Emergency responders have been trying to reach a miner trapped deep inside a flooded West Virginia coalmine since Saturday, according to authorities.
A mining crew hit an unknown pocket of water on Saturday about three-quarters of a mile into the Rolling Thunder mine near Drennen, about 50 miles (80km) east of the state capital of Charleston, the Nicholas county commissioner, Garrett Cole, said in a Facebook post.
All the other miners on the team were accounted for after the accident was reported to the county emergency management department at about 1.30pm Saturday. It was unclear how extensive the flooding was inside.
West Virginia’s governor, Patrick Morrisey, said in a statement that the mine flooded after an old mine wall “was compromised” – and that multiple state agencies were involved in the response, which includes pumping water from the flooded section.
On Sunday, that meant emergency responders were trying to use an underwater drone to reach the trapped miner, whose identity has not been released.
Morrisey later said dive teams were searching for pockets of air where the miner could be located, as ABC News reported. The governor added that all resources, including national experts, had been made available to rescue crews at the Alpha Metallurgical Resources’ Rolling Thunder mine, according to the West Virginia Watch news outlet.
Rolling Thunder is one of 11 underground mines operated in West Virginia by Tennessee-based Alpha Metallurgical Resources. The company also operates four surface mines in the state, as well as three underground and one surface mine in Virginia.
A report prepared in February for Alpha by an engineering consulting firm, Marshall Miller & Associates, said the area had been “extensively explored” by previous mine owners, generating “a significant amount of historical data” that Alpha examined in assessing its potential for producing coal.
The same report says that the Rolling Thunder coal seam runs along and below the drainage of TwentyMile Creek – but said there were “no significant hydrologic concerns” about digging for more coal in the extensively mined property.
