AKRON, Ohio (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Coal miners provide the raw material for nearly half of America's power. Mining is a necessity, but it's a dangerous job. Every year, 40 people in the United States die trapped in a mine, and China alone reported almost 4,000 coal mining deaths in 2007. New technology is going underground to help keep track of miners and save lives.
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The news spread fast in the small town of Sago, West Virginia. After a search that spanned two miles and lasted 41 hours, one survivor and 12 bodies were pulled from the rubble of the collapsed mine. Russel Breeding, Chief Technology Officer at InSet Systems in Akron, Ohio, watched the tragedy unfold. He knows what it's like to have a dangerous job. He spent several years on fast attack submarines.
"It's a very bad feeling, and you feel very trapped and very alone and there's no help," Breeding told Ivanhoe.
Based on military navigational systems he used in the Navy, Breeding and his team of engineers developed a wireless radio network that provides real-time locations of miners underground.
"It can tell you how fast they're going, what direction they're going, and it can represent on a map as well," Mike Millam, Chief Engineer at InSet Systems, told Ivanhoe.h
Miners wear cell-phoned sized transmitters while radio transceivers bolted into the mine's roof -- and covered with bullet-proof plastic -- pick up the transmitters' signal and relay the positions of miners to an above-ground computer, which displays them on a map of the mine.
"We can locate that miner within a 9-foot circle," Breeding said.
Crews can then drill a hole and get trapped miners what they need.
"They can get them air, they can get them communication devices and they can get them water and food through that hole as well," Breeding said.
After another tragedy hit Utah that killed six miners underground, safety regulations changed. By June 2009, all 700 U.S. mines must have wireless underground tracking and communication.
"Our mission is to be able to say our system helped a miner go home to his family," Jay Breeding, Chief Operating Office at InSet Systems, told Ivanhoe.
Right now, many miners use radiofrequency identification tracking systems similar to barcode scanners that read and record their locations, but it only tracks them as they walk past the scanners -- which could be placed several hundred yards apart.
The American Industrial Hygiene Association and the American Society of Civil Engineers contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.
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Coal miners provide the raw material for nearly half of America's power. Mining is a necessity, but it's a dangerous job. Every year, 40 people in the United States die trapped in a mine, and China alone reported almost 4,000 coal mining deaths in 2007.
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