|
COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Shortly after 1:30 A.M. on Thursday, July 25th, a Somerset, Pennsylvania, dairy farmer named Bill Arnold and his wife, Lori, were startled from sleep by the insistent yelping of their dog, Pitch, who had fixed on some commotion outside. Arnold stepped to the bedroom window and looked out into the dark. In the distance, he saw two pickup trucks parked at the edge of his property, and, nearby, men with flashlights, who seemed to be probing his lower pasture. Arnold quickly dressed, grabbed a .45 automatic he kept in the house, and hurried outside. One of the men, spotting the gun in his hand, shouted, "Don't shoot, Billy!" Arnold recognized the man as Sean Isgan, a local engineer who had done some survey work around the Arnold farm. Randy Musser, also an engineer, and a competitor of Isgan's, was with him. Both men seemed agitated.
Isgan explained that there had been an accident at the Quecreek coal mine, just up the state road--a sudden, terrible flood. "Nine guys are missing."
If the missing miners were alive, they were trapped somewhere underground. Their last known location was a spot in the far corner of the mine, more than a mile from the entrance, which would put them two hundred and forty feet beneath the Arnold farm. Drilling was the only way to reach them, and that was what had brought the two engineers to the Arnolds' lower pasture--each man was running a survey to pinpoint the drilling target. They explained that the drilling might disturb some of the Arnolds' property. "Take down my house, if you have to," Arnold answered. Using his cell phone, he called his wife, who was watching from the kitchen with their daughter, Roann. "I can remember standing at the window and grabbing Roann's hand and saying, 'We've got to pray,' " Lori Arnold recalls. "I remember praying for God's mercy. And making coffee. I knew it would be a long night."
Arnold climbed into his backhoe and levelled a spot in the lower pasture where the drillers could set up. By 3:15 A.M., the first rig was drilling through the topsoil and into the rock below. The drill bit was a relatively small one, six and a half inches in diameter, but it was capable of quick work, and time was everything. The rescuers' first priority was to establish communication with the trapped men, by lowering a camera or a microphone down through the hole and into the mine.
By dawn, the Arnolds' six-acre lower pasture had become a crowded, frantic emergency scene. Scores of rescue workers commanded a vast tonnage of great machines--drill rigs and excavators, compressors and cranes--that continued to arrive through the day. As miners at other mines came off their shifts, they went to the Arnolds' farm and to Quecreek to join the effort, hopeful, but with a certain measure of dread. Mine disasters rarely end happily, and at Quecreek the odds strongly indicated a dire outcome.
The missing miners had apparently breached a wall into an adjacent mine, long abandoned, loosing an inundation of water that quickly filled their own mine to the point of overflow, and beyond. So much water poured in from the breach--tens of millions of gallons--that it came spilling out the mine's entrance, and it kept coming. When a coal-company employee at the rescue scene that first night asked Randy Musser for a professional assessment of the miners' chances, Musser was grimly candid. "From an engineering viewpoint, I'd have to say that none of them are alive," Musser said. "If any of them are alive, it's a miracle.''
Approached from the east by land, Somerset County comes into view suddenly, as you emerge from a long, straight tunnel cut through Allegheny Mountain on the old Pennsylvania Turnpike. The effect is of a particularly charming mountain scene in a diorama, a rolling landscape of pleasant farms and soft glades, painted in warm tones. The place is a visual surprise, given the economic dictates of its geology. Somerset is on the eastern edge of the Appalachian coal basin, and coal has been mined in the area for a century and a half. Many of the small communities in the county, places such as Gray, Wilbur, Jenner's Crossroads, and Hooversville, originated as mining towns, some of them wholly owned--from the tidy little homes to the local bank--by the mining company that was the town's sole employer. As recently as the mid-nineteen-sixties, nearly half the people in the county had at least one family member working in the mines or in the steel mills that the coal mines fed, in nearby Johnstown and Pittsburgh. Even those who didn't work in the mines or the mills often mined coal for themselves, digging "dog mines" by the barn, or even in the cellar, for their winter fuel supply.
But Somerset's coal heritage is not obviously displayed. When the steel economy collapsed, so did the major market for much of Pennsylvania's bituminous coal. By the time coal operators reoriented themselves to a new primary market--generating electricity--the fundamentals of the coal industry had changed dramatically. New technologies and mining techniques made coal mining a far less labor-intensive undertaking, and Pennsylvania coal production has steadily risen, even though in the nineteen-nineties the number of miners declined by nearly half. Among Somerset County's population of eighty thousand, only two hundred and eighty-two people worked in underground mines in 1999. Most of Somerset's mines are small operations, and none are unionized. The most plentiful job opportunities in Somerset are in tourism and manufacturing, and the biggest private employer is the Seven Springs golf and ski resort. An actual coal miner has become something of a rarity. "It's a hidden profession," Ron Hileman, a Quecreek miner, said. "Nobody can drive down the road and see what we do every day. Very few people know what we do." In the case of Quecreek, that is literally true. To enter the mine, one must first cross a local truck yard, and then descend a steep gravel grade to a deep pit below. Few people in Somerset, even those who drove past the mine several times a day, knew of its existence.
