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" To the miners, the fire came as no surprise. On Jan. 19, 2006, around 3:30 pm, Carl White saw haze near a conveyor belt inside Aracoma Alma Mine No. 1 in Logan County, W.Va. At 4:20, White&amp;#039;s replacement on the afternoon shift, Bryan Cabell, noticed the haze too. He found that the belt was misaligned, making it rub and smoke.  Cabell was speaking to the foreman about the problem when, shortly after 5 o&amp;#039;clock, he saw red embers beneath the belt. They soon burst into a small blaze, which was detected immediately. But Aracoma Alma had a history of allowing combustible materials, such as coal dust and grease, to accumulate to dangerous levels. The flames quickly grew. Handheld fire extinguishers proved ineffective. When Cabell tried to connect a fire hose, he discovered that the threads of the coupling and the outlet weren&amp;#039;t compatible\u2014and then that the water supply had been turned off.  Unaware that a fire was spreading, Don Bragg and Ellery &amp;quot;Elvis&amp;quot; Hatfield continued to drill roof bolts in 2 Section, the deepest part of the mine. Elsewhere, carbon-monoxide sensors signaled elevated levels of the gas, but almost half an hour passed before the two men received orders to evacuate. They first boarded a diesel-powered mantrip, but the vehicle&amp;#039;s route was thick with dense, black smoke. Together, the 12 men working in 2 Section then attempted to exit on foot. Ten escaped; the bodies of Bragg and Hatfield were found two days later, lying 575 feet apart in the mine. A century ago, major disasters like the 1907 Monongah explosion in West Virginia, which killed 362 miners, drew attention to the need for a U.S. Bureau of Mines to improve workplace safety. In the 100 years since the agency&amp;#039;s founding, a great deal has been learned about how to operate safer mines. Coal mining fatality rates have fallen sharply from the horrific levels of the early 20th century.  &amp;quot;My opinion is that the majority of the industry is always pushing for better safety,&amp;quot; says Rick Honaker, chair of the mining engineering program at the University of Kentucky. And regulations governing mine safety have grown progressively stricter, most recently with the 2006 MINER (Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response) Act. Nonetheless, the rate of decline in mining deaths has largely flattened since the mid-1990s. With 40 fatalities recorded by July 1, 2010 is already shaping up to be one of the worst years of the past decade.  Coal mines are inherently dangerous places to work. In the decade ending with 2009, 354 miners died, nearly 90 percent of them in small accidents that killed in ones and twos, like the fire at Aracoma Alma, rather than in the much larger tragedies that make national news. Most of those deaths were preventable. The Department of Labor&amp;#039;s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) issued 175,000 safety violations and levied $141.2 million in fines in 2009, more than ever before, but with little effect on the number of avoidable fatalities.  Affordable, existing technology could prevent the needless loss of life. Remote sensors, wireless communications and computer-data management have dramatically increased the ability of operators to monitor conditions hundreds or even thousands of feet below the surface. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not that the technologies don&amp;#039;t exist,&amp;quot; says Raymond C. Pilcher, a mining consultant who chairs the United Nations&amp;#039; committee on coal mine safety. &amp;quot;The problems generally have to do with people not applying the technology that&amp;#039;s available.&amp;quot; Take the Aracoma Alma fire: A federal investigation identified 16 root causes, each of which contributed to the loss of life, including a missing carbon-monoxide alarm at 2 Section, an inadequate fire-suppression system and improperly installed ventilation controls. In April 2009 the Aracoma Coal Company pleaded guilty to willfully violating mandatory safety standards and paid $4.2 million in criminal and civil penalties\u2014the largest settlement in the coal mining industry&amp;#039;s history.    Industry Safety /// 3 Coal Mining Dangers And How to Fix Them /&amp;amp;gt; During late March 2010, federal inspectors tested the Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh County, W.Va., for explosive levels of coal dust. Getting the results would take four weeks. But three weeks after the samples were collected, the mine exploded, killing 29 people. At press time, MSHA had not specified the cause of the disaster, but given the explosion&amp;#039;s force, experts believe a coal-dust fire ignited methane.  After the explosion, MSHA criticized the Massey Energy Company, which also owns the Aracoma Coal Company, for repeated safety violations. In June, Massey sued MSHA, alleging that it contributed to unsafe conditions at the mine by barring the company from installing scrubbers to capture coal dust.  Both Massey and the regulators have a point. Some companies, including Massey, have a long history of fighting common-sense rules that would make mines safer. &amp;quot;Bad actors concentrate 100 percent on production and zero on safety,&amp;quot; says Dennis O&amp;#039;Dell, administrator of occupational health and safety for the United Mine Workers of America. MSHA can also be slow to green-light existing technology. There was no technical reason MSHA inspectors needed to wait a month for coal-dust test results; handheld explosivity meters could have provided data immediately. But partly because of MSHA&amp;#039;s cumbersome approval process, the devices won&amp;#039;t become commercially available until at least 2011. