Massey spins with PR campaign

by: Carnacki

Wed Jun 16, 2010 at 12:23:24 PM EDT

While the bigger media new to the story is falling for it, Ward with his years of experiencing covering coal mining and Massey is able to provide context the Wall Street Journal and Reuters miss.

Now, the MSHA report that Massey posted online contains only a brief mention of degasification wells, and basically writes the whole idea off:

Experience suggests that locating and degassing floor methane zones through a drilling program was highly problematic.

But for some reason, Massey didn't post online this earlier MSHA report, dated March 4, which outlined steps that company had said it planned to take to deal with the methane outburst problem:

Mine personnel reported that in the subsequent longwall panel, degasification wells will be developed into the Lower Eagle seam in an attempt to decrease the potential for future outbursts. This appears to be a reasonable plan.

So did Massey do that? That's one thing investigators are looking into ... but not something that you'd know about if you read Massey's press releases or the media coverage generated by the company's PR campaign.

MSHA doesn't help itself in all of this. The agency has yet to explain how a former acting district manager who was involved in investigating the 2003 and 2004 incidents at Upper Big Branch could have ended up on the MSHA "internal review" team that is examining the agency's performance at the mine prior to the disaster.

Ward again calls for public hearings to shine some light on the investigation.

Of course, one way to deal with this problem of "selective release of information" by Massey would be for MSHA to reverse itself and begin conducting the entire investigation out in the open. If this happened, any spurious allegations by Massey could be defused with truth from witness testimony, and MSHA officials could provide context that ensures the media coverage is accurate and balanced. Or, at the very least, MSHA could come out of hiding and conduct periodic public and media briefings to answer questions about these issues.