Free Republic

A new explosion has rocked a coalmine in Vorkuta, northern Russia, killing five rescuers and one miner. The blast occurred during efforts to rescue workers trapped underground after the first blast at the mine earlier this week. ... The Emergencies Ministry has officially confirmed that none of the 26 miners whom the rescuers were trying to save from the first blast had survived. That brings the total death toll from the two explosions to 36 people. The first blast happened on Thursday. Four people were killed immediately and the rescue operation for those trapped started. Coalmine rescuers were operating at...

The North Fork Valley is now down to one operating coal mine after Friday’s announcement that the Bowie No. 2 Mine near Paonia is being idled. Kentucky-based Bowie Resource Partners said in a news release that the action is occurring “as a result of continued market deterioration.” “The mine will remain idle while the market for Bowie No. 2 coal is evaluated,” the company said. The mine employs 108 full-time employees and one contractor. Bowie said it expects that 68 positions will be eliminated ... Just a few years ago, Bowie No. 2 employed more than 300 miners ... Another...

Groups question keeping Four Corners Power Plant open for 25 more years. A coalition of environmental groups has filed a notice of intent to sue the Office of Surface Mining, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and others over a July decision to allow the Four Corners Power Plant to operate through 2041. A coalition of environmental groups announced earlier this week its intent to take legal action against several federal agencies for extending operations at the Four Corners Power Plant and Navajo Mine just outside Farmington. On Dec. 21, San Juan Citizen Alliance, among other regional and national conservation groups,...

Judge stalls approved Montana coal mine expansion in 2nd successful suit citing climate change. The U.S. Interior Department should not have approved the expansion of a southeastern Montana coal mine without taking a closer look at its effect on the environment, a federal judge said about a lawsuit arguing the government ignored coal's contributions to climate change. Environmental groups sued the Interior Department after it approved an expansion of the Spring Creek Coal mine in 2012. The case marks the second time conservationists have used worries over climate change to successfully challenge approval of a coal mine after it had...

Bowie Resource Partners plans to lay off nearly 100 people at its Bowie #2 Mine near Paonia in the latest setback to coal employment in the North Fork Valley. The company said Tuesday that it anticipates laying off 78 workers and 19 contractors from the mine, where 181 full-time employees and 19 contractors work now. ... it is continuing to evaluate the market for the mine’s coal after losing a contract to sell to the Tennessee Valley Authority a year ago. The loss of that contract caused Bowie to eliminate about 150 jobs at that time. Bowie operates three underground...

A second northwestern Colorado coal mine will undergo a review of the mine's environmental impact following an agreement reached by the federal government, the mine's owners and WildEarth Guardians.. The agreement between the U.S. Department of Interior’s Office of Surface Mining (OSM), Trapper Mining Inc. and WildEarth Guardians was filed Thursday with the U.S. District Court in Denver. The agreement gives the federal government until the end of April to complete a new review of the mine’s operations. ... Our miners must be allowed to keep working to supply Craig Station with the coal that’s needed to supply the grid...

A Colorado coal mine slated for closure due to a technicality has gotten a reprieve from the federal government in a move that could save hundreds of jobs. The Colowyo coal mine, which has provided hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars to the economy of the city of Craig and the northwestern region of the state since 1977 was in danger of being closed because a renewal permit drafted eight years ago did not take into account the mine's impact on climate change. An environmental group sued in a bid to invalidate the permit. A court-ordered review by the...

Industry blasts suggestion as harmful to the country. A conservation group that has succeeded in dealing recent legal setbacks to western Colorado coal mines called Thursday for a phase-out of federal coal leasing to help combat climate change. “It’s time for the Interior Department to shut it down,” Jeremy Nichols, Climate and Energy Program director for WildEarth Guardians, said in a news release. The group outlined a plan for ending the federal coal program over 10 to 25 years through a moratorium on leasing publicly owned coal, retiring existing leases that aren’t producing, honestly reporting the climate impacts of the...

North Koreans working in Sarawak's coal mines legally Monday, November 24, 2014 - 10:26 The Star/Asia News Network SARAWAK, MALAYSIA - Deputy Home Minister Datuk Seri Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar said the North Koreans were brought into Sarawak to work via a special arrangement between the Sarawak and North Korean governments. "Only Sarawak has North Korean workers (in Malaysia). This is not (allowed) in the peninsular,'' he said when commenting on the presence of dozens of North Koreans at a coal mine in the Sri Aman division. Besides the 46 North Koreans, the mine's 119 foreign workers were from Myanmar...

Sen.-elect Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) pledged on “Fox News Sunday” to be “extremely aggressive” in trying to rollback some regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency. “Extremely aggressive,” she said when asked how aggressive she would be in the Senate in trying to rollback some of the EPA regulations. “That is my promise to West Virginia. We have lost over the last two years, 5,000 jobs. Those are just coal jobs. “We had several thousand other miners who are what are called a warn notice, meaning they're potentially going to be losing their jobs. That doesn't even count the transportation job,...

