April 5, 2010, an explosion once again rocked the hills of West Virginia. Not due to terrorist attacks or military influence, this was caused deep underground by methane gas.

   Montcoal, Raleigh County West Virginia, location of Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Coal Mine exploded at 3:30 pm (?) killing at least 25 of it's underground coal miners.

   Labeled as the worst mining disaster since 1984, the Upper Big Branch Mine received many citations by federal and state mine inspectors, including 57 infractions in the month of March 2010 alone. Many of the citations were reported as failure to develop and follow an acceptable ventilation plan.

    The federal records catalog the problems at the Upper Big Branch mine, operated by the Performance Coal Company. They show the company was fighting manu of the steepest fines, or simply refusing to pay them. Another Massey subsidiary agreed to pay $4.2 million in criminal and civil fines last year and admitted to willfully violating mandatory safety standards that led to the deaths of two Logan County miners. The fine was the largest penalty in the history of the coal industry.

     An agonizing four-day wait came to a tragic end early Saturday morning, April 10, 2010 when rescue workers failed to find any survivors in an underground mine after a huge explosion earlier this week.
   Rescue efforts had been an agonizing 100-hour exercise in frustration as the teams repeatedly inched their way through tangled debris and fallen rock only to have to withdraw because of explosively high levels of methane and carbon monoxide.

   The death toll caused by the April 5th explosion was the highest in an American mine since a 1970 explosion killed 38 at Finley Coal Company, in Hyden, Ky. The blast at Upper Big Branch comes four years after a pair of other West Virginia mine disasters — an explosion that killed 12 miners at the Sago mine and a fire that killed two at the Aracoma Alma coal mine. 
   Rescue workers described the blast as overwhelming — like nothing they had ever witnessed. Rail lines were twisted like pretzels, they said. Mining machines were blown to pieces. The conditions underground were such a mess after the explosion that is was only late Friday that rescuers realized that they had walked past the bodies of the four missing miners on the first day without seeing, a federal mine safety official had said.