Miners Defy Danger, Rush to Aid Co-Workers

THE STORY SO FAR

Half a mile underground, Tony Key trod down a tunnel, flecks of coal dust blowing in his face. He was looking for a telephone to alert mine inspectors that a house-size section of roof had just caved in. Key knew that this was a particularly gassy mine and that a battery charger -- its electric arc a potential ignition source -- might still be running on the other side of the cave-in. A tremor of worry passed through him.

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BROOKWOOD, Ala. -- Tony Key heard the explosion before he felt it. He half-turned to look but found himself hurtling through the air.

He bounced several times on his side before coming to rest 50 feet away, half-buried in a pile of dirt and coal. Disoriented and blinded by the swirl of coal dust, his headlamp blown from his head, he thought at first that he might be dead.

As he clawed his way out of the rubble, he reached for the self-rescue apparatus in a tube on his belt. In the darkness, he fumbled with the mouthpiece and activated the airbag designed to convert carbon monoxide into breathable oxygen.

Key was terrified. He was usually mellow and unexcitable, speaking only in slow, measured tones, but he’d never been through anything like this.

It was 5:15 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 23, 2001. Less than a minute had passed since the roof fall in Four Section of the No. 5 mine, but it had been time enough for a pocket of gas to escape, reach the electric arc of the battery charger and ignite.

A few yards from Key, Michael McIe staggered to his feet with the vague feeling that he was on fire. He remembered the mantra his young daughter recited from school: Stop, drop and roll. That’s what he did, rolling about in the dark and patting himself frantically.

McIe heard moaning. He hollered for his friend, Gaston Adams Jr., the third man who had been working on the roof with them. McIe dragged himself toward Adams’ headlamp, the only one still working. He could barely make it out, the dust was so thick.

McIe found his friend on the ground, surrounded by chunks of concrete blasted from the nearby wall. “I can’t move,” Adams said.

For a moment, McIe thought about carrying Adams, who at 240 pounds outweighed his would-be rescuer by 70. But fearful that Adams might have a broken back, he discarded the idea. Adams gave him his light to go for help.

With Key clinging to his work belt, McIe headed down the tunnel in the direction of the section entrance, several hundred yards away, holding the light high so they could follow a cable running overhead.

A short way down the tunnel, they stumbled into Skip Palmer, nicknamed Brutus, who’d been ferrying materials to Four Section on a motorized rail cart. Palmer was just picking himself off the ground.

The three of them got in the cart and rode until they could ride no farther. Across the tracks, pipes from Four Section’s ventilation system lay in a useless heap.

Closer to the source of the blast, the force of the explosion had shattered concrete walls, another part of the ventilation system that carried good air into the mine and bad air, laden with methane, out.

Any methane seeping into Four Section now had no way to get out.

Key skirted the wreckage of the ventilation pipes and made his way down the tunnel on foot, looking for a phone that he knew was somewhere just outside the section entrance. By now, three other miners working nearby had made their way up the passageway to investigate.

Key and two of the men climbed into a six-passenger “manbus” that was still running and made it to the phone. One of his companions told him that the phone wasn’t working; he’d already tried it. But Key frantically punched its black emergency page button again and again. Finally, he got through to the mine’s control room, which sits on the surface next to the mine’s elevator shaft.

“There’s been an explosion,” Key said. “We need lots of help. Mine rescue, helicopters, ambulances, everything.”

Thirty-two men were scattered throughout the vast Jim Walter Resources No. 5 mine that evening. As emergency telephones bleated out instructions, the men began moving through the vast complex of caverns and tunnels.

Had they scrambled to the surface, only Adams, too injured to make it out, would have perished. But that is not what they did. Like the New York City police and firefighters who, just days before, had rushed to the World Trade Center towers, the miners raced not from danger but toward it.

Miners know what underground fires and gas explosions can do; the annals of mining abound with tragic examples. In Monogah, W.Va., in 1907, 362 miners died in the worst mining accident in the nation’s history; in Farmington, W.Va., in 1968, 78 perished; in Oven Fork, Ky., in 1976, 26 miners and inspectors were killed.

But miners have a creed: When trouble happens, you save your brothers. You also save your livelihood. You save the mine.

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After Key made his call, he realized how much his back was bothering him. His companions told him to lie down on the floor of the tunnel, then went back to confer with the others.

Soon, McIe and Palmer emerged from Four Section on a rail cart. They picked up Key and started toward the mine entrance.

Through the gloom, they saw a light in the distance. It was a manbus carrying six men who had come from two miles away. Twenty or 30 minutes after the explosion, the first help had arrived.

