CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — The body of a coal miner was found early Thursday in a mine that flooded in southern West Virginia, Gov. Patrick Morrisey said.
Crews found the body inside Alpha Metallurgical Resources Inc.’s Rolling Thunder Mine near Belva, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of the state capital of Charleston.
A mining crew had hit an unknown pocket of water last Saturday about three-quarters of a mile (1.2 kilometers) into the mine, which flooded after an old mine wall “was compromised,” Gov. Patrick Morrisey said. More than a dozen other miners were accounted for after the accident was reported.
The death is the third at an Alpha facility in West Virginia this year. Both of the others occurred in nearby Raleigh County: An elevator being tested struck a miner on a first-floor platform in August at Alpha subsidiary Marfork Coal’s processing facility, and a coal seam fell on a contractor in February at Alpha’s Black Eagle underground operation, according to the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration.
Holes were drilled in the mine in an attempt to speed up the search process and dive teams explored potential areas in the water where air pockets might exist. The National Cave Rescue Commission provided surplus Army phones attached to wires that can travel great distances to enable for better underground communication.
Rolling Thunder is one of 11 underground mines operated in West Virginia by Tennessee-based Alpha Metallurgical Resources Inc. The company also operates four surface mines in the state, as well as three underground and one surface mine in Virginia.
Morrisey said the abandoned mine next to Rolling Thunder had been in operation in the 1930s and 1940s.
A report prepared in February for Alpha by an engineering consulting firm, Marshall Miller & Associates, said the area had been “extensively explored” by previous mine owners, generating “a significant amount of historical data” that Alpha examined in assessing its potential for producing coal.
The same report says that the Rolling Thunder coal seam runs along and below the drainage of Twentymile Creek, but said there were “no significant hydrologic concerns” about digging for more coal in the extensively mined property.
In 1968 in the same county, miners working for Gauley Coal and Coke at Hominy Falls accidentally tunneled into an unmapped abandoned mine nearby, flooding their operation. Four men died, but 15 miners were brought to the surface after five days, and six others further into the mine were rescued after 10 days.
In 2002 in southwestern Pennsylvania, nine miners were rescued after spending more than three days trapped in the flooded Quecreek Mine.
