Labor & Employment Law

Roof Fall Traps Two Kentucky Coal Miners

By Mike Hall

BREAKING: Word out now that one of the two trapped miners has died, according to media reports quoting Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell. The miner’s identity has not been released. 

UPDATE: One of the two missing miners has been located and is alive according to news reports. But rescuers have not been able to remove him from the mine and he remains trapped. Click here for more.

Two coal miners are missing and believed to be trapped five miles from the entrance of a western Kentucky mine after a roof collapse last night. Federal and state mining officials are on the scene but attempts to locate and communicate with the miners have not been successful.

Two other miners working in that area were able to escape following the roof fall.

The Dotiki Mine is owned by Alliance Coal Co. The mine covers more than 100 acres underground and is some 150 miles west of Louisville. Last week, Business Week reported Dotiki had the seventh highest number of significant and substantial safety violations?321?since January 2009, according to a list of the top 20 coal mines with high numbers of safety violations.

The list was released by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) after the April 5 explosion at Massey Energy Co.’s Upper Big Branch Mine, where 29 West Virginia coal miners were killed.

MSHA defines significant and substantial violations as those that are “reasonably likely to result in a reasonably serious injury or illness under the unique circumstance contributed to by the violations.”

Robert Ferriter, a 27-year veteran of MSHA now with the mine safety program at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colo., told Business Week:

That means the operator is taking a higher risk than he should be. You’re putting your miners in more dangerous conditions.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on April 29, 2010 (boomark / email).