.
We did not examine the agency’s application of others, nor did we try to find
out what education and training and technical support tools regulators brought
to bear on the fatality problem. The evidence from the impact inspection
experience does suggest that MSHA has sharpened its enforcement pen in M/NM due
to the sector’s unenviable record of leading the industry in fatalities over
the last three calendar years, a development likely to continue again this year.
Figure
2
MSHA Impact Inspection Results
Coal/Metal-Nonmetal
Comparison: FY'13 – FY '16
Fiscal Year '13 '14
'15 '16
Total Mines 109/49 128/29 146/56
136/62
Ave. C/Os/Mine 16/13 12/22
9/14 8/12
Ave. %S&S 42/39 42/36 36/37 30/36
Spec. Enf %
8/5 7/11
6/3 2/4
Copyright
2016, James Sharpe, CIH. All Rights Reserved.
