Word: branches
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Lillie Hamilton can look out the back window of her boxy clapboard house in Mink Branch, Ky., and see the family business, a small coal mine burrowed into the hillside. One chill morning last month, seven men-including three of her sons and a grandson-were wedged 700 ft. down a narrow tunnel, crawling on their knees and blasting loose great chunks of bituminous coal with an explosive gel. Suddenly, a monstrous explosion shattered the Appalachian quiet. The Joyce Ann shaft (named for a Hamilton widow) had become a quarter-mile-long cannon, and the men inside fodder...
...more a year in the 1940s. The improvement came from both technological advances and more stringent standards enforced by the Government since 1973. But now the trend has taken a troubling upswing: mine mishaps killed 106 men in 1978, 133 in 1980 and 155 last year. The Mink Branch disaster was one of seven major Kentucky mining accidents in seven weeks; since the first of the year, 31 U.S. coal miners have been killed on the job. Says Willard Stanley, Kentucky's Commissioner of Mines and Minerals: "Something is going wrong...
MSHA has not yet issued its findings on the Mink Branch tragedy, but Commissioner Stanley, a former miner, thinks that the blasting ignited coal dust suspended in the dank, clammy shaft. "We were very surprised by some of the things we saw in there," Stanley says. "The whole situation was very improper...
Inside the Mink Branch mine, far below the muddy clutter of wood siding and decrepit machines at the opening, the Hamiltons were taking coal by "shooting from the solid." This problematic technique consists of detonating tubes of explosives tamped a few feet into a coal seam. (Safer, mechanized extraction techniques would cost at least twice as much...
This week a House subcommittee will hold hearings to determine whether MSHA is properly enforcing small-mine safety. Yet Government fiat may finally be unable to make hard-scrabbling independent operators work as safely as the sophisticated corporate giants. The Mink Branch mine had passed all of its 17 federal and six state inspections; just a few days before Lillie Hamilton's sons blew themselves up, in fact, they had spent eight hours in an MSHA safety seminar. "You still find a terrible fatalism out there," says Joseph Brennan, president of the Bituminous Coal Operators' Association. "An attitude...