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a lot of frustration with MSHA,&amp;quot; says James Sharpe, publisher of Sharpe&amp;#039;s Point, a mine-safety newsletter. &amp;quot;And there should be.&amp;quot; The real regulatory flaw, however, lies in the agency&amp;#039;s inability to back up its punitive actions. &amp;quot;There are good regulations in place to protect miners,&amp;quot; O&amp;#039;Dell says. &amp;quot;But enforcement is not used like it should be.&amp;quot; Massey has received thousands of safety citations for Upper Big Branch, including 425 since 1995 for allowing combustible materials to accumulate and another 427 for failing to maintain proper ventilation. Some may have required only simple fixes, such as rehanging plastic curtains that had fallen to the ground. &amp;quot;The ventilation system didn&amp;#039;t work,&amp;quot; Stanley &amp;quot;Goose&amp;quot; Stewart, a miner who escaped the explosion, told Congress in May. Upper Big Branch, he said, &amp;quot;was a ticking time bomb.&amp;quot; Yet the mine continued to operate, producing 1.2 million tons of coal in 2009. By Massey&amp;#039;s estimate, the mine&amp;#039;s high-value coal is worth $91 a ton, so stopping production for half a day to perform basic maintenance could have cost approximately $150,000 in lost revenue. Just three months before the Aracoma disaster, Massey&amp;#039;s CEO, Don Blankenship, wrote a memo to the company&amp;#039;s deep-mine superintendents: &amp;quot;If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal . . . you need to ignore them and run coal. This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills.&amp;quot; (Despite numerous attempts by PM, a Massey representative could not be reached for comment. Blankenship told a Senate committee in May that the memo had been &amp;quot;quickly and poorly drafted.&amp;quot;) One reason repeated citations haven&amp;#039;t produced change: For years, the fines were so low companies accepted them as a cost of doing business. The fines increased with the MINER Act, as did MSHA&amp;#039;s power to shut down mines that have a pattern of safety violations. However, the agency&amp;#039;s own rules bar it from acting on any violation older than 24 months. The Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission currently takes 26 months, on average, to rule on a case, which eliminates the regulators&amp;#039; most powerful weapon. Inflating the fines, as it turns out, didn&amp;#039;t work either. Some of the largest coal companies responded by challenging nearly every citation. Within a year, the number of appeals to the review commission grew 400 percent. By the end of June 2010 it had 17,088 cases. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a huge backlog,&amp;quot; says Michael McCord, the commission&amp;#039;s general counsel. &amp;quot;I wouldn&amp;#039;t use the word overwhelmed, but you get the idea.&amp;quot; To reduce the caseload, MSHA started negotiating with company attorneys. The process results in a 47 percent drop in fines on average, reducing any motivation to avoid violations in the first place. &amp;quot;We have this crazy, perverse incentive for operators to contest, regardless of merit,&amp;quot; says Aaron Albright, spokesman for the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor, which is studying mine-safety regulations. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s created a system where they have been able to escape tougher scrutiny.&amp;quot;  cellpadding=&amp;quot;0&amp;quot; cellspacing=&amp;quot;0&amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt;  CONTINUED &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Fines Don&amp;#039;t Improve Safety &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;  Low fines didn&amp;#039;t improve mine safety. Higher fines backfired. So safety problems persist, along with heart-wrenching disasters. One option Congress may consider, Albright says, is to levy steep penalties against mining companies that bring frivolous appeals. Another is to improve protection for whistle-blowers.  Others recommend scrapping the existing regulatory system altogether. At present, violations are evaluated individually. But that&amp;#039;s not how mine disasters actually unfold\u2014most, like the uncontrolled fire at Aracoma Alma, involve multiple events contributing to a runaway chain reaction. MSHA is &amp;quot;geared up to write citations and collect fines. That piecemeal approach is not working,&amp;quot; Sharpe says. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s no systematic look at the mine as a whole to determine the hazards.&amp;quot; A more realistic model, called risk assessment, treats each mine as a collection of interwoven systems. In Australia, regulators require mine operators to write their own plans for each system, such as ventilation and coal-dust suppression. Instead of looking for places where coal dust has accumulated, for example, risk assessment requires investigators to test the safety of the entire suppression system and assess whether deviations from the plan are minor or pose actual safety risks. And because companies write the plans, they cannot blame the government if something goes wrong, as Massey attempted to do after the Upper Big Branch disaster. