In 1954 an underground blast killed sixteen miners working on a chilly Saturday in November. The Consolidation Coal Company and the reckless way it operated Number 9 had added to these grim statistics. Coal mining’s injury rate was four times higher than that of any other industrial job in the United States and fourteen times higher than the national average for all workers.Īt least another 150,000 active and retired coal miners had pneumoconiosis, or black lung, contracted by inhaling coal dust, which made their lungs as porous as fishing nets and turned them into wheezing wrecks. The federal government first began compiling statistics on coal-mining deaths and serious accidents in 1900, and by November 1968 over 101,000 coal miners had been crushed, gassed, electrocuted, or incinerated underground, while another 1.5 million had been seriously injured. In 1963 The Atlantic called coal mining a “mortician’s paradise,” and for good reason. They also knew that they were working at the most dangerous jobs in the country for a company that was obsessed with extracting as much coal as it could. They knew that the shift of miners working before them had had to stop digging three times, once for two and a half hours, while the mine’s four giant surface fans drew fresh air into its tunnels and diluted deadly methane gas. One crew toiled at freeing a large piece of equipment that had been covered with slate and debris during a roof fall while the others clawed coal out of the mine’s rich seams.īut earning a living was not the only thing on their minds. For the next eight hours they would cut and load coal. When they reached the bottom, the miners broke into six- to eight-man crews and boarded mantrips-electric train–like vehicles that ran on rails or had rubber tires-that carried them through Number 9’s vast network of spidery tunnels to their workstations. By 1968 1,400 men from Marion County had fought in Vietnam. Many of the men on the cat-eye shift were veterans. One had mined coal for forty-two years, another for just eight days. They lived on narrow, pitching streets in little northern West Virginia mining communities called Idamay, Enterprise, and Shinnston. The oldest among them was sixty-two, the youngest only nineteen. They stepped into steel cages and started their nearly six-hundred-foot drop to the mine’s sooty floor. Superstitious, none of them dared call their 12 am to 8 am turn in the mine the “graveyard shift.” Just before midnight on November 19, 1968, ninety-nine men working on the “cat-eye shift” at Consolidation Coal Company’s Number 9 mine walked into its bathhouse and began pulling on their thick work shirts and darkly smudged overalls.
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