A worker has died in an accident at the Revelation Energy operated Revelation S7 Mine near Mount Hope in Fayette County, West Virginia. Thurman Watts, 34, of Harts in Lincoln County, was driving a bulldozer when it went over the side of the open pit at about 1.00 am local time on Friday 29 December 2017. The cause of the incident is being investigated by the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training.
The approximate location of the S7 Surface Mine. Google Maps.
This is the eighth death in the mining industry in West Virginia this year, and the fifteenth in the US. This is up from 2016, when there were only eight mining fatalities in the US, and marks the worst year in the West Virginian mining industry since 2010, when there were 35 fatalities in the state, 29 of them in a single incident, an underground explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh County. There has been a steady decline in mining accidents in the US over the past decade, which has generally been ascribed to a tightening of mining regulations by the Obama Government. The Trump administration has promised to undo many of these regulations, but has not yet done so, preventing a direct correlation between the change in administrations and the rise in fatalities in the US mining industry.
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