Frank,

            Just read your comments on the "Zero" citation "witch hunt" that MSHA is currently implementing. We here at ******* had a similar problem last month when the inspector showed up here. He came in on a ******* afternoon when we were shut down for the winter. He seemed to have trouble understanding why we were not producing since the day was fairly nice by January standards. I explained that we would not be running due to the low volume of sales and the weather uncertainty. He did a few looks at things, walked around the plant a little and said that he would be back tomorrow and hang noise and dust monitors on the only guy that I had working; which he was disappointed because he wanted to be able to use several guys for monitoring. The next morning after he had put his monitors in place he made a comment to me that really pi**ed me off, saying that he was researching our history and could not believe that we had not had citation in over 2 ½ years. He said there is no way we are that good and he felt that past inspectors were just lazy and didn't want to do their job. At that point I knew that I was in trouble and it was not going to be a good day. By the end of the day we a 1 non-S&S citation and 2 S&S citations for not having or implementing fall protection when a haul truck operator does a pre-shift on his ***** A-35C articulating haul truck each morning. Needless to say I was extremely upset with him since we stress 3 points of contact just as the Operator's Manual directs us to do, his comment was that in his opinion we do not do that and he claims to have seen me slip after demonstrating our practice to him (while wearing fall protection). His next comment was he does not understand why "******'s Site Managers get so upset when he writes us a citation, and besides that I know you will contest these citations anyway, ****** always contests citations."

             Needless to say he did not leave here without getting a real earful from me.

            Hope all is well with you and Miss Blue.

                               Site Manager (Institute Graduate)

($afepro has removed names, dates, and times to prevent identification of the site. Here is the Manager's e-mail reply to my request to post the above.)

Frank,

You may do anything with this e-mail that you want and I wish I could truly express my distaste for MSHA at this time. I told the inspector that there was a time when we may not have liked having them come to our pit but after they left we knew that anything they found unsafe was brought to the attention of management and we were all the better for it. This is no longer the case we (being average Joe Miner) despise them coming in now because they don't care about average Joe Miner they are only concerned about writing enough citation's to pay for their salaries and couldn't care any less about the miners, because now some of the ridiculous things that they are writing are causing more hazards then anything they are correcting. I wish I knew what the answer was to stop this bull**it that is going on with these inspectors. 

Register for May 10-14 Institute

HOME