The body of a West Virginia miner went missing in a flood at coal mine on Saturday 8 November 2025 has been recovered, according to rescue workers. Steve Lipscomb, 42, a foreman at the Rolling Thunder Mine in Nicholas County was last seen helping workers to escape following an inrush at the mine, about a kilometre below ground. Since this time rescue workers have been working round the clock, pumping an average of 1.4 million litres out of the mine every hour, but on several occasions encountering new packages of water, hampering efforts to reach the area where Lipscomb went missing. His body was finally recovered on Thursday 13 November.
Floods and inrushes typically occur when miners accidentally break through into pockets of water and gas trapped within rocks. Since such buried waters are often under high pressure due to the weight of rocks above them, they tend to escape into the mine rapidly, and on occasion explosively, leading to a highly dangerous situation in which miners are often rapidly overwhelmed. Such inrushes can also occur when miners encounter flooded disused mineworkings, a danger in areas where mining has occurred for a long time but good records have not been kept.
The Rolling Thunder Mine, which is operated by Tennessee-based Alpha Metallurgical Resources, is located close to a former coal mine, which was in operation in the 1930s and 40s, and targets the Eagle Coal Seam, which runs below the drainage of Twenty Mile Creek, following the path of this waterway. Despite this, it is unclear what steps the mine's owners took to identify any hydrological risks at the site. A report produced by consulting firm Marshall Miller & Associates in February 2024 suggested that the area had been sufficiently explored in the past for there to be 'no significant hydrologic concerns'. However, this report is primarily economic in focus, and also reports that hydrologic testing should be undertaken as part of the mine permitting process.
The Rolling Thunder Mine is one of eleven deep pit mines operated by Alpha Metallurgical Resources in West Virginia. The company also operated four surface mines in the state, and three underground mines and one surface mine in Virginia. This is the third death at an Alpha Metallurgical Resources facility in West Virginia this year, with previous incidents having occurred at the Marfork Coal Processing Facility and the Black Eagle Mine.
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