ENVIRONMENT — DESPITE THOUSANDS OF SAFETY VIOLATIONS, MASSEY CEO DON BLANKENSHIP CLAIMS THAT HE ‘NEVER’ PUTS PROFITS ABOVE SAFETY: In his first Capitol Hill appearance since the Upper Big Branch mine explosion last month, Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship told a Senate committee yesterday that “we never have, and never will” put profits above safety in any of his company’s mines. “From the day I became a member of Massey’s leadership team 20 years ago, I have made safety my number one priority,” Blankenship said. But the truth is that Blankenship’s Big Branch mine alone was “cited for safety violations 515 times in 2009 and 124 times in 2010 before the blast,” citations which Assistant Secretary of Labor Joseph Main said were “not only more numerous than average, but also more serious.”  The Big Branch violations are part of Massey’s long record of egregious environmental and health violations. In 2000, a Massey subsidiary was responsible for what was at that time the “nation’s largest man-made environmental disaster east of the Mississippi.”  In 2007, the EPA sued Massey for violating the Clean Water Act “more than 4,500 times from the beginning of 2000 to the end of 2006.” And in 2006, Massey’s Aracoma Coal Co. pled “guilty to 10 criminal charges, including one felony, and pay $2.5 million in criminal fines” after two workers died in a fire at the Aracoma Alma No. 1 Mine in Melville, West Virginia. Massey failed to notify authorities of the fire until two hours after the disaster, and Blankenship later called the incident “statistically insignificant.” Though the company has been charged with tens of thousands of violations (10,653 in 2009), Massey continues to escape full responsibility by constantly appealing the penalties, and by leveraging connections with former employees of Blankenship who had been placed at the highest levels of the federal mine safety system. Blankenship’s attitude toward worker safety is best embodied in a memo he sent to mine superintendents just two months before the Aracoma fire. “If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e. build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever),” he wrote, “you need to ignore them and run coal. This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills.”