Copyright 2006 P.G. Publishing Co.
Death was quick, says U.S. official
By ANN BELSER
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)
MELVILLE, W.Va. — Rescuers in the Aracamo Alma No. 1 Mine found the bodies of two miners yesterday afternoon in an area where a conveyor belt caught fire Thursday.
Jesse Cole, district manager for the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration, said the two miners likely died quickly because of the intense heat and carbon monoxide generated by the blaze.
“We have found the two miners we were looking for. It appeared the two miners were trying to make a valiant effort to get outside,” Doug Conaway, director of the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training, announced about 4:45 p.m.
The fire broke out about 5:30 p.m. Thursday, two miles back in the mine.
The two miners, Don Israel Bragg, 33, of Accoville, W.Va., and Ellery “Elvis” Hatfield, 47, of Simon, W.Va., had worked in the mine for five years. They were with a group of 10 others when the fire broke out in a conveyor belt used to transport coal to the surface.
The others all made it out safely, but Mr. Bragg and Mr. Hatfield disappeared.
West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin III said he would make sure that the two men who died here and the 12 who perished three weeks ago in the Sago Mine, 180 miles north in Upshur County, W.Va., did not die in vain.
He said he planned to introduce three bills in the state’s House of Delegates tomorrow that call for a more rapid response to mine emergencies, equipping miners with electronic tracking devices, and placing stations containing bottled air throughout mines.
Now, not all mines have rescue teams, and the air supplies they carry with them last no more than an hour.
Mr. Manchin said no one should have to endure 45 hours of waiting, as the two miners’ families did before learning the grim news yesterday.
“Their families are going to look back and say, “Because of my Dad, because of my brother, because of my cousin, we have laws to make people safe.”
Mr. Bragg, who is survived by his wife, Delorice, and two children, had 15 years of mining experience. Mr. Hatfield, a miner for 12 years, is survived by his wife, Freda, and four children.
The public announcement that the bodies had been found came after Mr. Manchin and Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., broke the news to family members who had gathered at the Brightstar Freewill Baptist Church about a mile from the Massey Energy Co. mine. People then emerged from the church, crying and hugging. State police officers escorted distraught families to their cars.
State and federal mine regulators did not say when an investigation would begin. They were still trying to put out the fire, which had spread from the conveyor belt to a coal seam.
Conveyor belt fires can occur when belt rollers get stuck or out of alignment and rub against the structure supporting them, said John Langston, MSHA’s deputy administrator for coal mine safety and health.
The tragedy here is not expected to affect the investigation of the explosion at the Sago Mine, even though some equipment and men there had been hustled to southern West Virginia for the latest rescue effort.
Officials emphasized that there were key differences between the Aracoma fire and the Sago explosion Jan. 2. Carbon monoxide levels at Aracoma were higher than normal but were not as severe as at Sago, Mr. Conaway said. Also, the ventilation system continued to work at Aracoma and no methane was detected coming out, Robert Friend, MSHA acting deputy assistant secretary, told the Associated Press.
In fact, gases at the Sago Mine had prevented investigators from even entering it until yesterday, but it will likely be another week before they can reach the deepest recesses of the mine, where the 12 died, said Ben Hatfield, president of the mine’s owner, the International Coal Group.
Mr. Conaway said the fire in the Aracoma mine hindered rescue operations because it was so intense and smoky. Air that rescuers were forcing into the mine in hopes of keeping the miners alive at times fed the fire.
Before this month, it seemed that mining in West Virginia was getting much safer.
The state ended 2005 with just three mining-related deaths, drastically down from the 12 who died in 2004.
Then the Sago Mine exploded, followed Thursday afternoon by the fire inside Aracoma.
At Sago, only miner Randal McCloy survived. He was in a semi-coma yesterday at Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, W.Va.
“They say bad things come in threes,” said U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall, D-Beckley, who was including a death in a Kentucky mine roof collapse Jan. 10. “We pray to God this is the last one.”
Mr. Rahall said in the 37 years since the Consol No. 9 mine explosion in Farmington, W.Va., on Nov. 20, 1968, killed 78 miners, much progress had been made in passing legislation aimed at improving mine safety.
“It’s unfortunate that every mine-safety law on the books has been written with the blood of coal miners. It’s taken tragedy to get legislation passed,” Mr. Rahall said.
Caryn Gresham, spokeswoman for the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training, said there hadn’t been mining tragedies in the state on the scale of the two January incidents since Farmington.
“I don’t think there’s a way to predict something like Sago or Aracoma,” she said.
Rescuers in the Aracoma mine had hoped the two miners had wandered into another section a mile from the fire, and they drilled a hole and tapped on its steel casing, trying to get taps back from Mr. Bragg and Mr. Hatfield.
MSHA’s Mr. Cole said there was no response to the tapping. He also said a camera and a microphone were dropped down the hole, but that, too, was unsuccessful.
“That hole is pretty much finished,” he said earlier yesterday, before the bodies were discovered
Mr. Conaway said that all through Friday night, rescue teams were plagued by flare-ups from the fire.
And if all that wasn’t trouble enough, parts of the mine roof near the fire started to collapse, preventing rescuers from getting into that area.
All the while, family members waited in the church, getting constant but disheartening updates on the rescue progress. Community members and businesses inundated the church with food and beverages.
Mr. Rockefeller was in the church when the families learned of their losses.
“It was extraordinary to be in the church when the news came,” he said. “There was tremendous crying and a sense of obliteration.”
He said coal mining has to be made safer.
“It’s in America’s interest that [mining] is done, but it needs to be done safely. And it shall be.”