Jack Spadaro was only 23 years old in 1972, but had already accumulated enough coal mining expertise that he was asked to be the staff engineer for the governor's commission that investigated the Buffalo Creek disaster.

"That was a terrible tragedy that could have been avoided," he says. "There had been plenty of warnings that something [of this nature] would occur. There were a series of dams at Buffalo Creek and there had been failures on all of them."

The tragedy profoundly affected Spadaro. He spent the next 30 years studying rock and earth structures and working as a government regulator to try and protect miners and communities from faulty dams and negligent coal companies.

The Martin County Coal slurry impoundment is 70 acres in size and has a capacity of more than 2 billion gallons. Part of the lagoon is situated above underground mines. In the early morning hours of Oct. 11, 2000, the bottom of the slurry impoundment broke into one of the mines. A torrent of sludge and water blasted through about two miles of underground mines until the flood punched out of a mine opening in the side of a mountain and began flooding Coldwater Creek.

Residents described the flood as a black lava flow. Janice Maynard remembers seeing five big turtles, supine in their shells on top of the slurry, which had enough density to raise bridges as it crested the creek banks.

"It smelled like hydraulic fluid," she said. "Nothing smells worse than hydraulic fluid."

Eventually, the thick sludge stopped flowing, but the less viscous slurry at the top of the impoundment was still rushing into the mine. This caused a pressure build up, which resulted in a second flood that punched through mines on the Wolf Creek side of the impoundment.

There was no loss of human life, but aquatic life was annihilated, and animals that came in contact with the sludge got stuck and perished, or died because they were unable to get uncontaminated drinking water. Many residents exhibited severe rashes and suffered from respiratory problems. No one in the area dares drink tap water for fear that a number of hazardous substances found in slurry, such as arsenic and mercury, have permanently poisoned the municipal water systems.

It's a stroke of luck that no miners were killed. A conveyer belt that hauls coal to the preparation plant runs through the area where the breakthrough occurred. A miner had just vacated that section of the mine minutes before the catastrophe. Officials say that if all of the slurry had come down the Coldwater side, hundreds of homes would have been submerged and the loss of life would have easily surpassed the death toll at Buffalo Creek.

Within two days of the disaster, Davitt McAteer, then assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health (a 1994 Clinton appointee), assembled an accident investigation team. Tony Oppegard, now general counsel for the Kentucky Department of Mines and Minerals, was the team leader.

Jack Spadaro was the No. 2 man. "Jack was highly qualified for the job," said Oppegard. "I knew he'd be a diligent member of the team. He knew a lot about impoundments, and I knew that he had investigated the Buffalo Creek disaster. McAteer told me that if I wasn't there, Jack was in charge."

Spadaro immediately set out to find the root causes of the Martin County Coal accident: "I was concerned that we were having a failure of this magnitude 30 years after Buffalo Creek. There had been a lot of safeguards implemented over time. But all that was related to the dams and the earth structures. Not a whole lot of attention had been given to the reservoir areas. I was interested from a technical standpoint and a personal standpoint because I had been involved with these things for so long, and I knew what kind of tragedy could result if we didn't do a good job of investigating."

Oppegard started his investigation by wading through slurry-filled mines at Martin County Coal to try and get a close-up look at the diaster. The details of the May 1994 spill, six years earlier, in which about 100 million gallons of slurry were dumped, didn't come to light until later in the investigation. But when they did, certain documents read like smoking guns.

Of particular interest is a June 13, 1994 memorandum obtained by Salon through a Freedom of Information Act request. In that memo an MSHA engineer made a series of nine critical recommendations that Martin County Coal and MSHA regulators needed to address before the company could resume using the impoundment. The engineer, Larry Wilson, also observed rising bubbles in the slurry impoundment, indicating that there was still a breech. "[Martin County Coal] should not be allowed to let the [slurry] level rise until a complete evaluation by the Company's consultant has been completed [sic]," wrote Wilson.

The Wilson memo caught the attention of Mark Skiles, head of MSHA's engineering division, which is known as Technical Support. Skiles was ordered by McAteer in October 2000 to do a complete review of MSHA's files on the May 1994 accident.

