"Clearly, we have been pointed out as a state that has been deficient in this regard," Huntsman said.

For his part, Nielsen — who most recently served as director of mine development at Interwest Mining — the focus needs to be on the improvement of policies and procedures that promote safety, as well as compromise among all the players.

He said if miners, regulatory agencies and operators are open to working to improve safety within the industry, then more positive changes will happen.

"We have made huge strides in improving the mining industry in the last 20 years," he said.

But, as it typically relates to bureaucracy, advancement on the regulatory front has been more of a sluggish crawl.

Prodded by the disaster, MSHA has been busy proposing rules to implement an earlier mine safety bill passed two years ago. It says it is moving quickly. Critics, again, say the opposite. Some major reforms include much closer scrutiny of out-of-the-ordinary roof plans such as the one that reports say led to disaster at Crandall Canyon.

Many congressional hearings and studies emerged during the year to look at what went wrong at Crandall Canyon — with most pointing some fingers both at Murray, for inadequate mine design where coal was removed from pillars needed to support the roof, and MSHA, for approving the design.

It hasn't seemed to hurt Strickler or Murray much.

Despite the criticism of MSHA, Bush reappointed Stickler as temporary head of MSHA on Jan. 4 — after an earlier yearlong temporary appointment had expired on Dec. 31 — and he will likely serve in that post until the end of the Bush administration.

Murray has also been a target of many of the studies and hearings. For example, Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., said an investigation by a labor committee he chairs showed that Murray Energy "disregarded dangerous conditions at the mine, failed to tell federal regulators about these dangers, conducted unauthorized mining and — as a result — exposed its miners to serious risks."

The report by Kennedy's committee also said, "Murray bullied MSHA and got away with it." It said documents showed that Murray and his company would often successfully seek to have tough inspectors fired or reassigned.

House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., after his own committee's investigation into the disaster, called for the Justice Department to investigate whether mine operators conspired to withhold data about earlier "bounces" at Crandall Canyon in order to keep mining there.

No charges have resulted to date. Murray Energy continues as one of the nation's largest coal mining companies.