 A near-miss incident occurred on the surface at an underground coal mine at approximately 5.30 p.m. on November 15, 2002. The operator of a D9L caterpillar bulldozer became entrapped in a void. I parked way outside the coal pile and I felt the dozer give and I thought that I'd pull too close to the edge or I'd have to get pulled back off, you know, back onto the coal pile. And about that time I fell in and things started happening and I got on the radio. The CB radio still worked, my alarm system worked, everybody started trying to find out where I was at and what was going on. The person operating the dozer had been feeding the feeders on the east and west side of the stacker and so doing he'd been traveling back and forth from side to side under the stacker belts. The cavity was formed directly under the stacker belts in between the two stackers. This area had been traversed back and forth several times with no problems whatsoever and upon this one occasion he traveled across it. The cavity caved in immediately taking the dozer in. The lights tell you which feeders are activated and those orange voles show you approximately where the feeder is at. The yellow lights up there that you see burning now means those feeders are off. The red light up there means that feeder is running. This is a login lockout switch. It's on all the dozers here. When you go on the clean coal, you flip it to clean coal, it's just a toggle switch. And when you go back to raw coal you flip it and you call the washer control room and you tell them whichever pile you're going on to and you flip this switch, it puts you on a computer. If anything happens you get in the feeder, you just hit this big red button, it says stop. It puts off an alarm in the washer and around the mines, that minesite, that lets you know that something's happened on one of the coal piles. All right, we've got the e-stop on the number one dozer activated. That means the clean coal dozer's got a distress. Go on clean coal dozer, come in my givers. Mike's in the hole. Mike. So we went up the clean coal belt. We went on up 375, which is the second tube belt. And when we got to that point we could see that the dozer was, the dozer was almost completely in the hole. The blade was sticking out of the holes, all we could see. I heard him holler for help on the CB, so I ran out there and went up on the stack of tube above him and looked down and see what the situation was. And by that time, a couple of other fellas had come up. So I got them to get hand-held radios and I kept one and went back to my truck where I could talk to the operator. And I directed two other dozer operators to the pile to start cutting coal away from him where it wouldn't cave in on him. And I was able to keep abreast of how it was going by talking to the men up on the stacker tube with a hand-held radio and talking to the two operators that were trying to cut the coal away and also talking to the operator that was in the hole on the CB radio. Pretty soon he wanted to get out of the dozer, but I told him the safest thing for him to do was stay put. We was going to get him, wasn't going to take long, just be patient. They probably had pushed 30 minutes and they got the coal down low enough in front of the blade that we asked Hosey to stop and let Johnny Beach turn to 45 right beside the dozer where it would slough off of the dozer itself. And he probably pushed another 15 minutes doing that. And when it got down, it looked like it was going to be low enough that we could get down and clean the dozer off, get Mike out. I took off back down the stacker, ran to the bottom and Dennis Nolan was on another D9. And I asked Dave to have Dennis come off the pile on that D9 and wrap me up there. I thought Mike had kicked the door when I opened it to help me get it open. But what had happened, though, I jerked the door so hard it hit me in the face and knocked me off. I went off the dozer backwards about eight feet in the coal pile. But when Mike, as soon as he got down, his knees was real weak and mine was too. I told him that I didn't ever think I would think he was beautiful but when he came down off that pile, I told him he was beautiful. And he told me I was, too. When they were taking the coal away, every time one of the dozers got pretty close or went across the coal pile it seemed like you could fill every track, every cleat on that track turn and shake the dozer when it would go by you. I did activate myself rescuer that night and I did use it while I was in that dozer. It took about 45 minutes an hour to get me out. That might be something they needed to check in. They needed to have two on there because the coal pile had been any different than what it was. It took longer to have gotten me out. I was able to keep the dome light on the entire time I was covered up but I also had the flashlight out. I don't guess it was bright enough. I wasn't able to see inside so I had both of them on. The safety glass that the company had employed on it, none of it had broke. I felt like that made a major part of safe and Mike's life or anyone else that had been in the dozer. The way the coal was end up and packed on the doors. For us to see to bring the dozer down we cranked it up and drove it down. It was runnable. Thinking about, you know, what's today the last time I was ever going to see my family or what I'm able to get out to see my family again. When something like this happens to you you look at life in a different way. Operating a dozer on a stockpile is a dangerous occupation. As a safety precaution the company had installed high tensile strength impact resistant glass in the dozers as well as a transmitter that sounds an alarm to alert the control center operator to manually switch off the draw off tunnel feeders and bells. Dozer cabs were provided with radio communications, a self-contained self-rescuer and a flashlight. A system of easily visible markers should be suspended over the tunnel feeders to indicate their location. Lights or signal systems that identify which feeders are operating should be installed. Equipment operators should wear their seatbelts at all times and keep their doors and windows closed.