Skiles' investigation resulted in a memorandum to his boss that stated: "I would conclude from this investigation that after the 1994 failure the [local MSHA district office] did not follow [Larry Wilson's] recommendations. Technical Support in light of the 1994 failure did not follow up on the recommendations."

What's more, Martin County Coal's own engineering firm was aware that another breakthrough after the May 1994 accident was "virtually inevitable," according to testimony given to the accident investigation team. (The Lexington Herald-Leader newspaper obtained transcripts.) In his testimony an engineer for Geo/Environmental Associates, Scott Ballard, said that there was only 15 feet of rock and dirt between the bottom of the slurry impoundment and the location of the 1994 breakthrough into the underground mine. (The MSHA recommended amount is 150 feet.)

Plans to seal the rupture and minimize leakage were "never intended to prevent a breakthrough in any form or fashion," Ballard told MSHA investigators. "In fact, the question was asked during the MSHA review process: Will this prevent it? And the answer was emphatically 'no.' There's no guarantees. There's nothing here that will prevent a breakthrough."

According to Jack Spadaro, Ballard testified that at least five Martin County Coal executives were aware of the risks their impoundment posed to miners and the surrounding communities. Massey Energy declined to comment.

Two months into the Martin County Coal accident investigation, evidence started coming to light that the Massey subsidiary could be charged with criminal negligence, which could have severe financial and legal implications. MSHA was also in the hot seat: Its own district managers, who were vested with holding Martin County Coal accountable to the law, appeared to have given the company a pass. Despite the warnings inherent in another impoundment rupture, MSHA let Martin County Coal increase the volume and height of its slurry impoundment after the 1994 accident.

But the direction of the investigation abruptly changed when Bush was sworn in as the nation's 43rd president. In late January 2001 Bush administration officials installed a new team leader to take charge of the Martin County Coal investigation, a switch that was neither required by law nor politically necessary. In fact, MSHA's lead investigator, Tony Oppegard, had gotten indications that he was going to be put on contract so he could finish the investigation. But, with no explanation, he received word that the Bush administration had not approved his contract.

Instead, Tim Thompson, the district manager from MSHA's Morgantown, W.V., office, was brought in. According to some members of the accident investigation team, Thompson made it clear that investigators were expected to immediately start wrapping up their work and write the final report. There were as many as 30 interviews that the team had left to conduct, but Thompson whittled that number down to about six. Spadaro says that Thompson explicitly said, "We're not going to let any fingers point at MSHA." Thompson did not respond to a request for an interview.

According to investigation team members who spoke with Salon on condition of anonymity, Thompson was in frequent communication with the new assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health, David Lauriski, who was appointed by Bush in March 2001. These communications took place particularly when Thompson was at odds with the rest of the team over critical issues, the sources said.

Bush's top leadership at MSHA is stacked with former mining executives. Lauriski, MSHA's chief, was an executive with Energy West Mining. Deputy assistant secretary John Caylor worked for Cyprus Minerals, Amax Mining and Magma Copper. MSHA's other deputy assistant secretary, John Correll, worked for Amax Mining and Peabody Coal.

In Kentucky there's a high degree of suspicion that MSHA officials were getting their orders from higher-ups in the administration, and from Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who, like the Bush-Cheney ticket, is heavily backed by campaign contributions from the coal industry, including Massey Energy. In a full-page editorial in the Lexington Herald-Leader, the newspaper's opinion writer put it this way: "When President Bush took office in January 2001, Elaine Chao, Senator Mitch McConnell's wife, became Secretary of Labor with responsibility for MSHA. David Lauriski, a Utah coal operator, became MSHA's director. Lauriski hired a McConnell staffer, Andrew Rajec, who attended the MSHA investigator's meetings and now works in Chao's office."

Coal has been king in these parts for more than a century. As an example of how coal companies wield political influence these days, consider this excerpt from a meeting in 2002 between coal magnate Bob Murray and MSHA inspectors. West Virginia Public Radio managed to obtain notes from the meeting. Said Murray: "Senator Mitch McConnell calls me one of the five finest men in America, and last time I checked he was sleeping with your boss."

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