The answer, Mine & Process Service said, is simply to provide a piece of personnel protection equipment to protect the worker from a possible safety hazard. The company has done this in the form of the integrated, powered respiratory protection MAX helmet.

“The MAX Helmet would seem to be the right choice by mine management, federal and state agencies along with the miners operating the machinery,” said marketing manager Lee Ptasnik.

“Our MAX Powered Respiratory Protection Helmet is truly unique and we know of no other integrated safety device that provides all the protection one needs from the neck up,” he said.

“What we can do is provide them one device that provides four types of protection and dramatically decrease their cost of operation by lowering their maintenance expenses.”

Ptasnik said as more work is done into incorporating miner-to-miner radio communication in a helmet, industry would accept equipment types like the MAX helmet more readily. Specifically, for miners working on longwall faces and continuous miner sections where they are subject to higher dust levels.

The helmet provides protection to the head and filters out dust as well as the visor which provides total protection to the face, and earmuffs that not only protect the hearing of the miner but their ears themselves.

“Safety glasses provide a small amount of protection to one's eyes and literally none to the face. For instance, if a hose should break on a longwall shield, spraying emulsion, what level of protection can safety glasses provide to someone's eyes in that instance?” he said.

“Additionally, neither safety glasses, nor ear plugs can provide protection from flying coal, rock,

pieces of bits, etc. that come off not only a longwall face, a continuous miner cutting head, loading conveyor off of the back of a continuous miner into a "buggy," etc. This is significant to decrease injuries to miners in underground operations.”

Statistics from 2001 reported by the MSHA Injury Experience in Coal Mining IR1302, documented 213 eye injuries. Additionally, 29 injuries to the ear, 16 to the jaw, 67 to the mouth, and 72 injuries to the face.

“We feel that a large number of these injuries could have been prevented with the use of a totally integrated helmet, such as our MAX System.”