Coal Mining in the US
DOUG JOHNSON: Our listener question this week comes from Mongolia. Tsogt Sharav has been listening to VOA Special English since two thousand four and wants to know more about coal mining in the United States.
The United States produces about half of its electric power from coal. America is the second-largest producer of coal after China. Coal is mined in half the states, but Wyoming mines the most, followed by West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania.
The United States gets about two-thirds of its coal from surface mining rather than underground mining. Surface mining is the name for different methods that are used to remove coal that is less than sixty meters underground.
The United States has about eighty-seven thousand coal miners. The jobs pay well, especially for the poor communities where mines are often located. But the job can also be dangerous.
The government says more than one hundred thousand miners were killed between nineteen hundred and last year. Coal mining deaths have decreased sharply. But last year forty-eight miners were killed. Twenty-nine of them died in an explosion at an underground mine in West Virginia on April fifth, twenty-ten. It was the deadliest coal mining disaster in the United States in forty years.
A memorial at the entrance to Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia one year after the April 2010 explosion that killed 29 men
最新
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25