Established by the Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response (MINER) Act of 2006, the programme promotes mine safety while honouring 25 miners who died in 2001 in Brookwood, Alabama, at the Jim Walter Resources #5 mine, and in 2006 in Buckhannon, West Virginia, at the Sago mine.
Funding will enable grant recipients to develop training materials, provide mine safety training or educational programmes, recruit mine operators and miners for the training, and conduct and evaluate the training. MSHA will give special emphasis to programme and materials that target workers at smaller mines, including training miners and employers about new MSHA standards, high risk activities, or hazards identified by MSHA.
The minimum and maximum amounts of each individual grant are US$50 000 and US$250 000, respectively.
