Word: coal
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Next the miners descend in an elevator to the mine, far below the surface. There they file into a tiny rail car for the ride to the mine face, the wall of solid coal at the end of the tunnel where the coal is actually extracted. During the four-mile journey, the beams from the lamps on the miners' hats bore through the darkness, picking up eerie, abandoned passageways, diggings of another day. The foreman carries a small naphtha lamp; if the lamp's flame flares up, it indicates the presence of flammable methane gas and the threat...
...miners begin to clear their throats and spit. The area around the mine face looks like a small construction site, with piles of boards, bolts, rails, ties and electrical power equipment. The wires on this equipment are regularly checked lest a miner be electrocuted. Facing the wall of coal is a continuous coal mining machine called "the beast." The machine's whirling blades chew into the seam with a roaring noise like an avalanche, spewing chunks of coal back into waiting coal cars, which are equipped with robot-like "gathering arms" that channel the flow. The load is then...
...mining because the unsupported roof can easily give way. When the supports are up, the mining machine goes back to work, and the process is repeated over and over until the shift ends. For all the hazards, miners insist that there is a great deal of satisfaction in coal mining. Says Miller, a third-generation miner: "There are always going to be dangers. After a couple of years, you learn to accept the realities of mining...
...Fans. Veteran miners know how much those realities have improved. For example, Raymond Echard, 58, has spent four decades in West Virginia mines. When he started out at age 13, he loaded coal for 17? per ton-earning about $4.40 a day. Companies then forced miners to buy then-own picks, shovels and other equipment and did not even provide fans to blow away the coal dust. Echard lost a thumb coupling coal cars and injured his back three times. Yet he encouraged his grandson to get into the mines. "I told him it was a good job," says Echard...
When Miller returned home, his old employer claimed that he had no jobs. Miller protested, invoking his status as a veteran-and found himself mining coal while standing in ten inches of water. He quit to enroll in an auto mechanics' apprenticeship program but returned to mining in 1951. This time Miller was placed in a mine so dusty that he soon had trouble breathing, but "the companies told you that coal dust didn't hurt you." Ultimately, suffering from black-lung disease, he switched to another mine-one so wet that it brought on his arthritis...