An editorial in the NYT today praises a recent story on the Upper Big Branch mine disaster by the P-G's Dennis Roddy and Dan Malloy. It begins:

If a sense of urgency is needed beyond the deaths of 29 coal miners last April in West Virginia, Congressional lawmakers better heed the latest news from the Upper Big Branch mine where the explosion occurred. A company electrician has admitted that he was ordered to bypass a methane detector alarm when it kept interrupting the flow of coal.

The highly risky silencing, first reported by The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, occurred two months before the tragedy and four miles away. But a grand jury is reportedly looking into a possible pattern of detector-tampering, an outlawed practice that the company, Massey Energy, firmly denies.