The Scoop

Ken Ward Jr. of the Charleston Gazette, who pretty much owns the mine safety beat, has a story showing that “mine disasters like Sago get headlines. But far more coal miners die … alone, crushed by heavy equipment, ground up by runaway machinery, buried beneath collapsed mine roofs … Only 13 percent of the more than 100,000 coal miners killed in the United States in the last 100 years have died in mine disasters, which regulators define as accidents causing five or more deaths.” The story is the first in a series resulting from Ward’s research as an Alicia Patterson fellow.