The second day of 2006 started as thousands had before for an experienced crew of 13 coal miners at the Sago Mine in Upshur County, West Virginia. They entered the mine about 100 miles south of Pittsburgh before sunrise. A dozen of them would never see daylight again.

Half an hour after their descent began, a methane gas explosion shattered the mine’s concrete walls and scattered the rubble mess throughout the 2 miles between the miners and the opening where they’d entered. Before the dusty haze from the explosion’s dusty haze cleared, one miner was already dead.

Due to severed communications lines, the men were unaware that a clear path to escape was a short walk away. Believing they were trapped, all the miners could do was barricade themselves where they’d been working and wait for help. It arrived 41 hours later, too late for all but one of them. The rest succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning while they waited.

The Sago accident drew unwanted scrutiny to the non-union mine, its parent company International Coal Group Inc. and the firm’s owner at the time, billionaire Wilbur Ross Jr., who in 2017 became President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, despite broad criticism that his business empire with tentacles to so many industries posed conflicts of interest. Congress faced heavy pressure to act swiftly, and it did, creating new requirements for mine rescue training, reliable communication equipment and other elements of a safe workplace that Sago lacked before the disaster.

But coal company executives, girding against new safety standards likely to thin their bottom lines, acted even faster. Two dozen of them spent the first week of March 2006 on Capitol Hill, buttonholing some 60 members of Congress, angling to share the “guiding principles” that the executives saw as the path to improved safety. Predictably, it included tax relief that would help their companies to afford the more rigorous safety regulations they expected Congress to pass. The coal barons told the world they wanted safer mines, but they whispered to Congress that they weren’t willing to pay for improvements out of their own profits.

International Coal Group tried to keep a low profile, but remained active behind the scenes to protect its bottom line in the face of embarrassing news about its poor safety record in the years immediately preceding the Sago accident. The company hired a crisis PR firm that “worked one-on-one with ICG executives to help enhance their effectiveness” when news cameras were rolling and during “congressional subcommittee testimony.”

Ross’s mining company reported spending $0 lobbying Congress in 2006. Nonetheless, the firm had a conduit for its desires to Capitol Hill in the National Mining Association, an industry organization that International Coal Group was a dues-paying member of at the time. In 2006, the National Mining Association spent $2.4 million lobbying on all issues, including the, an obscure piece of legislation that established tax breaks for rescue training and safety equipment — a provision that is still on the books today.

By the time the Sago accident happened in 2006, King Coal’s heyday as an economic powerhouse had long since withered. In certain regions, though, coal remained — and still does — an influential force. So in the aftermath of the Sago tragedy, big coal looked for friends in the congressional delegations from states whose economies were still reliant on coal mining.

The coal executives found an ally in Sen. John “Jay” D. Rockefeller IV, a West Virginia Democrat whose own lineage gave him reason to sympathize with the mine owners. Rockefeller’s grandfather and namesake made his fortune on natural resources a century earlier, mostly in oil, but in coal as well.

When the elder Rockefeller’s employees at a coal camp in Ludlow, Colorado, struck in 1914 to protest wage law violations, the influential oil and coal magnate appealed to Congress and the governor of Colorado to intervene. The National Guard deployed to Ludlow to roust the strikers and their families from a tent colony they’d established. Gunfights followed. The Guard burned the camp. Before the days-long skirmish was over, more than 60 men, women and children were killed.

Sen. Rockefeller amended tax legislation in 2006 to include the tax breaks for rescue training and emergency equipment that the coal executives coveted. He even twisted the arms of some reluctant fellow Democrats to make sure the subsidies passed.

They were meant to be a temporary bridge to encourage coal companies to spend the necessary money to assure their employees didn’t die unnecessary deaths, like the 12 miners at Sago had. But the tax breaks continue today. Whenever the sun has been poised to set on the tax breaks — and occasionally even after sundown — Congress has bailed out coal companies by extending the relief, sometimes retroactively, as occurred this year.

The estimated $2 million a year in costs for the two retroactive tax benefits provided coal companies for 2017 are easily lost in a massive federal budget. Though modest in the context of the broader tax package, the mine safety and rescue tax breaks illustrate how industry can turn even a tragedy into an enduring political and financial victory.

The sum of the tax benefits has shown the coal industry’s up-front investment lobbying Congress to establish the tax breaks was a winning gambit. These two obscure tax breaks have provided coal companies more than $20 million since 2006.

Rockefeller always had a cozy relationship with his constituents from the coal industry. In 2002, he ranked 13th in donations from the industry among members of Congress, having collected $35,200 — more than any other Democrat in Congress. When Rockefeller ran for re-election to his final term in 2008, following his support for the tax breaks that resulted from the Sago accident, he rose in the rankings to the industry’s third most-supported member of Congress, collecting $102,300 from coal companies. Coal gave Rockefeller almost three times more than it provided any other Democrat in Congress during that election cycle.