A Montana coal mine located near Billings, Montana, was fined $1 million Monday for repeated employee and environment safety violations, according to the United States Attorney’s Office for Montana.
Federal Magistrate Judge Timothy J. Cavan fined Signal Peak Energy and sentenced the company to three years of probation for violations such as failing to report worker injuries and not getting federal approval before pumping waste into abandoned sections of the mine. The fine will be broken up into four different installments of $250,000.
“This case holds Signal Peak Mine accountable for its utter disregard for environmental and worker health and safety standards,” U.S. Attorney Leif M. Johnson said in a Department of Justice press release. “Mine owners provided little in the way of meaningful oversight of mine operations as long as the mine’s managers could meet reported safety and production goals. That lax oversight fostered a climate of fraud, which today cost the mine $1 million in fines.”
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According to court documents that were cited by the DOJ, Signal Peak Energy violated mandatory health and safety standards from 2013 to 2018.
The violations included paying a worker $2,000 in cash who had their fingers crushed and amputated, instead of reporting it as a work-related injury. Another incident involved a worker with a bad laceration getting sent home instead of to a hospital. The next day, the employee needed staples and told the hospital he had been hit in the head by a shelf, instead of a rock, according to the Casper Star-Tribune.
The company pleaded guilty to four counts of willful violation of health and safety standards in October. The company said the senior managers who oversaw the incidents are no longer with the company and had broken the law without the company’s knowledge. However, Kavan said the company could not pass the problems off on a few bad actors because of the scope of the deception, the Star-Tribune reported.
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The company additionally pumped chemicals, waste, and soil that included metals such as arsenic and lead into abandoned sections of the mine without approval. At one point, the waste and chemicals leaked into an active area of the mine, causing flooding, according to the Star-Tribune. The pumping stretched over a few weeks at a time and occurred more than once.
