By Doug Cunningham

The West Virginia coal mine where the thirteen miners were trapped had two and a half times the national average of safety violations, including 18 "serious and substantial" violations likely to cause injury to miners. Phil Smith, Communications Director with the United Mine Workers of America, says union rescue teams and safety experts are at the scene…

[Phil Smith 1]: "The UMWA has offered all of its resources that we can bring to bear to help both get these trapped miners out, if we indeed can do that, and support the families. To that end, the fine rescue teams that are advancing into the mines are UMWA mine rescue teams from three of the surrounding mines there that are members of the UMWA . Our Director of Occupational Health and Safety is on site at the mine providing whatever assistance he can. Certainly our prayers and our hopes are with the families."

Smith says mine safety and safety enforcement needs to be improved and he says while this mine was not a union facility, miners at unionized mines have an extra layer of safety protection on the job.

[Smith 2] "Let's say you're a miner and you see something that looks to be a safety violation and you go to your foreman and you look this is a problem let's get if fixed. If the foreman says no, I think it's OK then as a UMWA miner you've got a local union safety committeeman there to back you up. And you can go to him and say look we've got a problem and he can take that forward, up to and including federal and state mining inspectors to come in."