Tony Oppegard Quotations

There are some good recommendations. It's a good start.

With the price of coal so high, you have operators coming out of the woodwork, trying to get into any seam of coal they can to make a quick buck, opening up a lot of little dog holes.

We have a serious, serious problem in Kentucky with failure to report accidents.

Basically, if you see 73 accumulation violations, that's a sign of a mine operator who is not too concerned with safety. It's troubling if you see that many.

I can't over-emphasize how important pre-shift examinations are. It is a key provision put in the act to protect miners' safety.

If an operator is undercapitalized to the extent that he can't pay his fines, he shouldn't be in business. You can bet he's skimping on safety.

From the time that the company got its first unwarrantable failure, that put them on alert that those examinations weren't being conducted properly. Such unwarrantable failure is just intolerable, and that should be referred to the U.S. attorney for possible criminal prosecution.

What we have now is terrible. Just a thin telephone wire with a speaker phone attached to it.

I would say that these are indicative of an operator who wasn't going to let safety get in the way of production.

That's very unusual and a red flag that there's some safety problems at that mine.

Most of the fines are not high enough to have a real deterrent effect. If the operators know they're not going to have to pay the fines, or that they will be minimal fines, they just factor that into the cost of doing business.

We're not getting everything that we think coal miners need in this bill.

There has to be enough of a fine to encourage compliance with the law.

You can mine 4 tons of coal in a couple of minutes. It's cheaper to exceed the dust limits, expose a miner to black lung and pay the fine than it is to do the right thing.

To me, if you're under-capitalized and don't have the financial means to operate a safe mine, you shouldn't be in the mining business.

Far too many mines receive the minimum assessment of $60, which is less than what a ton of coal goes for these days.

I've been criticizing them for 20 years for doing it that way. It's not good government.

The Bush administration ushered in this desire to develop cooperative ties between regulators and the mining industry. Safety has certainly suffered as a result.

They see tomorrow, they don't see the future. They don't think they're getting their money's worth ... if a guy can't operate a continuous miner or a roof-bolting machine tomorrow.

It's the next enforcement step and it's never used.

It's like fining you or me 25 cents for a speeding violation.

That is a very high number, and it is usually indicative of a very poor safety record.

That is not a very enviable safety record.

They want guys who are 30 to 35 years old, and there is a finite supply of them.

That's extremely low and inappropriate. Most unsafe conditions in a mine would affect more than one person.

If you have a foreman who is not doing pre-shift examinations properly, you should discharge that person, because every miner working there is relying on that person.

If you know they're not going to collect, what's your incentive to follow the law?

You can't expect miners to come in and testify about unsafe conditions in the mine when you have their employers across the table from them.

You can pick which court will be better for you.