On a Wednesday morning in Kentucky, before the sun had even crested the horizon, dozens of miners were already hard at work. They quickly donned specialized oxygen masks and began to search for survivors in a mine accident.
“Let’s go!” one team leader yelled through the mask, running a pre-search safety check. “Check your bypass! Check your hoses for leaks! Inhale! Exhale!”
Only these miners aren’t underground – they are in a downtown convention center in Lexington, Kentucky. This is the National Mine Rescue Contest, held every two years.
Mines are often in remote areas, far from the closest fire or police station, and they require specialized knowledge to navigate. Unlike many other workplaces, miners find themselves on the frontlines when emergencies happen.
Brian Goepfert with the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) watches off to the side. He says event organizers can throw all sorts of scenarios at these miners to prepare them for the real deal. Teams of miners get scored by judges on how well they address challenges.
“There’s usually unaccounted people, fires, unstable ground, water — it’s a combination of those different things,” he said. “Kind of almost like a geometry problem, how do you solve this?”
It requires a decent bit of imagination to see those hazards like fires and unstable ground in a well-lit, air-conditioned convention center. Curtains and poles symbolize rock walls and paper signs warn of toxic gas.
Missouri miner Steve Setzer knows it’s a far cry from a real mine — and he noted that some regional competitions are held in actual decommissioned mines — but he believes it’s still helpful to young miners.
“The main thing we'd like to do is get teams under duress, get them tired, get them stressed, because that's when they got to make tough decisions,” he said. “And tough decisions is a big, big deal of it.”
There have been a lot of those tough decisions lately. Last year, 40 miners died at work. Three of those were in Kentucky.
“Last year was not the best year for all the mining community,” Chris Williamson, head of MSHA, said while attending the safety competition.
In light of the concerning rise in deaths last year, Williamson had lots of meetings with mines and inspectors to stress safety. So far this year 16 miners have died on the job. He said even one death is too many.
“So far to date this year, we're over halfway into the year, the number of fatalities have dropped dramatically,” he said. “We’ve still got a lot more work to do and we want to remain equally as vigilant.”
The vast majority of deaths this year and last have happened at surface mines, not underground mines. Most competitions and training are designed for underground rescues, even though more than 95% of the nation’s mines are above ground.
Historically, there’s not been as much energy around surface rescue competitions and training, but that’s changing, Williamson said.
“On the surface [mine] side, you know, more and more people are seeing the value of mine rescue and how important it is to have really good teams that you may need to call on,” he said.
Right now, perhaps the best place for surface mine safety training and competition happens in a place without a single mountain: Florida.
“We have no underground mines in the state of Florida,” said Karen Miller, manager of Florida’s Mine Safety Program. “Everything is surface mining.”
Miller’s surface mine competition is the largest in the country. She said it started in part because their regional MSHA director asked them to lead the way about five years ago.
“They were like, we've got to do something for surface [mines],” she said. “And that's where they asked us, would you be interested in putting together a mine rescue surface competition? At first we laughed and didn’t think they were serious.”
But they were serious. Miller and her team got to work organizing a competition. Instead of focusing on underground worries like toxic gas, they focus on things like firefighting, first aid and rescuing people from vehicles.
“Because that's the only way they're going to learn,” Miller said. “The first line of defense is the miners. They need to be.”
Miller said she’s even hoping to start the first-ever national surface mine competition next year.
Miller’s surface competition has grown to about 20 rescue teams attending her biggest competition. Still nowhere close to the more than 70 rescue teams at the underground national competition, but it’s a start.
