 Mine rescue. We plan for it. We train for it. We practice it. We even have contests to see what team can solve the problem the best and the fastest. But do we do enough? Are we truly prepared? Are we ready if a mine disaster happens? That's why we stage this underground mock disaster in a real environment. So here are the characteristics of the simulated mine disaster. An explosion has been reported. Smoke is coming out of the returns. Ventilation controls are destroyed. 16 miners are unaccounted for. And the mine is located in a remote area. District 4 want to be involved in a mock disaster to try to get as many people involved in the situation that would should an actual emergency arise. We wanted to test the our ability to respond to an emergency and do that in conjunction with conditions that simulated as much as we possibly could. Get the rescue teams involved in some underground work as opposed to working in mine contest type atmosphere. The groups we were concerned with were the mine operators, the state of West Virginia and EMSHA and miners representatives, UMWA, whatever, you know, the representative representation is and that we could all work together and command center that everybody should or ever become a need would know would be familiar with what to do. And like I say, we could expose any faults or what that we might have. When we first started that morning and we got the phone calling and everything started. It was very hectic for about two hours. We got 16 people underground to start a cattle farm. We got smoke coming out of the town. And for at least a little while starting out, you deal with who's in charge and who's going to take charge here. Can I request something? When we do a briefing, I'd just like for the four of us to be on the news and be back. Everything that goes on here, we'll go through that command center. The fourth thing we've got to make sure is that they They had a command post for the high officials and then they would inform the other command post what they were going to do. So they was actually going through four chains of command. The main command post, the command post, fresh air base and then to the teams. We would like to do, to start a mine rescue team underground to this point, to those players that are here, to establish a fresh air base. We would like to take two more teams underground to the fresh air base and begin another team exploring in this direction. These guys have to pay a huge amount of money to bring you guys the best things together. There's a lot of confusion at the start, but after about an hour, the teams and the command center and everybody they start to get a little more serious about it. And then they start working the problem. One of the problems of the disaster was my mine phone went dead. So in trying to find another mine phone, get it hooked up and get the communications established again, threw me off. Communication, once we got in by the fresh air base and what we told our briefing officer and he reported to the command center and we wanted to do something. It just seemed like it took too long to get the information from outside back to us permission to do something. We were down at the mine office that morning and we were waiting there to be called up, our team to be called up. And while we were there, there was state troopers went by, there was ambulances went by, there was fire trucks went by. A lot of the guys had never seen this before, been around it. They really thought that something had really happened. This was a real good training exercise for everybody involved, especially the teams, because of the difference in the environment that we were working in. Normally a mine rescue contest is pretty much limited to three or four entries, three or four cross cuts. Here we had seven or eight entries, 15, 20, 30, 40 cross cuts to explore. And the things that teams would normally do in a contest that might take them 30 seconds might take four or five minutes in the actual situation. Out here on the field you can look across one heading of sea walks in another heading, or you can look through a cross cut and see what's at the end of that cross cut. Underground in that mock disaster you can't do that. The difference between this mock disaster we've done in a mine rescue contest is roles are written for a mine rescue contest that can't apply when you're actually exploring underground. You try to apply your mine rescue roles to the disaster underground, but you can't use those roles that you use in competition underground. There's just too much difference. The people outside making decisions seems like it takes an eternity. 15, 20, 30 minutes to relay back an okay to do something or no do something else. And the mine rescue teams are trained to do it and generally do it in two, three minutes, max. We had to wait on permission to come from the command center. Well we really ever took into perspective all the things they have to figure on at the command center. We knew what we wanted to do and we really didn't like having to wait for permission from the command center to do it, but you have to wait for their permission to do it. I don't know. The guys that has never been through this has just done real because it's completely different from any competition or anything else. These two situations, the mock disaster that we had in the normal mine rescue contest that we do, we're just about opposite ends of the scale. In the mine rescue contest every second counts you have to try to make real quick decisions and keep moving along real fast. In this type of exercise, slow and steady was what we wanted. Being careful that you were sure that you had all the right information, all the possible information that you could get, and then make your decision and go about your work in a more steady pace so that you didn't overlook anything, didn't take any chances. Do you have rooms set aside? We have rooms set aside at the local church down here for the families. We're starting to gather media people. We're setting up a media room at the main office down below. I was assigned then to handle the mock media, whose job it was to be treated as we would actually treat the media in an emergency, which meant we had to have a press room, we had to have badges, we had to have people signed in, we had to take care of their training, and any other needs that they might have during the day such as phone service. The one problem we did have was the mock media decided they wanted to really be media and they were digging for the story. And they didn't want to stay in the press room, they wanted to go run around on the property, look for ways in, check with the guards, try to get through the gates. No one's coming up on this hill unless it comes through me. We've got the gates secured. I understand at this time we're starting to have a lot of people gather down below. Of course we also had a family center set up and we had other people who were in charge to give the information to the families. So we had to coordinate any announcement we