Engineering Ethics

4 Engineering Ethics: An Industrial Perspective

instituting ethics policies and codes of conduct to address issues related

to unethical or illegal conduct. Although none of the other texts

mention SOX, I believe it will enable engineers to conduct their jobs in

an ethical manner.

A REAL WORLD EXAMPLE

We begin our discussion of how to determine our personal threshold for

action by examining the real world events that geodesic engineer Jack

Spadaro encountered. Spadaro was second in command of a team selected

by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) to investigate a

coal slurry spill that occurred on October 11, 2000. Coal slurry refers to the

wastewater and impurities that result from coal washing and processing.

An embankment made of coarse coal refuse acts as a dam to contain the

slurry at a mining site. As sediment settles out of this mixture, filling the

pond, wastewater is recycled back into the coal washing process. The slurry

pit remains after mining operations cease.

During this disaster, a slurry pit in Inez, Kentucky, owned by a subsidiary

of Massey Energy, burst into subsurface mine shafts, flooding downstream

communities.This 300-million gallon spill was the largest in American history.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, it was the greatest

environmental catastrophe in the history of the eastern United States. Thick,

black, lava-like toxic sludge containing 60 poisonous chemicals choked and

sterilized 100 miles of rivers and creeks and poisoned the drinking water in

17 communities.

Spadaro, the former superintendent of the National Mine Health and

Safety Academy, where MSHA trains its engineers, is nationally recog-

nized for his slurry spill expertise, having spent 30 years studying slurry

dam failure and prevention. In the course of the team’s investigation, it

was discovered that mitigation of a spill at the same site in 1994 had been

misrepresented to the government (Kennedy, 2004). Mining officials had

stated that a solid coal barrier at least 70 to 80 feet wide between the

mine workings and the bottom of the reservoir existed, when in fact the

barrier was less than 20 feet.An engineer at the Massey subsidiary, Martin

County Coal, admitted he and the company knew another spill was

inevitable (Simon, 2004). Martin County Coal has stated that the slurry

spill was accidental.

Massey Energy is the fifth largest U.S. mining company, and a large

contributor to the Republican party. When the Bush administration took

over the White House in 2001, the MHSA team was given a smaller

scope of investigation, and was asked to complete its investigation in a

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