By JULIEANNE COOPER, Staff Writer
The Inter-Mountain

After nearly two years in the making, Hannah Engineering, a West Virginia corporation in Elkins that provides professional consulting engineering services to public and private enterprises and specializes in civil and mining application, is taking the final strides to improve underground coal mine communication. The engineering firm, along with two other technology companies in Alabama and Pennsylvania, have come up with a system that could someday save lives and make tragedies such as the Sago mine disaster a thing of the past.

According to Hannah Engineering President Dewayne Hannah, “Recently both the state of West Virginia and the federal government passed legislation that mandated wireless communication and wireless tracking systems for underground coal mines. We have developed such a system. As far as we know its the first of its kind.”

Testing has already been conducted on the system, Hannah said, although more will follow from the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) before the system will be placed on the market.

“We recently deployed in the Pittsburgh research mine, the NIOSH (National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health) mine at Bruceton in Pennsylvania,” Hannah said. “We were able to make a wireless call from 1,000 feet underground and called out to our dispatcher unit. There we were patched into the phone system and we were able to make calls throughout the United States, and we did that.”

Hannah said the ability to make that call was a tremendous breakthrough.

“It means that folks that would be underground, if there would be an accident, they would be able to talk directly to a doctor, or an EMT, or something like that, perhaps an ambulance, 911, fire service, police service, whatever they would need to do,” Hannah said. “This particular dispatch unit that we use can also interface with various radio frequencies which means that we could talk to the radios of a given fire department or police. It would be up to the operator of a given coal mine to make sure which frequency in their local area they were using so that we could put the right radio to be plugged into our dispatcher unit. But other than that, we’re good to go.”

Hannah said the engineering company started on the project in the late summer of 2005.

“We were working on a system to deliver data to remote coal mine owners, whether it would be production data for the coal, or delivery data, maybe inventory data, payroll data, those kinds of things that would go from remote coal locations back via either phone lines or Internet to the satellites so that folks could actually tie in to their Internet and with certain key words, they could find out what was going on.”

Hannah said that when legislation was passed following the tragedy at Sago, the companies began streamlining their efforts and “went directly to the wireless commutation and tracking because it was mandated by law and we felt that if we had the wireless communication ... then we would have the backbone for the other data that we had originally been wanting to do anyway. So we had sort of a leap out of the gate, we were already working on the thing.”

Since then, Hannah Engineering has been working to develop the system for wireless communication and tracking.

“On the 13th of December at the Pittsburgh research laboratory we did deploy successfully and were able to talk wirelessly from underground and we were able to track the various nodes that we deployed in the client devices, which would be if a given miner, as required by law now had a phone on him, these phones would be tracked as they associated with the nodes in a given area in the mine so the people could be located and you could see on the computer screen indeed where they were, and it all worked very well. We were quite pleased with our effort.

Engineers then requested use of an experimental mine owned by NIOSH and were given permission to test the system in one located just out of Morgantown.

“We deployed twice up there,” Hannah said. “We didn’t have a dispatcher unit. We weren’t testing the tracking, but we did go in and did the underground communications portion and utilized our access points, the BreadCrumbs system, that’s what they’re called.

Hannah spent two days in the smoke of a coal mine observing the various functions of a mine rescue team.

“They had about five teams on the first day and about five or six teams on the second day,” Hannah said. “So I got to see some of the problems that these gentlemen, and women, are up against,” including smokey conditions and limited use of equipment, among others. “I learned a lot and I’ve actually been able to put that into our product.”

Hannah said it’s been a collaborative effort from several companies in creating this system.

According to a prepared statement from Hannah Engineering, Rajant Corp., a leading provider of portable networking solutions and Sanmina-SCI, a leading Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) provider, “collaborately demonstrated the first ever wireless phone call from inside a coal mine to outside POTS extensions. Calls were made to several different endpoints in multiple states from 1,000 feet underground.”

“The collaborative project was in support of statewide rulings from West Virginia and the new 2006 federal regulations included in the June 2006 Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response (MINER) Act, to improve the preparedness and effectiveness of emergency responders in coal mines,” according to the statement. “Both the state legislators and the MINER Act require mining companies to install improved wireless communications and tracking solutions to provide optimal safe working conditions for miners.”

“Safety within mines relies on having the most current communication solutions,” said Bob Schena, chairman of Rajant Corp. “The combined solution from Rajant, Hannah Engineering and Sanmina-SCI offers a breakthrough in how miners can communicate, and be tracked within a mine. This solution will go a long way to make sure our mines will be safe for our workers.”

“The system will be deployed as Hannah Engineering’s Wireless Integrated Technology System (WITS), which provides a complete end-to-end solution for improved communications within coal mines,” according to the statement. “The WITS system utilizes the networking capabilities of Rajant and Sanmina-SCI to offer wireless communications and personnel tracking from within the mine connecting a host of disparate communication devices.

“Rajant BreadCrumb technology was deployed in the mine which delivered instant, portable, mesh-networking capabilities to VoIP phones within the mine. BreadCrumb units were hand deployed, thereby enabling the network to move as the miners moved. The networking components also facilitated tracking of miners. In operational situations, should an emergency situation arise, miners would easily be located within the mine by using Rajant’s BCAdmin network monitoring software.

“Sanmina-SCI’s Defense & Aerospace Systems Division provided their REDI-COMM 1/4 system, which interfaced with the BreadCrumb network and allowed the miners communication devices to be easily linked with emergency radio systems, other critical communication networks, and POTS phone lines,” the release states. “The Defense & Aerospace Systems Division will soon offer a specialized version of their MP1 phone system that will be uniquely configured and certified for underground use.”

In addition to the system, Hannah said work is also under way to create a miner phone — one that’s specially designed in that it’s waterproof, hands-free, and can be used even when a breathing apparatus is in use.

Hannah said the dispatcher unit (REDI-COMM) is already being used by the U.S. military and with a few modifications, it makes WITS a “slick system.”