The number of mines landing on the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration’s (MSHA) pattern of violations (POV) list has dropped dramatically according to numbers released by the government on Oct. 2.

There is no question that this is good news for the mining industry, but there are questions about how, and why the change came about.
MSHA says mines have cleaned up their acts for fear of landing on the dreaded POV lists which is reserved for mines that pose the greatest risk to the safety and health and miners and can lead work stoppages at the mine.

The National Mining Association (NMA) says the industry has played a role in change, without the threat of regulation, and credits the success of its CORESafety program (endorsed by SME).

“NMA’s own CORESafety program, consisting of best safety practices from around the world and from other industries, was implemented in our biggest member company mines beginning in 2011,” Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the NMA said in an email. “I don’t think it’s coincidental that this program coincided with the documented improvement in the numbers MSHA is now showing.”

He added that mines have an incentive to operate safely.

“Our members recognize because they’ve documented the correlation between safe mines and productive mines,” Popovich said.

Prior to 2010, according to MSHA, no mine had been put on that list. But partly in response to the 2010 Upper Big Branch explosion in West Virginia, which killed 29 miners, MSHA toughened its enforcement that year and began citing mines for POV actions. Since then, seven mines have been on the POV list, The Associated Press reported.

In its 2010 screening, 51 chronic violators were identified for further review among mine operators. But for this year’s screening, that number had dropped to 12. The biggest reduction came in coal mines, which dropped from 42 in 2010 to six this year.

“For the first time in the history of the Mine Act, mine operators were under the threat of being placed on a POV action if they failed to clean up their act,” Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health Joseph A. Main said in a telephone interview. “That was really never a threat before. We’re not seeing the kind of records that Upper Big Branch and other mines were amassing” anymore.

In the 2010 screening, the worst 12 offenders were cited for 2,050 violations of significant health or safety standards; by this year, that number had fallen to 857.

Main said that there was a corresponding reduction in the number of deaths and injuries, noting that for the most recent fiscal year for which numbers are available, ending Sept. 30, 2013, there were record-low fatality and injury rates, as well as the fewest mining deaths, 33. But MHSA also announced in January that fatalities for the 2013 calendar year had increased. There were 41 fatalities, up from 36 the previous calendar year, because of an especially deadly final three months, which claimed the lives of 14 miners.