"I've seen little evidence to convince me that two agencies are better than one," said Brett Harvey, CEO of Consol Energy, the nation's largest underground mine operator.
Utah had its own mine safety inspection program until it was phased out in the mid-1980s as a cost-cutting measure after the Wilberg Mine disaster that claimed 27 lives.
"I think it was the wrong decision then and you're making the right decision now in taking a hard look at what the role of Utah ought to be," Joe Main, a mine safety consultant and former United Mine Workers official who worked on the Wilberg rescue, told the Utah Mine Safety Commission.
In the aftermath of two collapses at the Crandall Canyon mine in August that entombed six miners and killed three rescuers, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. asked the commission to study what, if anything, the state could do to prevent future accidents.
The commission hopes to make interim recommendations to the Utah Legislature before it begins its annual session Jan. 22. There appears to be little support for a revived state inspection program, but there is widespread support for a larger state role in miner training, emergency planning and continued participation in the post-accident investigation process.
The commission plans to meet again at least once next week to formalize the interim proposals.
Mike Dalpiaz, vice president of the United Mine Workers in Utah, said one thing is clear: The existing system failed at Crandall Canyon. He believes federal Mine Safety and Health officials should not have approved the mine plan for Crandall Canyon, and he likes to think that someone at the state level would have had the sense to stop the plan.
"It appalled me when I saw the mining plan. . . . In fact it brought tears to my eyes," Dalpiaz said. "Maybe the state of Utah could have caught that. Maybe someone with another set of eyes would say, 'Hey you cannot do that.'
"Maybe we need a new set of eyes. Maybe the eyes that are looking at these plans aren't looking very closely," Dalpiaz said.
But Utah Rep. Kay McIff, a member of the commission, said it's impossible to say whether problems in the Crandall Canyon mine plan, designed by mining experts and approved by federal regulators, would have been caught.
"Now in hindsight we say someone should have picked up on that, it was obvious it was a problem, but it didn't seem obvious at the time," McIff said.
Val Payne, who worked for a quarter century in the mining industry and now works in Huntsman's public lands office, said there may be a simpler solution, where the state can act as a facilitator and provide insight and expertise when the company and federal regulators are considering a mine plan.
"I agree another set of eyes might have been beneficial with regard to Crandall Canyon, if that set of eyes also had a set of ears attached to it, and that set of eyes would have looked at the mine plan and asked the hard questions," said Payne, who stressed he was speaking only for himself and not the governor.
Those questions would include why the company thought it could get more coal out of a section that had already been extensively mined, and why the company continued retreat mining after serious problems forced it to abandon mining the northern portion of the same area.
