A haul truck driver was taken to the hospital Wednesday night, following a crash between haul trucks at Black Thunder Mine.
Sheriff’s deputies responded to an EMS call at the mine at about 11 p.m. Wednesday, Sheriff’s Sgt. Gary Sams said. Sams said the accident was a rear-end collision between two haul trucks where the driver of the truck who rear-ended the other ended up being taken to the hospital. The age and gender of the drivers were not indicated in the report.
Campbell County Fire Department employees also responded to a call they received as a two-vehicle crash between haul trucks. Employees extricated a driver from one of the trucks, according to the fire department’s press report. The department deferred other questions to Black Thunder Mine.
When contacted, a mine employee who answered the phone declined to comment.
The crash marks the third haul truck incident within two weeks at Campbell County mines.
Last week, two haul truck drivers were taken to hospitals Tuesday after separate crashes at different Campbell County mines. Last Tuesday, Sheriff’s deputies and EMS workers responded to an emergency call in a Wyodak coal pit, Unersheriff Quentin Reynolds said at the time.
In that incident, a 39-year-old man was driving a haul truck when he had an unspecified medical episode, lost control of the truck and drove over a berm inside of a coal pit.
He was taken to Campbell County Memorial Hospital for treatment.
Later that afternoon, a 55-year-old woman was driving a haul truck at Black Thunder Mine when she had an unspecified medical episode, causing her to roll a haul truck onto its side.
The mine’s rescue team extricated the woman from the haul truck and she was flown by air ambulance to Casper for medical treatment, Reynolds said.
Reynolds said at the time that it’s “very rare” to have multiple haul truck incidents on the same day, and Sheriff Scott Matheny said that he didn’t recall it ever happening in his 37 years working with the Sheriff’s Office.
