Longwall Coal Mine Grows Beneath an Alabama Town

As a Longwall Coal Mine Grows Beneath an Alabama Town, Neighbors of an Explosion Victim Feel Undermined and Unheard

No one seems willing to answer citizens’ questions, they say, and public officials don’t seem to care. Will state or federal regulators move to shut down the mine? By Lee Hedgepeth, June 25, 2024

Residents of Oak Grove and Adger are demanding transparency and accountability around the mine expanding under their community. Public officials and regulators have remained largely silent in the face of residents’ complaints about the devastating impacts of longwall mining. Credit: Lee Hedgepeth/Inside Climate News

She was talking to her daughter on the phone when the boom came. Her family was accustomed to the occasional blasts that would sometimes shake their windows, she said. But this was different.

“The only way I can describe it would be a direct hit with a lightning bolt, a massive explosion, and an earthquake, all in one,” she said.

Spicer was the closest neighbor to 78-year-old W.M. Griffice, whose home atop an expanding underground mine exploded on March 8, leading to his death, seriously injuring his grandson and deeply rattling this rural community 20 miles outside Birmingham.

Spicer said that since the explosion she and her family have lived in constant fear of dying themselves.

In the wake of the explosion, she and other residents have been left with serious concerns about the vast mine expanding under their homes, where bladed machines shear coal from expanses more than 1,000 feet wide and a mile long. But no one seems willing or able to answer their questions. Mine representatives and public officials alike have ignored citizens’ calls for transparency and accountability. An Inside Climate News review of regulatory documents confirmed that Griffice’s home was located over the mine’s expanding footprint, carved by the bladed shearers, which create rock ceilings, called “overburden,” that collapses behind the cutting tools, often causing significant subsidence in the land above. The documents outline Crimson Grove Resources, LLC’s lengthy history of safety violations: Federal regulators have fined Crimson Oak Grove Resources 288 times for safety violations at the mine since the explosion, including 100 times for “significant and substantial” violations that the regulator concluded were “reasonably likely to result in a serious injury or illness.”

Still, state regulators have done little to quell residents’ concerns, and both federal and state regulators have made no serious effort to stop mining activity that residents say has devastated their community.

Click here to read the full story about this communities’ concerns.