Allegheny County Courthouse
PITTSBURGH – Following a fatal accident at a Pennsylvania coal mine, two employees of CONSOL Energy have filed lawsuits alleging retaliation for voicing safety concerns.
One of those men, Mark Smith, said he relayed how workers felt in the aftermath of tons of rock falling on Zachary Wolfe, a 34-year-old husband and father-of-two who died May 19 at the underground Bailey Mine. Understaffing and inexperienced miners left them feeling unsafe, Smith told senior leadership, according to a lawsuit filed last week in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas.
“A few days later, four corporate officials summoned Mr. Smith to a meeting and berated him for more than two hours,” the suit says. “They accused him of going against the Company, not backing upper management, and said he should have stopped the miners from bad-mouthing CONSOL.
“A few days after that, CONSOL fired Mr. Smith, bringing his 17-year mining career to an end.”
CONSOL, now Core Natural Resources after a merger with Arch Resources, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The lawsuit claims Smith was fired for merely fulfilling his duties under the Pennsylvania Bituminous Coal Mine Safety Act, which requires mine foremen and others to act as direct officers of the Commonwealth to enforce safety rules.
Smith was a shift supervisor and assistant mine foreman bound by the law to address safety issues brought up by the miners who attended the post-accident debriefing, the suit says. A preliminary report with the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration says Wolfe, who had 13 years of experience, was killed while setting supports in the Bailey Mine. Two others suffered injuries.
One of the other CONSOL employees at the debriefing was Brian Young, who had driven a miner too disturbed by the accident to drive himself there. Young was also an assistant mine foreman who heard, in addition to staffing concerns, that walls known as ribs were going unmeshed and that CONSOL’s methods had exposed the rocks that fell on Wolfe.
Young specifically suggested that a safer bolting technique would help protect workers from falling rock, his lawsuit says. About a month after the accident, Young returned from short-term disability leave, was reassigned to the mine’s Dry Ridge Portal and stripped of his AMF duties, he said.
He was put in lower-graded roles of fire boss and section supervisor – “a significant de facto demotion,” the suit says. “A lower-paid subordinate set Mr. Young’s schedule.”
At Dry Ridge, other miners “shunned him,” he says, by not answering his calls over radio. He asked for a personal day to deal with “emotional strain” on June 16 and says his request was revealed to coworkers who began asking about his mental health. He complained a week later that he was facing retaliation and demanded reinstatement to his position, which CONSOL refused. That left him with no choice but to resign after 14 years with the company, he says.
The lawsuits state that a therapist at the post-accident debriefing allowed miners to express their feelings in a confidential environment. The lawsuits add the accident could have been avoided if staffs weren’t so thin, because “the men who would take down or secure the dangerous rock are the same men needed to mine the coal to meet CONSOL’s production quota, and the production quota does not flex down when crews are short.”
Charles Lamberton of Lamberton Law Firm filed the cases July 28 – 17 days after a contract employee was “engulfed in falling coal spillage while shoveling beneath a silo” at the Bailey Mine. Thomas Cooley died from his injuries July 20.
