But miners are often delaying payment of fines. Many are automatically protesting virtually all fines they receive. Stickler said that can lead to expensive, drawn-out hearings so complicated "that you would think it is a murder case" — even for small fines such as $1,000.

Stickler said operators who protest almost all fines "just flat out are not showing good faith," and added, "how can you show any good faith when you expect that MSHA is wrong 100 percent of the time?'

He said the backlog of handling fines being protested is a "train wreck that Congress is going to have to settle."

With all that, how safe is coal mining?

"It's getting safer," Stickler said. Nationally, he said three of the last four years had the lowest death rates for hours worked ever, and the lowest rates for injuries and work days lost to them. He said that has come as MSHA has increased the fines it has proposed

He said MSHA has a net increase of 170 inspectors. "As we spend more time at the job site, we're going to find unsafe conditions, write violations and get them corrected."

Still, he worries, "a lot of people don't see the importance of laws." But he says almost every law written resulted from a problem that killed miners. He adds: "There's other people who feel like, 'I can get away with this,' like on the highway, we think we can sneak another 10 miles an hour over the speed limit." That reasoning hurts safety.

"We're going in the right direction, but we certainly have a long ways to go," Stickler said.

As a sign of how far the state needs to go: Utah ranks sixth in the nation for coal-mining deaths since 1996.

Utah coal mines have had 24 deaths in that time, behind the much more well-known coal-mining states of West Virginia (124 deaths), Kentucky (108), Virginia and Alabama (35 each), and Pennsylvania (29), according to MSHA data.

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E-mail: lee@desnews.com