I guess I just missed this, but I just became aware this morning that there was another mining accident in WV:
With the search for two missing miners partly blocked by the smoke and intense heat of an underground fire, workers on the surface drilled deep into a mine shaft in an effort to contact the missing men but got no response, officials said Saturday.
A conveyor belt inside the mine caught fire on Thursday evening and the fire might have spread into a coal seam, officials said. Nineteen miners escaped, but two others did not make it to the surface.
“Part of the problem with the fire is we are having roof falls,” said Doug Conaway, director of the state’s Office of Miners’ Health Safety and Training. “The heat from the fire is deteriorating the roof.”
Another problem was ventilation; air flow could cause the fire to flare up and spread.
I am not sure why there is so much less coverage- perhaps because there are only two miners trapped as opposed to over a dozen, but those two miners mean just as much to their families as the others did several weeks ago.
*** Update ***
Damnit. They didn’t make it.