Bleeder ventilation is common and legally required in underground longwall coal mines in the United States. This ventilation technique originated with room-and-pillar retreat mining and is intended to clear mined-out areas or gobs of any explosive methane-air mixtures. A system of bleeder ventilation entries surrounds the gob, intended to draw explosive methane accumulations directly towards a dedicated system of return airways and to a dedicated bleeder fan. Bleeder entries are traveled regularly for inspection purposes and the methane content within these travel ways is limited to 2%. With the arrival of longwall mining in the United States in the 1970s, bleeder ventilation was extended to controlling methane in longwall gobs. Researchers at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM), under a research project funded by the CDC-NIOSH Office of Mine Safety and Health Research, have studied bleeder ventilated longwall gobs by examining gas compositions and gas flows using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling techniques. Researchers found that bleeder ventilated gobs are surrounded by a fringe of methane-air mixtures in the explosive range. Investigations of numerous mine explosions indicate that these explosive mixtures may have either ignited within the gob or may have been pushed into the active mine workings. This paper characterizes the explosion and fire hazards stemming from bleeder ventilated gobs and suggests improvements for ventilation practices that reduce or eliminate these hazards.