The most important aspect of the MINER Act is providing reliable communication for miners before and after tragic accidents. Reliable communication has always been a challenge in underground mines due to changing topologies and harsh environment. In addition, disasters disable electricity and communications cables, block tunnels and cause fire. These may damage the communication infrastructure ...

Federal regulations require that refuge alternatives (RAs) be located within 305 m (1,000 ft) of the working face and spaced at one-hour travel distances in the outby area in underground coal mines, in the event that miners cannot escape during a disaster. The Mine Safety and Health Administration mandates that RAs provide safe shelter and livable conditions for a minimum of 96 hours while main...

The prerequisite of maintaining an efficient and safe mining operation is the proper design of a mine by considering all aspects. The first step in a coal mine design is a realistic geometrical modelling of the coal seam(s). The structural features such as faults and folding must be reliably implemented in 3D seam models. Upon having a consistent seam model, the attributes such as calorific val...

Three local seismic systems were installed by August 2015 in deep underground mines in Sweden – Zinkgruvan Mine (Lundin Mining AB), Garpenberg Mine (Boliden AB), and Kiirunavaara Mine (LKAB) as part of a project for developing new methods for Evaluating the Rock Support Performance (ERSP, Vinnova). The areas were chosen within the most probable volumes where large rockbursts can be expected. Th...

The RFID-based positioning equipment, which is widely used in mine operation such as coal mine, has the advantages of low cost and maturity. It can locate human effectively so that it could improve the production safety situation and provide guarantee for disaster prevention and relief. However, the traditional RFID technology has the drawbacks of small monitoring range and no orientation which...

On March 11, 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred off the coast of Sanriku, Japan. It is important to build a sustainable society through the reconstruction process rather than simply restoring the infrastructure. To compare the goals of reconstruction plans of quake-stricken municipalities, Japanese language morphological analysis was performed by using text mining techniques. Freque...

AIMS To assess the impact of the Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster on daily diabetes practice and to determine the feasibility of controlling type 2 diabetes mellitus in an outpatient department. METHODS We retrospectively reviewed the data on disaster-affected patients with type 2 diabetes who periodically attended outpatient department of Soma Central Hospital. There were 767 patients wi...

In early decades, rescue operation in coal mine was treated as a dangerous task. After explosions occur, when rescue workers get into the tunnel without environment conditional awareness, they are facing heavy damages due to consecutive explosions [1]. This bring the necessity to detect the status of the mine environment details such as toxic gases, high temperatures through wireless sensors to...