At approximately 11:45 a.m., March 9, 1976, a massive explosion caused by coal dust and methane gas blasted through Scotia Coal Company No. 1 mine at Oven Fork, Letcher County, Kentucky, killing fifteen miners. Two days later — on March 11, 1976 — 11 rescue workers, including 3 federal mine inspectors, were killed in a 2nd explosion as they attempted to restore ventilation inside the mine. Investigators believed that the explosions were set off when faulty equipment ignited methane gas that had built up in the poorly ventilated mine.
The mine had an inspection history of recurrent violations of ventilation rules and other hazards that existing enforcement mechanisms were unable to address and Scotia miners also reported a complete lack of training. The tragedy led to the passage of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977 which strengthened the previously passed 1969 Federal Coal mine Health and Safety Act. The 1977 law also moved the Mine Safety and Health Administration from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Labor.
The widows of 15 of the men who died in the Scotia Mine explosions sued the parent company, Blue Diamond Coal, for $60 million in a wrongful death and negligence suit, but their suit was initially rejected, because the judge found that Kentucky’s Workman’s Compensation Law exempted parent company’s from tort liability.
Ward Sinclair and Bill Bishop, writing in the Washington Post in 1980, four years after the explosion, described the aftermath:
Since that beginning four years ago this week, the Scotia Coal Co. disaster at Oven Fork has become a twisted Gothic tale, little related to the mining of coal.
It is now a story about lawyers and judges and big money, a stubborn corporation, laws and regulators and, most of all, justice denied — or at least slow in coming.
The company has paid no penalties. The miners’ widows still await the trial of their damage claims. The government has not fully implemented new safety laws passed after the disaster. Lawyers have produced a swarm of suits and countersuits that have clogged the courts. Prosecutors move at snail’s pace.
Scotia, meanwhile, has resumed operations at the mine. It is as though Appalachian history is repeating itself — the coal comes first, miners and the widows last.
The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, however, later allowed the case to go forward, finding that under Kentucky’s Workmen’s Compensation Act. a parent corporation is not immune from tort liability to its subsidiary employees for its own, independent acts of negligence. In 1980, Blue Diamond settled with the widows, providing $5.5 million in payment.
After the explosions, congressional investigators minced no words over Scotia. “It was a mine which . . . placed production and profit before the safety and health of its miners. It was a mine which essentially ignored the law,” the official report said.
The Scotia mine also faced criminal charges. In 1982, the mine owners pleaded guilty to two charges and no contest to another three criminal charges. They were fined $80,000.
The judge in the criminal case allowed Scotia/Blue Diamond to contribute $60,000 to charitable organizations that provided support in the aftermath of the explosions.
There was also a Congressional investigation, which concluded that
After the explosions, congressional investigators minced no words over Scotia. “It was a mine which . . . placed production and profit before the safety and health of its miners. It was a mine which essentially ignored the law,” the official report said.
Scotia’s safety record was called “abominable.” Federal inspectors shut it down 110 times between 1970 and 1976. Between 1974 and 1976, they cited it for 420 safety violations. The citations showed a long pattern of ventilation and methane-gas problems of the sort that led to the explosions, yet the federal safety men took no action to force full-scale corrections.
Mine safety attorney Tony Oppegard, writing in Confined Space on the 55th anniversary of the 1968 Farmington Coal disaster remembered
I was a freshman in college on November 20, 1968 when a gigantic methane explosion destroyed Consolidation Coal Company’s No. 9 mine – located near Farmington and Mannington, West Virginia – killing 78 coal miners.. The bodies of 19 of those miners are still entombed in the mine today.
It is said that all mine safety laws are written with the blood of coal miners, and that certainly was the case with the Federal Coal Mine Health & Safety Act of 1969, which was enacted by the U.S. Congress in response to the Farmington Mine Disaster. It was the first comprehensive mine safety law ever enacted in America.
That law (called the “Coal Act”), along with its successor, the Federal Mine Safety & Health Act of 1977 (“the Mine Act”) – which was enacted in response to the Scotia Disaster in Letcher County, Kentucky, on March 9 & 11, 1976 (26 killed) – have literally saved the lives of thousands of American miners in the past 5 1/2 decades. But having represented the families of miners killed because of unsafe conditions, I can attest to the never-ending pain that such disasters cause.
Not surprisingly, the American coal industry opposed both of these life-saving mine safety laws, as well as the passage of every other meaningful mine safety regulation that has been enacted in the past 55 years. The coal industry has labeled itself as the “Friends of Coal” for political purposes, but it only cares about miners so long as they do exactly what they are told to do and don’t complain about unsafe or unhealthy working conditions.
When miners insist on a safe and healthy workplace, they are frequently fired for their efforts, which is why I – with my colleague Wes Addington of the Appalachian Citizens’ Law center – am still filing safety discrimination cases on behalf of miners who have been discharged or otherwise discriminated against because of making safety complaints or refusing to work in unsafe conditions. In that regard, very little has changed in the mining industry…