Bowie Resource Partners says it has eliminated 150 jobs at the Bowie #2 coal mine near Paonia. ... Last year the shutdown of another mine in the region caused nearly 300 people to lose their jobs. That coal mine is in Somerset. In the release, Bowie says it will provide the 150 laid off workers with 60 days of wages and benefits.

121 people will be out of a job after Alpha Natural Resources closes one of its mines. Alpha told News 5 WCYB the Cherokee Mine near Haysi, Virginia is at the end of its life. 66 miners will be officially laid off in 60 days. 55 others will continue to work, removing equipment and infrastructure and buttoning up the mine, which should take until September. The mine opened in 1997 and became part of Dickenson-Russell Coal Company and Alpha in 2002. The company says the mine closure is a result of continued adverse market conditions and the high cost of...

After 50 years, fire still burns under Pa. town (A motorist in 2004 drives among the smoldering remains of land near Route 61 in Centralia, Pa. AP file photo) Fifty years ago Sunday, a fire at the town dump ignited an exposed coal seam, setting off a chain of events that eventually led to the demolition of nearly every building in Centralia — a whole community of 1,400 simply gone. All these decades later, the Centralia fire still burns. It also maintains its grip on the popular imagination, drawing visitors from around the world who come to gawk at twisted,...

Found in a Colombian coal mine, a vertebra from a 45-foot (14-meter) Titanoboa cerrejones dwarfs a similar bone from a 17-foot (5.2-meter) anaconda--currently the world's biggest, if not longest, snake species. (View anaconda pictures and facts.) The ancient snake's giant size suggests that mean year-round temperatures in the tropics were several degrees warmer than they are today, according to a study that analyzed the relationships among a snake's body size, its metabolism, and the outside temperature. "We were able to use the snake, if you will, as a giant fossil thermometer," said biologist Jason Head, lead author of the new...

Rainforest similar to ours flourished at 3-5° hotterFossil boffins say that dense triple-canopy rainforests, home among other things to gigantic one-tonne boa constrictors, flourished millions of years ago in temperatures 3-5°C warmer than those seen today - as hot as some of the more dire global-warming projections.The new fossil evidence comes from the Cerrejón coal mine in Colombia, previously the location where the remains of the gigantic 40-foot Titanoboa cerrejonensis were discovered. The snake's discoverers attracted flak from global-warming worriers at the time for saying that the cold-blooded creature would only have been able to survive in jungles a good...

NEW YORK — Never mind the 40-foot snake that menaced Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 movie "Anaconda." Not even Hollywood could match a new discovery from the ancient world. Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds. "This thing weighs more than a bison and is longer than a city bus," enthused snake expert Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was familiar with the find. "It could easily eat something the size of a cow. A human...

After the extinction of the dinosaurs 65m years ago, new giants evolved to terrorise life on Earth: snakes as long as a bus and as wide as a door. On Thursday an international scientific team will announce in the journal Nature the discovery of Titanoboa, the largest snake that has ever lived. Its fossils were found in the Cerrejen coal mines of Colombia. Titanoboa was a constrictor like today’s boas and anacondas, preying on crocodiles and giant turtles about 60m years ago in what was then a steamy tropical rainforest. At a conservative estimate it grew 13 metres long and...

The discovery of fossilised remains belonging to the world's largest snake has been reported in Nature journal. Titanoboa was 13m (42ft) long - about the size of a London bus - and lived in the rainforest of north-east Colombia 58-60 million years ago. The snake was so wide it would have reached up to a person's hips, say researchers, and was estimated to have weighed more than a tonne. Green anacondas - the world's heaviest snakes - reach a mere 250kg (550lbs).

A 300-million-year-old forest has been found preserved by volcanic ash, just as the Roman town of Pompeii was. The remarkable discovery was made near a coal mine at the city of Wuda in China, by a University of Pennsylvania scientist and Chinese researchers. The study site is unique as it gives a snapshot of a moment in time. Because volcanic ash covered a large expanse of forest over the course of only a few days, the plants were preserved as they fell, in many cases in the exact locations where they grew. 'It's marvellously preserved,' said Hermann Pfefferkorn, a paleobotanist...

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian scientists said on Tuesday they have discovered a group of fossilized swamp cypress trees preserved from 8 million years ago which could provide clues about the climate of pre-historic times. Instead of petrifying -- turning to stone -- the wood of 16 Taxodium trees was preserved in an open-cast coal mine allowing geologists to study samples as if they were sections cut from a piece of living wood. "The importance of the findings is that so many trees got preserved in their original position in one place," Alfred Dulai, geologist at the Hungarian Natural History Museum...