McIe, in pain from three cracked ribs, recognized Bit Boyd, an old fishing buddy and a shear operator on the long wall. Boyd, 38, was one of several men who had been vocal recently about gas problems in the mine.

Boyd and the five men with him were shocked at how bad McIe, Palmer and Key looked. Key was barely recognizable, his hair was standing straight up and his face completely blackened. McIe was holding a rag to his head, stanching a cut on his forehead. Palmer appeared to be in shock.

McIe and Palmer clambered into the back seat of the manbus. The rescuers helped Key lie down in front. A man was designated to bring them out.

“Get the hell out of here,” Boyd told them.

Before heading off in the direction of the mine entrance, Key warned the rescuers that with the ventilation system in ruins and the battery possibly on fire, Four Section might explode again.

As the injured men headed down the tracks, Boyd and his four remaining companions headed the other way, toward Four Section.

Dave Blevins, the foreman in charge of the shift that evening, was near the elevator shaft when he first got word of trouble.

Several hours earlier, he had just sat down for lunch. Wanda, his wife of 36 years, had spent the morning cooking all his favorite foods: chicken and dumplings, green beans, mashed potatoes, cole slaw and blackberry cobbler.

“Why I decided to cook it all that day, I have no idea,” she said.

Blevins normally had Sundays off, but he was scheduled to go on vacation in a week, and his company wanted him at work. The foreman was popular with the men for his attention to safety and for his fairness. Once, after criticizing a worker in front of others, he gathered the 100 men working the shift so that he could publicly apologize. Many men would sign up to work only his shift.

Wanda worried about her husband, although he’d never been hurt in 34 years underground. He had taken her down once, back in West Virginia where they used to live. She got so scared, she cried.

As he headed out the door, Wanda Blevins told him that she’d wait up. He gave her a kiss on the cheek and jumped into his truck.

He’d been at work a little over an hour when he heard about the trouble in Four Section, 3 1/2 miles east. He hopped on a manbus and headed that way.

Just ahead of Blevins, 2 1/2 miles west of the roof fall, Ricky Rose and two other “belt crew” workers were busy repairing a section of the mine’s conveyer belt. A phone near them began sounding an urgent page.

It was the control room, Rose said, alerting them that there had been an “ignition” of gas in Four Section and asking them to go help put it out.

Ignitions are fairly common and usually no cause for alarm, but it is paramount to jump on them quickly before they race out of control.

According to Rose, the control room made no mention of an explosion. Rose and several other miners say this was the first of several conflicting stories that the control room relayed.

Harry House, control room operator that day, surveyed an array of instruments that monitored activity underground. However, it is unclear how much information he had in the crucial hour after the explosion. House has not responded to requests for an interview but has told federal investigators that he consistently informed miners that there had been an explosion.

Responding to the order from the control room, Rose’s group mounted a rail cart and headed toward Four Section. A short distance down the track, they flagged down their boss and four other belt crew workers to explain where they were heading.

Were they absolutely sure? a supervisor asked. They needed to fix the belt in time for the next shift.

House was insistent, they explained.

Rose and his two companions rode on in silence, winding their way through the mine tunnels, until one of them suddenly spoke up.

“I got a bad feeling about this,” he said.

Why were they going to fight a fire that was half an hour away? By the time they got there, it would either be out or burning out of control.

A second miner agreed. They should be heading for the surface, he said.

Sitting in the front of the cart, Rose listened in silence. He was a gruff, chain-smoking, Harley-Davidson aficionado. Usually nothing scared him.

But quietly he started to pray.

Should Four Section explode again, fire and debris would have nowhere to go but straight at them through the tunnels.

The rescuers were going down the barrel of a gun.

Next week: A powerful explosion and a fireball in the tunnels.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

How This Story Was Reported

The story of the accident at Jim Walter Resources No. 5 mine is based on interviews with eight miners who survived; another half-dozen current or former employees of the No. 5 mine; relatives of five miners who died; two members of the Alabama state mine rescue team; members of the United Mine Workers of America safety committees at several Alabama mines; UMWA safety director Joe Main; UMWA health and safety representative Tom Wilson; Jim Walter Resources spokesmen in Brookwood, Ala., and Tampa, Fla.; Assistant Secretary of Labor David Lauriski; federal Mine Safety and Health Administration spokesman Rodney Brown; and mining-industry experts. It also drew on depositions given to MSHA during its investigation of the accident and on six years of federal safety citations against Jim Walter Resources No. 5, which were obtained from MSHA under the Freedom of Information Act.