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t put any more liability on the federal government, and thereby on the taxpayer,&amp;quot; Sharpe says. &amp;quot;Put all the liability on the company. You write the ventilation plan. You write the roof-control plan. And if there&amp;#039;s a fatality, it&amp;#039;s your ass.&amp;quot; In the operations office at River View, a northern Kentucky mine owned by Alliance Coal, air-quality manager Gary Potts scans six computer screens connected to the mine&amp;#039;s advanced atmospheric-monitoring system. A carbon-monoxide sensor blinks red. High CO levels can indicate fire, but Potts suspects a diesel truck is rumbling by. Just in case, he watches the monitor until the blinking light stops.  &amp;quot;The more data you have, the more likely you&amp;#039;re going to catch a problem quickly and react to it quickly,&amp;quot; says Tracy Hayford, director of technology and development for Matrix Design Group, an Alliance subsidiary that developed River View&amp;#039;s monitoring systems. At the dawn of mine safety, risk reduction was primarily a matter of removing physical hazards, such as donkeys and oil-fed open flames on miners&amp;#039; helmets. Current safety advances focus on gathering and understanding real-time data about the environment inside a mine. The disaster at West Virginia&amp;#039;s Sago Mine in 2006 was in part an information failure. Thirteen workers trapped underground had only one way to communicate their position: Bang a single roof bolt with a sledgehammer. They labored in vain, wasting precious oxygen, and 12 miners died. After Sago, Congress included language in the MINER Act that required operators to install wireless communications systems. The upgrade proved more difficult than anyone anticipated, Hayford says. Transmitting signals through solid rock requires high-voltage electricity, which is unsafe in a post-accident mine with high levels of coal dust and methane. Wireless systems use less power but require line-of-sight transmission, which limits their range.  Some companies, including Matrix and Airo Wireless, recently developed pagers and phones that communicate with wireless antennas hanging near the working face and connect to the surface by redundant wireless antennas and copper, fiberoptic and coaxial cable. Such systems are less expensive than installing hard-wire connections. And as with all wireless systems, the costs are coming down, making it easier for operators to blanket mines with sensors. At River View, Matrix&amp;#039;s system uses radio antennas to transmit not just voice communications but also readings from methane and CO sensors. In addition, it communicates with radio-frequency identification tags on miners&amp;#039; helmets to monitor workers&amp;#039; proximity to mining machines. If a miner walks too close, the sensors disable the machines to prevent the worker from getting crushed. Since 2006, roof and wall falls have killed 37 underground coal miners in the U.S., emphasizing the need for more data on structural stability. Currently, engineers test roof strength by taking rock cores, but the cores don&amp;#039;t accurately reflect underground stresses once they&amp;#039;ve been removed. Kot F. Unrug at the University of Kentucky developed a test that involves drilling holes into the mine&amp;#039;s roof and walls, inserting hydraulic pumps and increasing the pressure until the rock splits.  An even simpler way to improve safety is to enhance mine lighting. Currently, most illumination underground comes from spotlights on mining machines and from miners&amp;#039; headlamps. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is developing lamps that use LED light. &amp;quot;This is not a big-brainer,&amp;quot; Unrug says. &amp;quot;You can see more in brighter lights.&amp;quot; Some industry officials claim that installing the latest safety gear is an unfair financial burden. Since all mines are different, it&amp;#039;s difficult to assess how much it would cost to bring mines into compliance with the MINER Act. But most experts are confident that mines could install basic safety technology, improve mine maintenance\u2014and reduce fatalities nearly to zero\u2014with very little added expense. &amp;quot;For a few extra pennies per ton, companies could improve mine safety substantially,&amp;quot; Sharpe says. &amp;quot;And I don&amp;#039;t think it would be noticed by consumers.&amp;quot;  Many companies have decided that safety and productivity can go hand in hand. But every day, miners descend several hundred feet into the labyrinthine chambers of mines that still fail to meet readily achievable safety standards. For those miners, cheap coal may come at a great\u2014and unnecessary\u2014cost. &amp;quot;I published my thesis on improved mine ventilation safety when I was 33,&amp;quot; says Andrzej M. Wala, a professor at the University of Kentucky and one of the nation&amp;#039;s top ventilation experts. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m now 73 years old. How much longer do we have to wait?&amp;quot;  cellpadding=&amp;quot;0&amp;quot; cellspacing=&amp;quot;0&amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt;  CONTINUED: Should All Disaster Rescuers Be Robots? &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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