WASHINGTON — Two weeks after an independent government commission concluded that Massey Energy was to blame for the explosion that killed 29 coal miners last year, the company’s former chairman released a report on Thursday disputing the panel’s finding.
The circumstances of the release were peculiar. It was made public this week by Bobby R. Inman, Massey’s former chairman. Mr. Inman no longer has a role in the company, after its purchase last week by Alpha Natural Resources, a Virginia-based company, but he is named in multiple lawsuits by shareholders. In a cover letter on his own letterhead dated Thursday, Mr. Inman said that the report was completed before the merger with Alpha, but that it was held at the request of Alpha executives who wanted to “minimize publicity” pre-sale.
In a terse statement, Alpha stated that it “did not commission or authorize the release of this report or the letter, and was not given the opportunity to review either this report or the letter before their public release.”
Alpha added that it had warned Massey before the merger that it would be “inappropriate” to release any findings before Alpha had a chance to conduct its own review of what happened, a warning that Mr. Inman, a retired Navy admiral, apparently chose not to heed.
“It would have been easy just to let it slide, and I certainly don’t need any additional publicity,” Mr. Inman wrote. He chose to “release the report now on my own,” out of “a strong sense of responsibility for all those who mine coal.”
The 102-page report reiterated Massey’s earlier assertion that the explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia on April 5, 2010, was caused by a sudden and massive inundation of natural gas, essentially an “act of God” that would have been impossible to predict or control.
That conclusion directly contradicts the May finding by a commission, led by a former federal mine safety chief, J. Davitt McAteer, that placed the blame for the explosion on Massey’s negligence and culture of putting production over safety.
The Massey report also disputed the panel’s conclusion that coal dust, which had been allowed to accumulate, had carried the explosion through the mine, making it far more lethal than it might otherwise have been.
It defended the mine’s ventilation system, which the commission said had helped create conditions for the blast.
The report spent considerable space detailing what it said were the failures of the federal Mining, Safety and Health Administration, including, it said, secrecy, witness intimidation and obstruction of Massey investigators.
Mr. McAteer disputed that assessment in a telephone interview, and said that some of the report’s conclusions “simply don’t make any sense,” like the assertion that the high levels of natural gas in the mine after the explosion were evidence that a big gas infusion was the cause.
“Quite frankly, that conclusion is uninformed,” Mr. McAteer said, explaining that spikes in methane occur after virtually every mine disaster.