Danger, Courage Found Underground

Half a mile underground, the earth talks. Usually it just murmurs, but when a few million tons of rock come alive overhead, it makes a racket.

On the evening of Sept. 23, 2001, when most of the country was still caught up in the aftermath of 9/11, Tony Key stood in the middle of a 20-foot-wide tunnel burrowed through the heart of Alabama’s Blue Creek coal seam, his helmet light tracing an arc through the blackness.

The earth groaned and rumbled like a restless beast as rock shifted above the mine’s Four Section.

A foot above his head, cracks big enough to poke a fist through snaked across the ceiling. Water dripped from steel rods drilled into the roof to secure it.

The soft-spoken husband and father had 20 years of experience underground, most of them here, at Jim Walter Resources No. 5 mine, the nation’s deepest vertical shaft coal mine. He knew what had to be done.

Working quickly, he and two other miners stacked chunks of wood Lincoln Log-style to bolster the ceiling. As one wedged in a final piece, a foot-long rock broke loose and hit him square on his hard hat. The three men stepped back.

Suddenly, the rumbling increased. Roof rods began snapping like .22-caliber rifle shots. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!

Then, with a loud “whoosh,” a section of roof as big as a house crashed down just 200 feet away.

Nobody got too excited.

Roof falls are not uncommon underground. As his companions sat down to swig water from their jugs, Key started back toward the section entrance to find a phone to notify federal mine inspectors.

As he trod down the tunnel, the mine’s air currents blowing flecks of coal dust into his face, the mine was quiet -- but not for long.

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The No. 5 mine lies about 40 miles southwest of Birmingham in Brookwood, population 1,500.

Riding an elevator that drops 15 feet per second, it takes miners 3 1/2 minutes to descend the 2,140 feet to the bottom. There, they enter a maze of interconnected caverns and honeycombed tunnels that cover 9.2 square miles. Working three round-the-clock shifts, seven days a week, the 382 employees mine one of the most fertile coal seams in the country.

The work area called Four Section lies at the end of a tunnel about 3 miles east of the elevator shaft, the closest way out.

Workers there first noticed the roof creaking on Friday, two days before the roof fall.

A miner spent several hours on the day shift pumping 30 10-foot-long steel rods into the roof to bolster it.

The mine’s government-approved roof control plan called for steel I-beams and straps to be used when the cracking became severe, but supervisors didn’t think they were needed. The diminished clamor seemed to indicate that the rods were doing the job.

Four Section and adjoining Six Section were “under development.” Mining machines, with large, rotating, drum-shaped heads studded with teeth, were hollowing out the coal in a carefully engineered pattern that left large walls of coal, more than 120 feet long, in place to help support the roof.

The plan was to connect the two cavernous sections in the back to form a straight, 850-foot “longwall” across the face of the coal seam. Then a machine would cut steadily back and forth across the coal face.

Friday evening, miners brought in some heavy equipment, including an 8-ton battery-charging station. With the roof fixed, it seemed safe to leave the high-voltage electrical equipment there over the weekend.

But on Sunday, an employee making safety checks noticed a chunk of a concrete wall crumbling under the ceiling’s weight.

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The men who work Jim Walter Resources No. 5 mine labor daily in a permanent night. A misstep can lead to crippling injury or even death. The specter of black lung disease always looms.

Their lives, and the lives of 95,000 other coal miners across America, connect directly to yours every time you turn on a light or recharge your cell phone. Today, more than half of the nation’s electricity is still generated by burning coal.

In fact, coal mining is a resurgent industry, recovering from nearly two decades of environmental backlash that made cleaner-burning natural gas the darling of utility companies.

As coal company profits have rebounded, so have fatal mine accidents.

Death has always haunted the mines. A century ago, 2,000 to 3,000 men perished annually in coal mine accidents. By the 1980s, safety regulations and better technology had driven annual fatalities down to double digits. Fatal accidents reached a low of 29 in 1998, according to the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Since then, they have been on the rise again. Last year, 42 coal miners perished.

