U.S. coal miners share tight bond

All across America, miners risk their lives deep in the ground.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

WELCH, W.Va. — Jim Sanson, a coal miner whose other calling in life might have been as an evangelical preacher, led his colleagues in somber prayer before they descended hundreds of feet into the earth.

“Lord, we pray this day that no one would be lost,” Sanson intoned one recent morning, as the miners around him bowed their heads outside the Pinnacle Mine near here.

The men prayed there would be no injuries. They prayed safety would be at the front of everyone’s minds for the coming eight-hour shift. And they prayed, as they had for two weeks straight, for six miners lost in Utah and their grief-stricken families.

Since Aug. 6, the day a colossal mine collapse swallowed a group of miners in Huntington, Utah, the nation has watched, hoping a miracle might happen and the men could be pulled alive from the Crandall Canyon mine. The tragedy has sparked a national dialogue about one of the most dangerous professions in America, about laws that could make mining safer, about whether a rescue attempt that cost three men their lives should have been undertaken in that unstable mine.

But unnoticed, all across America, in the hollows of West Virginia and the mountains of Kentucky, in the hills of southern Illinois and the gorges of Montana, the tens of thousands of coal miners in this county have quietly continued to do what they do 365 days a year: quarry the depths of the earth for the billions of tons of coal that create more than half of the nation’s electricity.

Pride and prayers

These miners work their shifts and return home to communities much like Huntington, quiet places where parents, spouses and children have for generations lived with the unsettling knowledge that their family’s livelihood is fraught with peril, sometimes death. They take deep pride in their occupation, putting bumper stickers with sayings such as “Miners go deeper” on their pickup trucks and reminding outsiders that increased attention on safety has actually made disasters like Utah rare. They pray.

“Coal miners always pray for other coal miners,” said an emotional Tom Morsi, a 30-year veteran of the mines, mentioning the Utah collapse as well as an accident in China, where 181 miners were trapped and likely killed this month.

Martha Moore, the mayor of Welch, a town of 2,800 people just a few miles from the Pinnacle Mine, put it like this: “I think there’s a spot in our hearts for anything that happens in a coal mining town.”

Indeed, at Pinnacle — an otherworldly maze of underground tunnels almost the size of Washington, D.C., where workers do deep, pillar-supported mining similar to the mining at Crandall Canyon — miners have been watching the events in Utah between shifts with well-trained eyes. Considered to have the top mine rescue team in the nation, the miners suspect the six didn’t survive the initial collapse, but they feel grave offense at the suggestion that the bodies of the men might never be recovered. Indeed, last week the mine’s chief promised to keep searching for the missing men.

And these miners mourn the potential loss of experienced miners and worry that the industry will suffer yet more accidents in coming years as veterans retire and leave the mines to a new crop of inexperienced “red caps,” the moniker given to new miners because of the distinctive color of their hard hats.

But mostly they talk about the sorrow they know has settled over the community of Huntington, an anguish they understand only too well from accidents in their own state — like the haunting one last year when their rescue team tried but couldn’t save two men trapped in a massive underground coal fire in a nearby mine. Some men of Pinnacle still weep when they talk about that accident, heartbreaking tears that trail through the black coal dust coating their faces.

“It tears you up because you think about accidents every day you leave your home in the morning. There’s never a guarantee that it won’t be the last time,” Morsi said.