Best of Gazette-Mail: MSHA cuts fueling safety fears 15 years after Upper Big Branch

Joe Main can tell you the exact moment he found out.

The head — at the time — of the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration, Main could tell from the look on MSHA Acting Deputy Administrator Charlie Thomas’ face that something had gone horribly wrong.

That something, at 3:02 p.m. on April 5, 2010, was a massive coal dust explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh County.

The catastrophe left 29 miners dead and two injured. It was the deadliest U.S. coal mine disaster in nearly four decades.

An internal review of MSHA actions at Upper Big Branch in response to the disaster published nearly two years later found that Massey Energy Company, through its subsidiary Performance Coal Company, caused the explosion by violating widely recognized safety standards and failing to corr