On the morning of January 2, 2006 — the first shift after the New Year holiday — two crews of miners rode into the Sago Mine, a coal mine near Buckhannon in Upshur County, West Virginia, operated by the Wolf Run Mining Company, part of the International Coal Group. At 6:26 a.m., methane that had gathered in a sealed-off worked-out section of the mine, the Old 2nd Left, exploded with a force that registered on seismic instruments, blowing out the seals meant to isolate it.
One crew of fourteen men escaped. Thirteen men, travelling ahead of them, were cut off behind the blast in air filling with carbon monoxide. Trained for exactly this emergency, they hung a barricade curtain and waited. Rescue teams, held back for hours by dangerous gas and the risk of a second explosion, fought their way some two miles into the mine. Forty-one hours after the blast, in the early hours of January 4, they reached the thirteen: twelve had died of carbon monoxide poisoning. One man, 26-year-old Randal McCloy Jr., was still alive; after months of treatment he recovered most of his health, the disaster’s sole survivor.
The wait at the surface produced the disaster’s bitterest episode. Late on January 3, a garbled report from the rescue effort — that twelve of the thirteen had been found alive — reached the families gathered in a nearby church and was broadcast around the world, before being corrected some three hours later with the truth: twelve dead, one survivor. The error became a lasting part of the Sago story, and of the argument for reforming how mine emergencies are communicated.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration’s report of investigation, delivered in May 2007, concluded that lightning was the most likely ignition source: studies by Sandia National Laboratories showed that energy from a lightning strike near the mine — three strikes were recorded that morning — could travel through the ground and induce an arc on an abandoned pump cable inside the sealed area, igniting the methane there. The blast had driven pressures above 93 pounds per square inch against seals built to a standard of only 20. MSHA cited the company for 149 violations found during the investigation, but concluded that none of them caused or contributed to the deaths.
Sago drove the first major reform of American mine law in a generation. The MINER Act of 2006, signed that June, required emergency response plans, more and better-equipped rescue teams, improved underground communications and tracking, and sharply higher penalties; seal standards were rewritten so that sealed areas must now withstand pressures of the kind that destroyed Sago’s. The Act stands as the disaster’s monument in law.