Wyo miners not immune to tragedy

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More than 5,000 men and women go to work at mines in Wyoming so they can provide for their families. And they share the sorrow felt in Utah after the tragic events at the Crandall Canyon mine.

Though most of Wyoming's miners do not go underground, none are immune to the scales of tragedy experienced both in Utah and at the Sago mine in West Virginia last year.

The Powder River Basin's famously thick (more than 50 feet) low-sulfur coal lies only hundreds of feet deep in Campbell County. When large-scale, open-pit strip mining began in the 1970s, mine engineers enjoyed a 2 to 1 strip ratio. That means mines were designed to remove two units of overburden to recover one unit of coal.

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