As the miners' place in the local economy and social order has diminished, the bond among miners has strengthened. Most who make up the dwindling number are in middle age, or approaching it, and many have two or more decades in the mines. While Somerset followed the rest of the country into the post-industrial age, with its postmodern sensibilities, coal miners stayed with a calling--crawling into the earth to fetch pieces of flammable rock--that is starkly pre-modern. Theirs is a kind of reverse elite, a bluer-than-blue-collar, hypermasculine subculture. The miners dip snuff, chew tobacco, drink beer, and hunt. They give each other nicknames like Stinky and Flathead. A woman in their workplace is considered bad luck. In conversation, they employ an exaggerated version of the local Appalachian lilt ("John" is pronounced "Jo-un," "fire hall" is rendered "far hole"). The miners routinely joke about their low station (Merle Travis's line in the song "Sixteen Tons" about "a mind that's weak and a back that's strong" is often quoted), but the self-deprecation is of a piece with a fierce pride in their work. Despite remarkable advances in technology and safety, mining remains a dirty, dangerous job, requiring considerable courage and skill. The miners are not necessarily close friends, but they have a camaraderie that comes from undertaking a task that most men, even those in their own community, wouldn't, or couldn't, do.
Prudent miners are not reckless, but the very act of entering a deep mine every day requires a certain suspension of natural caution. Some miners develop a strain of dark humor about the perils underground. A miner named Doug Custer, who was deep inside the Quecreek mine on the night of July 24th, says that when the first warning came of a dangerous inundation his response was to laugh. "All right!" he joked. "We've got an early quit." When his buddy Joe Kostyk heard that water was rushing toward them, he thought, What's the big deal? At least it wasn't a fire. Now Kostyk freely allows that what happened that night affected his nerve, perhaps for good. "There's not another coal mine I could go in right now," he says. "Some days I think I can. Talking to you about it now is bringing up all this stuff again, and I'm starting to shake again. I don't know. I don't know. . . . I never considered myself a weak guy. Never. A lot of people call me Bonehead. But this shook me up. I don't like to admit when I'm scared. But I guess I am."
Eighteen miners--two crews of nine--entered the Quecreek mine for the swing shift on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth. Quecreek had been in operation for just over a year, which meant that it was a relatively small mine. A mine is created by the process of mining, the digging out of the coal buried between layers of other rock. Every dig becomes a new passageway, and, after fourteen months of mining, Quecreek's fifty-nine miners had burrowed out two sections, each extending about a mile and a half into the earth from the entrance. Each section comprised a series of long parallel tunnels, which are called entries, and shorter tunnels that cut across them (crosscuts). This elementary method of mining, called room-and-pillar mining, is an engineering exercise designed to leave enough coal still standing, like a bearing wall in a house, in order to keep the mine from collapsing.
On a map, the mine that had been dug so far at Quecreek looked something like a lowercase "y," with the entrance of the main section--the "mains"--beginning at the bottom of the "y" 's tail and continuing on a more or less straight path to the lowest reaches of the mine, about seven thousand feet from the entrance. At roughly the halfway point, the mains hit a dip, a six-hundred-foot-long bowl in the coal seam, at which point another section diverted away from the main entries and continued, slightly uphill, up the left arm of the "y." This section was called One Left, and culminated about eight thousand feet from the entrance.
The journey into the mine that afternoon was routine and, as always, uncomfortable. Each of the eighteen miners wore a cumbersome tool belt that held, among other items, a "self-rescue" device--essentially, a portable oxygen tank--and a big battery attached to the miner's helmet lamp. The miners positioned themselves in two-seat golf carts and six-passenger carts called mantrips, grimy vehicles with backless seats, because the men had to lean back to avoid scraping the mine's roof. The height of a mine is determined by the thickness of the coal seam, and at Quecreek the seam averaged between forty-eight and fifty-two inches. That meant that, except for places where the roof had collapsed--and there were always several of those--the miners spent their entire shift hunched over or on their hands and knees. It was dark in the mine, but not black; the walls were an eerie gray, from the powdery rock dust that is thrown onto the coal walls during mining to keep coal dust down and to render it inert, decreasing the chance of explosion. Bugs followed the miners in for the first several hundred feet, dancing in the beams of their lamps, and there was an artificial breeze, stirred by a fan blowing fresh air into the mine. The ride was bumpy, the carts' rubber tires bouncing along the rock floor, slightly cushioned by crushed bits of coal. It was a hot afternoon, but a mine has its own weather--chilly and damp. Several hundred feet in, the miners' breath made steam, and in some of the low places in the mine the men drove through fog bogs. Quecreek, like many mines in the area, was a wet mine. Water from streams and aquifers leaked in through the roof, and gathered in great, goopy puddles. The miners call it "rain." "You'll get into an area where the water'll be coming out...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
