More than necessity makes miners

On top of the coat rack in my office sits a red miner's hardhat, trimmed with reflective tape and safety stickers and heavier and sturdier than the construction kind.
It was given to me upon successfully completing an underground-mine orientation and safety course and meant that I could have started working that Monday as a "red hat." Rookie miners wear a red hat their first year, meaning a lot of kidding and practical jokes from the "black hats," but also meaning the veteran miners are looking our for you.
The Sago mine fatalities had a special poignancy for me because of the ages of the miners, mostly late 40s and 50s, hired in the 1970s when mine employment picked up thanks to a spike in energy prices.
Then, as now, there had been a break in the usual steady father-son progression into the mines, and coal companies were looking for willing young workers that they could train to replace that lost generation. I asked Consolidation Coal if I could join a class of entry-level hires, and the company bravely said yes, with no strings attached.
So there I was after the usual pre-hire briefing -- "If you want your girlfriend to have medical benefits, you're going to have to marry her" -- with my helmet, steel toes, canteen-sized self-rescuer, battery pack -- and totally clueless.
South of Pittsburgh
Not all mines are in remote Appalachian hamlets. This one was just south of Pittsburgh with shopping centers, subdivisions and roads overhead, the people oblivious to the clangorous violence we were doing to the land beneath them.
The first thing you learn is that coal mines are not black but whitish-gray because of the rock dust that is thrown onto every exposed surface to prevent explosions. It is a chore reserved for new miners and is only fun for the first bag or so of rock dust.
The other thing you learn is that some people are natural-born miners and have an instinctive sense of where they are underground. These are the people you want to stick close to. I had no such sense, and two minutes into the man-trip to the coal face I was lost.
At the coal face, where miners and brutal-looking machines were crammed into a small space, you quickly learned your first lesson, but they shouted it into your ear anyway: "Pay attention."
The advice came rapid-fire, and one bit stays with me yet. When crossing an electric cable or a hydraulic line, always step on it, never over it, because if a machine suddenly pulls that cable taut you don't want to be straddling it.
Room-and-pillar mining has a definite appeal when it's well-done. The miners call it "running coal," an intricate mechanical ballet with the continuous miner bucking and slamming into the coal face, one shuttle car instantly replacing another as they hauled the coal to the conveyor and the conveyor dumping the coal into a mine train that clanked forward a car at a time.
One day I got to see a roof fall, sort of. It'll make you a believer. A crew cutting a crossing -- basically an intersection -- exposed a clay vein, notoriously weak and unstable. The mine engineers were called, and we waited in the tunnels a little distance back from the crossing. Just as the engineers arrived, the clay vein let go -- KA-WHOOMP! Visibility instantly disappeared in an impenetrable cloud of coal, clay and rock dust.
When the dust cleared, the engineers looked at the roof and told the section foreman it was OK to send in the roof bolters to pin up the ceiling. An older miner growled that this was pretty typical of what the engineers did all day.
Emergency escape route
The scariest part was when we had to do an emergency escape route. It was through a mined-out entry that the law only required be kept passable. A narrow path led through the debris. At each crossing the roof had collapsed and we had to climb up these piles of rubble and into the dome-shaped space left by the roof fall, dodging the dangling roof bolts, and down the other side. If my lamp had quit, I would have freaked.
Miners don't mean to be insular, but the job tends to make them that way. One office is pretty much like another office. While a mine has some similarities to a construction site, although one with a lid on it, as far as non-miners, that is, most people, are concerned, miners go to work on the moon every day. And miners tend to have the camaraderie, and the trust in each other, that veterans compare to that of a combat infantry platoon.
Scripps Howard News Service