Posted on 01/21/2006 2:10:00 PM PST by 2111USMC
Edited on 01/21/2006 2:22:59 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
>MELVILLE, W.Va. — Rescuers on Saturday found the bodies of two coal miners who disappeared after a conveyor belt caught fire deep inside a coal mine.
The bodies of Don I. Bragg, 33, and Ellery Hatfield, 47, were found in an area of the mine where rescue teams had been battling the fire for more than 40 hours.
"We have found the two miners we were looking for," said , director of the state Office of Miners' Health Training and Safety. "Unfortunately we don't have a positive outcome."
The miners became separated Thursday evening as their 12-member crew tried to escape a conveyor belt fire at Aracoma Coal's Alma No. 1 mine in Melville, about 60 miles southwest of . The rest of the crew and nine other miners working in a different section of the mine escaped unharmed.
Gov. and U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller informed families of the deaths at a church prior to making the announcement, along with Don Blankenship, chairman of the mine's owner, Massey Energy.
yea your right, was probably very hard to get to anywhere close to where the fire started.
Scott air packs
Drilling rigs and logging are more dangerous than coal mining. Hubby does both. That's double jeopardy! Oh AAARRRLEEEEENNNN!!
Every occupational death involves human life!
Logging is number 1
The parasites in Washington DC and surrounding burbs will shut down the mines so they can have nice 2nd homes in the WV mountains and valleys.
Actually, on the very last day of the Clinton administration, MSHA put into effect rules on Diesel Particulate Matter permissible exposure levels in underground mines. While common sense would say it is better not to breath diesel particulate than to breathe it, there have never been any scientifically validated studies that show what level of exposure leads to demonstrable negative health effects, such as lung cancer. NIOSH is about to complete the largest study that has ever been done on a mining cohort. MSHA bureaucrats under the Bush administration have been clinging to this Clinton rulemaking, despite the failure of the NIOSH study so far to show that there has been a higher incidence of lung cancer or other serious breathing disorders in miners as a result of diesel particulate exposure. My point is this. Instead of focusing on real hazards, or feasible technological improvements that can prevent disasters like Sago or Aracoma Coal, MSHA has been spending time and resources on issues that have not been proven to kill or injure one miner. They have done so at the instigation of Unions. It is all about politics, even under a Republican administration.
Prayers for our Christian brothers and their families.
GPS does not work underground. Radio signals on that frequency range do not penetrate the earth. Only very low frequeny, long wavelength signals can penetrate the ground.
Think again.
frequeny=frequency
"These people need to get a grip. This is tragic, but they're acting like it's unprecedented."
How many people died on Robert "Sheets" Byrd named roads over the last 50 hours?
Radio signals can penetrate for a short distance through the earth. It is one thing to penetrate 10' or 15' of snow, and another to penetrate 100' or more of solid rock.
Two way communications by radio in an underground mine is very difficult. In the early 1990's, I tried every commercial technology that was available for mine radio comms, in an effort to find one that worked the best for a particular mine. There are some, such as VHF/UHF leaky feeder, that worked fairly well. The problem is these all require infrastructure up in the face areas, along with repeaters that must be powered up. Under methane scenarios, there are legal and safety limitations on powering these systems. It is not an easy problem to solve. The best reliable coverage I have ever seen, where a miner could carry around a radio and talk to someone on the surface, was around 1000' or so between the individual miner and the antenna of the comm infrastructure. This is very dependant on the size of the mine entries, and the nature of the rock formation.
One system I have considered for tracking miners is one made in Australia. The miner wears an RF ID tag. There is a system of wireless internet transmitters/receivers spaced throughout the mine. These are hard wired together. Every time a piece of equipment or an individual miner carrying one of these RF ID tags passes within range of one of these trans/receivers, it is logged on the computer. Thus, you could likely tell where an individual is located based on the history logged in this system. The problem with any of these systems is that it can be damaged by an explosion, rock fall, or fire. If the communications link between the mine infrastructure and outside is lost, then you are still in the dark. \
Despite his lack of 100% reliability, I think such as system should be considered as a requirement in all mines.
'... this nation can find a way to make mining accidents less lethal..."
You mean only brain dead instead of all dead?
I wish the media had better things to do than stick a mike under the nose of every friggin dem who needs a forum to bitch about President Bush.
Thank you for taking time to explain this to me.
It sounds like you are involved in the industry.
Yes, cake_crumb, you are correct.
I guess my response to dennis1x was from emotion at the time.
At the time, it seemed that the media, and many on FR, felt that a stranded whale was a more important story.
No problem at all. Hopefully others will read it and understand that it is not a simple problem (underground radio communications) to solve.
Yes, I have been involved in all aspects of the mining industry for 33 years, and with radio communications for over 40 years.
Prayers for their families as well as their souls. May they rest in peace.
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