Underground coal mines must provide up to four days of breathable air to keep miners alive in emergencies such as an explosion or a tunnel collapse, federal regulators announced Thursday.
A law enacted last year after a string of deadly accidents, including the deaths of 12 miners at the Sago Mine in January 2006, required mine [...]

A state agency recommended Thursday that coal mine operators take steps to curtail lightning damage, a year after 12 miners died because of an explosion believed to have been triggered by a storm.
The recommendations are the first public proposal for lightning protection by the state Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training since it determined [...]

Many of the safety measures state legislatures and Congress rushed to adopt to protect the 46,000 people working in the nation’s underground coal mines after the Jan. 2. Sago Mine explosion have yet to take effect.
There are still no rescue chambers or wireless tracking and communications equipment in the country’s 606 underground coal mines, and [...]

He was brought out of the darkness of the Sago Mine in the middle of the night, comatose and battered — and straight into the unyielding glare of unwanted fame.
But today, nearing the anniversary of the Jan. 2 explosion and 41-hour entrapment that killed 12 of his friends, Randal McCloy Jr. is keeping a low [...]

Concerns raised by relatives of 12 miners killed in the Sago Mine disaster prompted state mine safety officials to hastily scrap the report’s release Monday and promise to rewrite it.
The report concludes the Jan. 2 methane gas explosion in a mined-out and sealed off area was nearly five times more powerful than the foam seals [...]

Nearly a year after an underground explosion led to the deaths of 12 miners, West Virginia officials say they will release their conclusions about the Sago Mine tragedy on Monday.
Mine safety chief Ron Wooten said Tuesday that the report was not finished and declined to preview any details.
“There will be questions that may never be [...]

Production is set to begin this week on a movie about the Sago Mine tragedy.
Sunday, the filmmakers met in the Sago Baptist Church.
That’s the same church where families waited to learn the fate of the 13 men trapped in the mine.
The documentary airs in January on the Discovery Channel.

Seven years ago, a government engineer in charge of testing emergency air packs used in U.S. coal mines suggested that tests used to approve the devices might not be effective _ and that there was no way to know if the air packs were safe.
Nicholas Kyriazi, a biomedical engineer with the National Institute for Occupational [...]