Coal company, employee file motions for rearraignment

PIKEVILLE — A coal company and one of its employees indicted in 2022 on charges of violating federal health and safety standards have indicated in court filings that they want to plead guilty.

Black Diamond Coal, LLC, and its certified coal dust sampler, Walter Perkins, originally pleaded not guilty but recently filed separate motions for rearraignment on the charges.

Black Diamond Coal is charged in an indictment returned in August 2022 with willful violation of a health and safety standard and false record.

Perkins is charged with knowingly violating a health and safety standard and making a false statement.

The indictment says Black Diamond Coal allegedly willfully violated mandatory health and safety standards by failing to keep a continuous personal dust monitor (CPDM) on the designated miner portal to portal, but instead running the CPDM on the surface in clean air on Oct. 8, 2020, at its No.1 mine in Floyd County.

The company also, on Oct. 6, 2020, allegedly “did knowingly make and certify false statements and representations in its sampling data electronically submitted to MSHA (Mine Safety and Health Administration), in that it knowingly submitted CPDM data representing valid shift samples when in fact, the CPDM was not worn by the designated miner portal-to-portal as required by the regulations,” according to the indictment.

CPDMs, sometimes referred to as dust pumps, must be worn by miners performing specific jobs at specific locations and are operated by the miners being sampled for a set period of time, the indictment says.

Perkins also allegedly knowingly violated the standards on Oct. 8, 2020, in the same manner as the coal company and also willfully and knowingly made and caused to mad a “material false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement and representation” by telling a federal mine inspector investigating the operations at the No. 1 mine that he had “assigned the CPDM to the miner operator, but that the pump had a malfunction when in truth and in fact he knew that he never gave the CPDM to the miner operator and the CPDM did not have any malfunctions,” the indictment says.

Perkins also told a federal MSHA special investigator, when asked why the CPDM was running outside on that day, that he had taken it in that morning but had “brought it right back out because it had quit.”

Perkins told the investigator that the “miner man hollered at me, said that the pump went off and said diagnosis failure” and that he had been “having problems with it,” the indictment says, adding that Perkins “knew that he never gave the CPDM to the miner operator. the miner operator never yelled at him. and the CPDM did not have any malfunctions.”

The coal company filed its motion for rearraignment Friday, and Perkins filed his motion on Monday.

Black Diamond also filed court papers saying federal prosecutors offered it a written plea agreement that calls for guilty pleas to its charges, with proposed sentences of $100,000 fines and two years’ probation for both counts.

The plea offer was unanimously approved by the company’s owners, Randall H. Fleming and Harold Hurley, in consultation with their attorneys on Friday, according to the court filing.