By Chris Lawrence

June 8, 2017 - The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration is concerned about seven mining fatalities and a number of on the job injuries in the coal industry in 2017.

Seven workers died on the job between January and May. The common thread in most of those instances was the victims had less than a year of experience in the mine or less than a year of experience in the task they were performing.

“Once we looked at these seven fatalities it didn’t take lone before the one year of experience or less and the change in mines jumped out at us,” said Tim Watkins, Deputy Administrator of Coal Mine Safety for the U.S. Department of Labor.

The trend was alarming enough to create a stakeholders meeting in Beckley this week where Watkins and his team rolled out a newly planned safety initiative.

“This is something I’d like to drill down a little further than a bathhouse meeting where you’re talking to 50 or 60 people,” Watkins told the gathering of coal operators. “In this initiative we want to send out our people and talk to these miners who fall into these categories.”

The conversations about safety and training would not be like normal safety refresher offered by MSHA to miners, but would rather be more personal and less condemning.

“It’s not that we want to go out and beat these people over the head, that’s not the intent,” he explained. “Our intent is to go out and spend time talking to these folks, watching them in their environment, and actually ask them some questions about their training.”

The results, Watkins believed, would be beneficial to gauge the level of safety competency among those who have been working on a coal mining job for less than a year.    He added it may also bring attention to an operator deficiencies in training they would want to address.

Watkins said he would also request operators to spare some of their most experienced miners who have good safety records to accompany the federal representatives when they visit workplaces within a mine. The request is to create a mentor relationship among coworkers and help instruct those doing a specific job about what they need to look out for and how to be more safety conscious.

Watkins stressed, this would not be a routine inspection of  the mine.

“I don’t believe this falls under ‘advance notice.'” he responded to a question from Murray Energy owner Bob Murray. “This is not an inspection and it’s not an investigation.  It’s just us reaching out to the operators with this initiative.”

From January to May there were four accidents in West Virginia.  Of the last 15 mining fatalities in the United States dating back to 2016, seven were in West Virginia.