dr. kohler, west virginia's -- so many investigations here. west virginia's ubb report made a recommendation to niosh to further study barriers. can you explain what those are, describe the previous work in this area and what you need to complete this study? >> yes, active and passive barriers serve as secondary means of quenching an explosion once it has started. active and passive barriers would offer the opportunity to be placed in certain strategic locations. for example, in certain belt entries. so that if the other mechanisms failed and there were a dust explosion, the barriers would most likely quench those -- that explosion. in order to implement these barriers, there are a few remaining questions, some experiments that need to be done, and as the state of west virginia recommended, there is some additional research that we need to build on the work that we did several years ago. at our lake lynn experimental mine, for example, that facility has the ability to do the kind of work that needs to be done to verify and to provide the best

dr. kohler, legal me ask you, do you feel you have sufficient personnel at and if so how do you keep them with you? >> the workforce challenges spread across the mining industry. they're not just confined to msha. we experienced them at niosh. universities, everywhere. everyone is struggling to hire and recruit talented personnel into mining. just to give you an example, msha and niosh both compete for entry level mining engineers. a student coming out of virginia tech or university of kentucky for example starts around 65 to $70,000 a year. we can offer that same graduating student $33,000 a year. now it's easy to see the difficulty we have in competing. it's a big, big problem. >> how do you suggest we remedy it? besides more pay? >> yeah, i think that if we want to be able to recruit and retain competent people, we have to have compensation schedules which don't necessarily match those available outside of the government, but they have to close the gap. >> we'll -- the public sector will never be able to compete with the private sector? >> not fully. but if we're serious about recruiti