Fatal explosion in US coal mine

A miner has been killed in an explosion in a coal mine in Pennsylvania.

Five others escaped yesterday’s blast, authorities said.

The incident happened 2,300 feet underground at the R&D Coal Company anthracite mine in Schuylkill County, about 80 miles north-west of Philadelphia.

It appeared the blast occurred when miners detonated explosives, said Dirk Fillpot, spokesman for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

The victim was Dale Reightler, 43, according to his brother-in-law Charles Kimmel.

Kimmel said: “All they know is they fired (the explosives).

“They don’t know if there was gas there and it went off. They won’t know until they get it aired out and get up there tomorrow.”

State and federal investigators were trying to determine the cause of the accident and the mine has been closed until the investigation is complete.

Fillpot said the miners had checked for methane gas before the detonation, but did not detect any.

DEP spokesman Mark Carmon noted that it was too dangerous to go down into the mine shaft to investigate because the incident knocked out the mine’s ventilation system. Officials hoped to have it restored today.

“Right now, it’s a mining accident, a fatal mine accident, and that’s what we’re terming it until the investigation concludes,” said Mark Carmon, a DEP spokesman.

The five miners who escaped were being interviewed, Carmon said.

The mine is in a remote, mountainous region in eastern Pennsylvania.

The area has the only US deposits of anthracite, a hard, relatively clean-burning coal that once heated millions of homes but now represents a tiny sliver of the US coal industry. The mines still operating are typically small, with only a few miners.

So far this year, there have been 41 other deaths in US coal-mine accidents, none in Pennsylvania.

In the deadliest accident, 12 men were killed at the Sago Mine in northern West Virginia in January.