Longwell mining is extensively practiced worldwide for the safe extraction of coal from underground coal mines. In this paper, we analyzed several sensor node deployment schemes and proposed a novel wireless sensor network (WSN) deployment scheme for environmental monitoring in longwall coal mines. The proposed scheme is based on the probabilistic event detection approach for complete coverage of the monitoring regions in longwall coal mines. The virtual force method is applied to minimize the redundant overlapping regions of the sensor nodes by preserving connectivity of the network. Moreover, the funneling effect that causes energy hole problem in a linear wireless sensor network is resolved. The performance of the WSN is evaluated through simulations. The simulation results showed that the proposed scheme provides best area coverage as compared to the existing node deployment strategies and is very cost effective. (C) 2017 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.