More than five years ago, West Virginia regulators were urged to consider banning a practice in which coal miners pull coal from the pillars meant to hold up underground mine roofs.
This weekend, two more West Virginia miners died “pulling pillars,” in the first deaths for the state’s coal industry this year.
In a November 2001 report, [...]

Share of mining equipment companies got a boost Monday on news that one member of the group had quarterly results that easily beat Wall Street predictions and another said it will acquire an underground coal mining equipment business.
Joy Global Inc. announced before the market opened that its fiscal fourth-quarter profit jumped 52 percent on overseas [...]

Walter Industries Inc.’s mining division produced 1.2 million tons of metallurgical coal for the quarter ended June 30. It traditionally produces more than 7 million tons of coal a year in its three mines in Alabama.
Specifically, Mine No. 4 produced less tonnage than its historic quarterly averages, primarily due to a longwall move and reduced [...]