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“We haven’t had a coal dust explosion in 20 years,” said Celeste Monforton, a former M.S.H.A. policy adviser who now teaches at George Washington University.

But M.S.H.A. inspectors were for too long content with cosmetic patches, said Ms. Monforton, the former policy adviser.

During one of those conversations, in November 2009, he told Massey’s chief operating officer: “Sometimes I’m torn with what I see about the craziness we do. Maybe if it weren’t for M.S.H.A., we’d blow ourselves up.”

After a passageway flooded four feet deep and a federal inspector shut it down, fearing miners might drown, Mr. Blankenship ordered mining to continue, scolding the mine’s president for “letting M.S.H.A. run” the mine, referring to the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

After the findings were announced by mine safety officials on Wednesday, Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, released a statement calling on Congress to “close loopholes in federal mine safety law that contributed to the inability of M.S.H.A. to prevent the Upper Big Branch mine tragedy.”