By Mike Tony
Charleston Gazette-Mail
Friday marks 20 years since an explosion at the Sago Mine in Upshur County left 12 coal miners dead after trapping 13.
The disaster prompted the nation’s most recent major mine safety law in 2006.
The law, the bipartisan MINER (Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response) Act established a program to award competitive grants to nonprofits for education and training to better identify and prevent unsafe working conditions in and around mines.
The program, the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration’s Brookwood-Sago Mine Safety Grant program, was named in remembrance of the disaster at Wolf Run Mining Company’s Sago Mine near Tallmansville and two explosions that left 13 miners dead at a coal mine in Brookwood, Alabama in 2001.
Since 2015, more than $7.5 million across 75 grant selections have been awarded through the program, including more than $1.2 million to West Virginia recipients — one-sixth of all funding approved.
The funding has been awarded to West Virginia recipients for emergency prevention and preparedness training to coal miners and coal mine operators.
Mine emergency preparedness and prevention loom especially large in West Virginia, whose six fatal mine incidents in 2025 were more than any other state experienced in the year, followed by Texas with four, according to MSHA records.
But the Brookwood-Sago Mine Safety Grant program is on the chopping block under the Trump administration, jeopardizing an enduring legacy of the Sago Mine disaster 20 years later.
Under President Donald Trump, MSHA has proposed eliminating the grant program.
MSHA proposed in its congressional budget justification for fiscal year 2026 that the program should be eliminated “due to administrative inefficiency and insufficient evidence of success.”
Read the rest of the story at the Charleston Gazette-Mail