Actions of the corporation involved in the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster in West Virginia amounted to a brand of murder, found investigators in a new report issued by the United Mine Workers of America. After extensive investigation and fact gathering, the report calls for prosecutors involved in the sprawling criminal investigation to charge executives of the company then known as Massey Energy with “industrial homicide.”
The report says that there is no official crime known as “industrial homicide” in either state or federal statutes. But it argues corporate leaders allowed the dangerous conditions to persist in order to drive up coal production and profit, and should be held accountable for the negligence that led to the death of 29 miners.