The agency responsible for the safety and health of America's miners has formally adopted emergency evacuation safety standards put in place last spring.

The Mine Safety and Health Administration says mine operators must store additional portable breathing devices underground, improve training on the devices, install lifelines to aid an escape and bolster emergency evacuation training.

The new rule also requires mines to notify federal officials within 15 minutes of a serious accident.

The changes were first enacted in April as an emergency temporary standard, only the third time in the agency's 28-year history it had taken such an action.

At the time, the nation was still mourning the death of 12 miners at Sago, and two more at West Virginia's Aracoma Mine.

In announcing the emergency standard, MSHA officials said at the time that they believed the new requirements "would have provided the deceased miners with the tools and training needed for them to have had a better chance of completing a successful evacuation."

The following month, five more miners perished at the Kentucky Darby Mine following a methane explosion that bore disturbing similarities to Sago. To date, 46 U.S. coal miners have died in 2006, more than double last year's record low total of 22, and another 24 have been killed at metal/non-metal mines.

Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association, said the group believes the standards will improve miner safety "especially when the called-for safety technology is available."

United Mine Workers spokesman Phil Smith said yesterday that he hopes the new rules will spur development of a third generation of the self-contained self-rescuer breathing devices.

"We need something that miners can rely on."

Randal McCloy Jr., the sole Two Left crew survivor at Sago, and at least one miner at Kentucky Darby, reported problems getting their self-rescuers to work during the emergency.

In July, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that one of the Sago self-rescuers was past its 10-year service expiration date, and six others were within 18 to 24 months of expiring.

The new rule requires that miners receive training on using a self-rescuer four times yearly, instead of once a year. That training will include donning a self-rescuer and transferring from one unit to another.

One of the sessions is supposed to be done in a smoky environment where the miner will breathe through a training unit to simulate an actual underground emergency.

In addition to the self-rescuer carried by each miner, an additional one-hour oxygen pack must be available to miners under the new rule, and that SCSR's be stored at 30-minute intervals along escapeways.

The notification requirement states that MSHA officials should be told of a serious accident within 15 minutes or face a stiff fine. Federal officials did not learn of the explosion and missing miners at Sago for two hours.