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    A Toxic Cover-Up?     By Bob Simon     CBS News     Sunday 04 April 2004     (CBS) Who is Jack Spadaro? He’s a man who’s devoted his life to the safety of miners and the safety of people who live near mines.     He’s an engineer, who until recently was head of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy (MSHA), a branch of the Department of Labor, which trains mining inspectors.     But he lost that job last year, after he blew the whistle on what he called a whitewash by the Bush administration of an investigation into a major environmental disaster.     "I had never seen anything so corrupt and lawless in my entire career, what I saw regarding interference with a federal investigation of the most serious environmental disaster in the history of the Eastern United States," says Spadaro.     "I’ve been in government since Richard Nixon. I’ve been through the Reagan administration, Carter and Clinton. I’ve never seen anything like this."     What he’s talking about is what he calls a government cover-up of an investigation into a disaster 25 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill.     It happened in October of 2000, when 300 million gallons of coal slurry – thick pudding-like waste from mining operations – flooded land, polluted rivers and destroyed property in Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. The slurry contained hazardous chemicals, including arsenic and mercury.     "It polluted 100 miles of stream, killed everything in the streams, all the way to the Ohio River," says Spadaro, who was second in command of the team investigating the accident.     The slurry had been contained in an enormous reservoir, called an impoundment, which is owned by the Massey Energy Company. One night, the heavy liquid broke through the bottom of the reservoir, flooded the abandoned coalmines below it and roared out into the streams.     Spadaro says the investigators discovered the spill was more than an accident — it was an accident waiting to happen.     During the investigation carried out by Spadaro and his colleagues, it came out that there had been a previous spill in 1994 at the same impoundment. The mining company claimed it had taken measures to make sure it wouldn’t happen again, but an engineer working for the company said the problem had not been fixed, and that both he and the company knew another spill was virtually inevitable.     "He said,