25-year old coal miner Preston Pollard was crushed to death by a heavy equipment failure at the Combs Branch Mine in Perry County, Kentucky, in the morning on May 20.
Pollard was performing maintenance under a Caterpillar 992-G loader when the counterweight of a front-end loader fell on him, killing him almost instantly. The Kentucky Division of Mine Safety is leading the investigation into what caused the equipment to fail.
Prior to his death, Pollard was a contract miner for Boyd Caterpillar with 6 years of mining experience and had worked at the Combs Branch Mine for one year, according to a Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) report. Combs Branch Mine is owned by Pine Branch Mining LLC, a subsidiary of Blackhawk Mining. According to a violations report from the MSHA, Combs Branch Mine has had over 300 citations issued since 2011, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties.
Pollard is the twelfth mine worker nationwide to be killed on the job this year, according to MSHA’s Fatality Reports. Another coal miner was killed the day before in Wind Ridge, Pennsylvania, and another died the following day in Las Vegas, Nevada. Federal mine safety and health data show that dozens of miners are killed on the job each year nationwide, with tens of thousands of safety citations issued across over 12,000 mines in the United States.
Pollard’s death follows the Trump administration’s push to increase coal production by slashing regulations and gutting the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which suffered a reduction from 1000 to 125 staff due to the cuts, as The Worker has previously reported. Some of those cuts were reversed last year. NIOSH tests for black lung, develops and screens safety equipment for miners and other workers, and investigates industrial hazards, among other duties.
In addition to workplace fatalities, more than 10 percent of US coal miners with 25 or more years of experience have Coal Workers’ Pneumoconiosis (CWP), black lung disease, according to a 2018 National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health report. This marks the highest rate of the disease recorded in roughly two decades, affecting 20.6% of long-tenured miners in central Appalachia (Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia).
Coal miners in the US are also suffering increasing rates of the lung disease silicosis, which is even spreading among younger coal miners, according to a New York Times report. Silicosis results from inhaling silica dust and causes severe lung scarring, progressive massive fibrosis, breathlessness, respiratory failure, and premature death. The rise of silicosis among Appalachian miners is due to the blasting and cutting of silica-rich rock required to penetrate deeper into layers of rock, which is used to increase coal production in mines where more easily accessible coal deposits have already been exhausted.
On a Facebook memorial post honoring Pollard, community members said, “He enjoyed hunting and fixing things. Preston was known for making people laugh and telling corny jokes. His personality was larger than life. When Preston entered a room, everyone knew it. He treasured being an Uncle ‘Bub’, he was loved by his family and many friends dearly.”
Image: Preston Pollard. Credit: Maggard Funeral Homes.
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