Some media coverage today of the terrible roof fall at the Alliance Resource Partners Dotiki Mine in Kentucky has mentioned a February 2004 fire that happened at this same operation.

The main Associated Press news story, for example, reports:

The mine was at least partially idled in 2004 when a supply tractor caught fire and spread flames to the coal, timbers and other equipment. The 70 miners who were underground were all safely evacuated and the mine returned to full production in about a month.

And on her Mine Safety Watch blog, former MSHA staffer Kathy Snyder writes:

Some may not recall that the Dotiki Mine was the scene of a major fire on Feb. 11, 2004. The blaze caused no injuries, but it took several days to extinguish the fire and several weeks to restore the mine. The effort also demanded considerable resources from MSHA.

I certainly recall … and I remember how then-MSHA chief Dave Lauriski gushed about it being a “textbook operation” that got everyone out of the mine safety and returned the operation to production:

Coal production was resumed in record time — saving jobs. The mine returned to full production in less than a month – saving paychecks, 360 miner’s jobs, and hundreds of thousands of tons of coal necessary to power the economy. In fact, a majority of miners were transferred to affiliate operations thus keeping the paychecks flowing and the local economy running.

MSHA issued a joint report with Alliance Coal about this “textbook operation” and also produced a video about it.

OK … but what about two important things that I found when I read the report of MSHA’s “investigation” of the fire?

First, if it was such a textbook  operation, then why did MSHA inspectors cite Alliance for not immediately reporting the fire to the agency? According to the report, the fire started sometime between 4 a.m. and 4:45 a.m., but was not reported to MSHA until 6:15 a.m.

And second, MSHA never figured out what started the fire.  According to the agency’s report:

The mine fire originated on the Getman tractor model No. LRD-200 DZ. During the recovery of the mine, the tractor was sealed in the fire area in the final effort to extinguish the fire. The underlying cause of the machine fire could not be identified because the machine could not be examined.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Mine Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.