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GX Technology Corporation, Houston, Texas, U.S.
Corresponding author: lgochioco@gxt.com
| The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below. |
Since 1995, U.S. coal miners have often inadvertently broken into abandoned underground coal mines in the Appalachian coal basin. Unavailable, inaccurate, or incomplete mine maps were typically blamed. However, two recent troubling occurrences have caused the U.S. Congress to authorize the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), Department of Labor, to refocus efforts to develop and employ remote-sensing technologies to detect and map abandoned and flooded mine works. These two events were (1) the breakthrough of a tailings impoundment through old mine works in Inez, Kentucky, releasing millions of gallons of mine wastewater and slurry on 11 October 2000, and (2) the breakthrough from a flooded mine works that trapped nine miners for nearly 77 hours at the Quecreek Mine, Pennsylvania, on 24 July 2002. Fortunately, there were no fatalities in these two incidents.
Rescue operations at Quecreek received international coverage. On the anniversary of the accident, a U.S. television network (ABC) aired a two-hour movie recreating the events, clearly depicting underground mining conditions at Quecreek Mine, and the subsequent logistics and rescue efforts. And The New Yorker (18 November 2002) magazine published an article by Peter Boyer, about the rich history and culture of coal mining in Pennsylvania, events leading to the accident, mobilization of rescue teams and drillers, on-site decisions made by key technical personnel, and the eventual rescue of the trapped miners.
The
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