made with them to make sure families were notified ahead of time to things that we were finding out from the mind. Okay, the families located at the Grander Freewheel Baptist Church. You can never give the family information fast enough, I found. Even though we may have been given it to them on like a 30 minute schedule, they wanted it continuous. We have sit down and formulated plans on how to deal with the family, how to deal with the news media, things of this nature. I think that's primarily one or two areas that we saw we maybe need the most work in. I don't think you can probably have enough people from your organization there to deal with the family members. I think we learned as far as the issue goes that we have different field offices and we very seldom get a chance to work together as one unit. And I think this taught us that we need to do more of that because we shouldn't be perfect strangers. And I think these drills give us certainly a valuable place for that process to evolve and everyone to learn their roles in exactly how we co-mingle in this situation. You know we found out some things that we've got to work out. We had some confusion at the fresh air base and getting our information from us to the briefing officer, to the command center, back to the briefing officer and back to us. So you know we're going to try to work on some kind of communication system where we can talk to the briefing officer and directly to the command center to cut down the confusion. The mind phone coming to the surface, that should have had a loudspeaker on it or some type of means of communicating to the room. When you're trying to communicate through one man and then him turn around and communicate to everyone else, you know there's bound to be a breakdown here and there's certainly a time to lay in that. We had a map and they had a map and they were relaying information off of their map back onto our map. And anytime you're transferring information and going through a third party like that, there's always a possibility of losing information or not receiving all the information. I think if the company would have set one official in place in the command center and that individual stayed there and that established their communication via telephone or however they wanted to do that with the mind formance office. When that information flowed in, the president of the company, the chief official for EMSHA and the chief official for the state and labor could have heard the information in unison. You need to have the teams that haven't been exposed to this type of situation there and hands on. Yeah, if anything, maybe to get away from the contest rules a little more. Several of the teams worked at real similar to like they were working in an actual contest. They seemed like they were worried about getting discounts for violations instead of taking care of the task at hand. We need to be more careful to give more complete information in the outlining of the incident, the layout of the incident so that people will know what to expect. One of the things that I noticed dealing with the press is that as much as possible, everything we do should be within our company boundaries. And I say that by like health net making their flights. If at all possible health net should land in a secure area. We landed them there beside of where we were keeping the press and you can imagine there was no way to keep the press back. So they're out there trying to take videos and pictures of people going between ambulances and health net helicopter. And had this been an actual emergency, I'm sure that the community would have been able to get too close to this area. The main thing that I think that everybody learned was that we can work together as all different agencies. The enforcement agencies, companies, the miners' reps, we all can come together in a time of need like this. It was an excellent exercise, a training exercise for I'm sure everyone involved from the mine rescue teams to the ancient state officials and our company officials. I'm sure all of us learned a great deal out of it. The mine rescue teams that I spoke with and we have a mine rescue team on site, they said this was a lot better than the mine rescue team contest that they're involved in because it's more realistic in what they do in counter-underground situations. They found out a lot of things about their apparatus and the way they worked underground and it really was beneficial to everyone. Here there's competitions between the teams. When you get to that mock disaster or real disaster, all the teams are won. I mean, you have no competitors in it. I mean, everybody works together. Well, my opinion is the best exercise I've been involved in in the 14 years I've been with mine rescue. And we did expose a few problems in the company's emergency plan where I think we found a couple N.R.s. And these will be addressed and changed in the future, I'm sure. But everybody, the whole team enjoyed it. And, you know, we worked as a team. The good thing about it was is when we were at the fresh air base, we could hear coal rivers' communications. So we took our map that they gave us and we worked along with them. We knew what they were doing before we went. It allowed us the opportunity to check our procedures, to see whether they work, they don't work. Where are some of the difficult areas that we maybe need to look at again? I think it was good for AMPSHA. It was a big training tool for them to be able to learn how to organize themselves in this situation. The state, I think everybody concerned gained a great deal of experience and are going to be a much better prepared to step into this situation if it does really occur. And as far as this exercise, by far I think every district ought to have one of them somewhere at least a year. To have to go through this, and for the teams, I think it was particularly beneficial for them, particularly teams that have never been to a situation like this, because at least now, if they do get caught, they have some type of feeling of what they're about to step into. I think it's going to make teams more ready. I think we should have something like this every year. I mean, to me, all mine rescue teams should be involved and it's not just the ones that want the kind. If they're going to be a mine rescue team, they need to be involved. They need to see what's going to happen. The teams got a real education. I talked to a few of them after it was over with and that was their comment was, this is different. You know, you've got to back out and look at it as a large coal mine, not a little three-entry system like we conduct our contests in. All the people involved in it gained a lot of knowledge, gained a lot of experience that otherwise they would not be subject to. It showed the true meaning of what EMSHA is all about and what the companies are trying to do and how the union people are involved in this. It was really good for everyone. It makes sure that we are prepared in case something ever does happen of this nature.