Union officials like Joe Main, head of safety for the United Mine Workers of America, say enforcement declined during the Clinton years and has gotten worse under the Bush administration.

As evidence, Main points to a steep drop nationwide in citations for “serious and substantial” violations, the kind that draw the stiffest penalties. But MSHA’s head, Assistant Secretary of Labor David Lauriski, says the numbers simply mean that mines are becoming safer.

No. 5 was a comparatively dangerous, problem-plagued mine.

In 1995, it led the country in safety violations and had one of the highest accident rates. Injuries and fines for violations dropped sharply over the next three years as Jim Walter made improvements. But then both began increasing again as production boomed.

MSHA records for No. 5 show some oddities. The mine had the third most violations in the country in 2000 but ranked only 62nd for serious and substantial violations.

Furthermore, of 520 violations cited in 2000, all but 16 were recorded as affecting only one miner, diminishing the fines faced by the company. Some of these single-miner violations were for powdery coal dust in thousands of feet of tunnels. Coal dust makes a mine prone to explosion.

Company officials say the figures reflect how quickly they respond to safety issues. Main, however, says MSHA inspectors were cutting breaks for Jim Walter Resources, a Florida-based conglomerate that brings in $2 billion a year.

Main says that the company was routinely warned ahead of time about “surprise” inspections, that federal mine safety agency bosses frequently overrode their inspectors’ citations, that inspectors often failed to follow up to see if violations had been remedied.

Lauriski declined to comment on the allegations, but the agency has launched an internal review.

In September 2001, the No. 5 mine was in the midst of a quarterly inspection. MSHA officials had found more than 50 violations, including 10 “significant and substantial ones.”

On the day things suddenly went wrong, the mine had 31 outstanding violations, including an accumulation of combustible coal dust and ventilation problems on Four Section. The deadline for fixing them had passed; no inspector had followed up.

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The roof in Four Section was rumbling. A few men in the skeleton crew of 32 workers that started their shift at 3 p.m. that Sunday needed to get to work building wooden roof supports called “cribs.”

Michael McIe was among the men assigned to support the roof.

He and three others waited for a manbus, a motorized rail cart, to take them on the half-hour ride to the section. By the time the men got to Four Section and started building the cribs, it was 4 p.m.

They had been at it for about an hour and 15 minutes when the house-sized section of roof fell.

As Key, foreman on the job, turned away to find a telephone to alert inspectors, his first thought was of gas -- the colorless, odorless methane that lurks in the Blue Creek coal seam.

Methane is commonly associated with coal, but Jim Walter Resources No. 5 is an especially gassy mine. Here, boreholes driven into the coal beds to free trapped methane are not only a safety measure but a profitable enterprise. Twenty million cubic feet of methane a day are liberated from No. 5 and sold to a natural gas company.

Roof falls can release pockets of gas into the tunnels; if the air in them becomes 5% to 15% methane, the slightest spark can cause an explosion.

As a precaution, mining machines are built to automatically shut down when gas levels exceed 2%, and company and union policy discourage workers from operating equipment when concentrations reached even 1%.

However, miners in No. 5 say they were feeling ever-increasing pressure to meet production goals. Mike Boyd and several other miners said workers often got flak from company bosses if they turned off machinery because of concerns about gas. Company officials denied it.

In the 10 days leading up to the accident in No. 5 mine, workers in Four Section and neighboring Six Section had put out three “ignitions” -- intensely hot flare-ups in which small pockets of methane gas caught fire.

Key had walked only a few feet up the tunnel when a tremor of worry passed through him. He couldn’t see what had happened to the battery charger that had been brought in on Friday. Had the roof fall crushed it?

Unseen behind the wall of rock, the charger was still running, its electric arc sparking in the darkness, waiting for fuel.

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Next week: Like firefighters on Sept. 11, miners rushed toward danger.