A miner on a rolling stairway at a North Dakota lignite mine produced an SEC filing five days later, and the company says it may contest the order
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An imminent danger order is the bluntest instrument a federal mine inspector carries. It is also, under the Dodd-Frank Act, a disclosure event for anybody who owns the mine and is listed on an American exchange.
NACCO Industries told the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday evening that the Mine Safety and Health Administration issued one of those orders on 14 August to The Coteau Properties Company, a subsidiary, at the Freedom Mine in Beulah, North Dakota. According to the filing, the order stated that one miner was exposed to a fall hazard while working from a rolling stairway. No injuries occurred, it says, as a result of the conditions that gave rise to the order.
Then one more sentence, and it is the only one in which the company speaks for itself. It reserves its right to contest the order.
Why the filing exists at all
Item 1.04 of Form 8-K is headed Mine Safety, and it is there because of section 1503(b)(1) of the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires a listed company to report on Form 8-K that it has received an imminent danger order under section 107(a) of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977. The obligation attaches to the fact of the order. It does not wait for a finding, a penalty or an appeal, and the form asks for no estimate of cost.
NACCO is a coal producer rather than a company that wandered into the mining rules by accident. Its own filing classifies it under bituminous coal and lignite surface mining, and its Class A shares trade in New York under the symbol NC.
What the document does not say
The order is dated 14 August and the disclosure went in on the 19th at ten past five in the evening. Between those two facts the filing offers nothing: no account of whether the work stopped, no statement of when or whether the order was lifted, no indication that a contest has actually been filed, and no exhibit or press release attached. It names neither the miner nor the inspector. It runs to five sentences, signed by the company's controller, and one of them is the whole disclosure.
