Today’s posting is dedicated to the men who labor for a living—especially those who years ago risked their lives each day for a meager paycheck that kept their families alive. I’m speaking of the men who worked in the black hell of coal mines. I grew up in the anthracite belt of northeastern Pennsylvania. Both of my grandfathers worked in the mines. I never met them. Both died of mining-related accidents long before I was born.
In their book The Kingdom of Coal, Donald L. Miller and Richard E. Sharpless describe what working in the mines was like:
Deep in the earth they worked in small teams of two, three or four men, in damp air with the acrid smell of coal dust always in their nostrils, in silence complete except for the loose coal crunching beneath their boots or the dull clinking of their tools. But for the faint light from their lamps shining on the black, glossy coal, they worked in total darkness. They drilled holes into the coal seams, tamped in the explosives and fired them from a safe distance, always alert for the deadly fumes of “rotten gas” and “stink damp,” for the creaking of timbers overhead, for falling rocks or even the sudden scurrying of rats—for miners, a sure sign of an imminent cave-in. When a bad accident occurred, death sometimes came mercifully quickly, but for others hopelessly entombed, there was the agony of burial alive. … When they emerged from underground at the end of their shift, their faces and hands blackened, their clothes clotted with sweat and dust, their bodies weary from labor and tension, they felt a surge of relief: they had survived another day without mishap.
Workers in the mines still toil underground in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, Colorado and Utah. Thankfully their labor is greatly augmented by machine. Underground production also occurs in Wales, Germany, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, India, China and Colombia. China accounts for nearly 40 percent of coal production worldwide; about 20,000 miners die in accidents in China each year.
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