West Virginia Mine Blast Vs. Radar, Lightning

The AP says that a 3 PM blast at a the Upper Big Branch coal mine (photo) in Montcoal (Google Map), West Virginia killed 25 people yesterday, the worst U.S. mining disaster since 1980.

Since I blogged about lightning strikes near the 2006 Sago Mine Blast (in which lightning was determined to be the cause) and Holmes Mills Mine Blast (which was determined to be caused by human error), you're probably wondering where my data is for this event. Well, unlike four years ago we have a full news team here, and while I've been helping them research, I needed to wait until we issued our official news story. In short, the lightning was well south of the mine site this time (strikes shown as squares with timestamps in Z time, 2pm-5pm eastern below):

Based on this map, I do not think lightning was a cause of this blast. This data is accurate to within a few hundred meters with detection efficiency near 100% in the continental U.S. so it's extremely unlikely that lightning hit and Vaisala didn't catch it. Yes, lightning strikes can travel far outside a storm's radar storm signatures, but these are the termination, ground locations of the strikes. The radar loop (Charleston RadarPlus in MOV format or West Virginia AccuWeather.com radar in AVI format) confirms that little to no storms were in the area around 3 PM and in fact their closest approach was at 4 PM in the southern part of Raleigh County: