The Eagle Valley Mine is owned by Sugar Camp Coal. Black Beauty Coal Co. holds the controlling interest in Sugar Camp. The mine is slated to close in about a year when reserves are exhausted. Sugar Camp has begun preliminary work to open another mine in the area.

The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and other government agencies have investigated Hays’s death and will make its findings public soon. According to one miner, Hays, a repairman, was lubricating a continuous mining machine when a large rock fell out of the roof overhead, crushing his skull against the machine. Co-workers administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation and rushed him out of the mine. He was flown to a hospital in Evansville, Indiana, where he was in a coma for nearly two days.

Richard Mottershaw, director of the Office of Mines and Minerals in Springfield, Illinois, told the Harrisburg, Illinois, Daily Register, that the preliminary investigation pointed to "soft adverse top conditions" and was recommending additional roof bolts be installed in the area before further mining continues.

Hays had worked for some 20 years in coal mines in the area. He started at the Eagle Valley Mine around a year ago, but only recently returned after a six-month layoff. Unlike many laid-off miners who had found other jobs in nearby Illinois and Indiana mines and who decided not to come back when recalled, Hays returned to Eagle Valley because of the hour-and-a-half drive he was making during the interim. He lived in Herod, Illinois, a small town only a few miles from the mine.

In 1999, James Ferrell was killed at Eagle Valley when he was struck by a falling rock while riding out of the Davis seam in an open personnel carrier after cleaning up a more serious rock fall above a belt line a short distance from the working face in the #3 Section.

Hays was the ninth fatality in a U.S. coal mine so far this year. Six of these workers died in West Virginia mines.  
 
 
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