SECTION 460:15-1-2. Definitions

  The following words and terms when used, in this Chapter, shall have the following meaning unless the context clearly indicates otherwise:

"Apprentice miner" means a person who is actively employed and who works underground and under the guidance and supervision of a certified miner.

"Accident" means any mine explosion, mine ignition, mine fire, or mine inundation, or injury to, or death of any person.

"Coal" means lignite, subbituminous, cannel, bitumunous, semi-bituminous, semianthracite, anthracite and asphaltic minerals or other hydrocarbons recovered by mining.

"Drift" means a horizontal or approximately horizontal opening through the strata.

"Department" means the Oklahoma Department of Mines, or such department, bureau or commission as may lawfully succeed to the powers and duties of such department.

"Face equipment" means mining machinery operated in/by the last open crosscut.

"Mine" includes the shafts, slopes, drifts or inclines connected with, or intended in the future to be connected with, excavations penetrating coal seams or strata, which excavations are ventilated by one general air current or division thereof, and connected by one general system of mine haulage over which coal may be delivered to one or more points outside the mine, and the surface structures or equipment connected or associated there with which contribute directly or indirectly to the mining, preparation or handling of coal, or construction thereof.

"Operator" means any person, partnership, firm or corporation engaged in and controlling a mining operation.

"Permissible" means any equipment, device or explosion that has been approved as permissible by the United States Bureau of Mines.

"Shaft" means a vertical opening through the strata.

"Slope" means a plane or incline.

"Working face" means any place in a coal mine in which work of extracting coal from its natural deposit in the earth is performed.