"WV Senate Bill Eliminates Mine Safety Enforcement"

"State safety inspectors wouldn’t inspect West Virginia’s coal mines anymore. They would conduct 'compliance visits and education.'

Violations of health and safety standards wouldn’t produce state citations and fines, either. Mine operators would receive 'compliance assistance visit notices.'

And West Virginia regulators wouldn’t have authority to write safety and health regulations. Instead, they could only 'adopt policies ... [for] improving compliance assistance' in the state’s mines.

Those and other significant changes in a new industry- backed bill would produce a wholesale elimination of most enforcement of longstanding laws and rules put in place over many years — as a result of hundreds of deaths — to protect the health and safety of West Virginia’s coal miners."

Ken Ward Jr. reports for the Charleston Gazette-Mail March 14, 2017.