As the miners made their way toward the amin portalof the New River Co.’s Siltix Mine, within earshot of Mount Hope, to begin the morning shift, Gene Hall’s gaze turned skyward.
White cottonlike clouds loomed in the west, over the horizon, and the midsummer sun flamed like a lanternin the cheerful blue sky.
Slowly, the mantrip descended into the cool mouth of the mine, where the air had the faintly acrid bite of coal.
The clattering electric rail car brought the men to the end of the main entry of the mine, where a series of intersecting passageways divided the coal seam into 80-foot blocks, or pillars. They hurried forward in the darkness to reach the flickering lights of the men and machines.
“I was a pin man, a roof bolter,” Hall, a 53-year-old retired miner, recalled of the incident. “But that morning the boss moved me back to the machine section.
“I’d worked the same section for months, but that morning they got me out of the mantrip, told me to give up the bits, the gas detector and the safety lamp.”
At the machine section, about three miles from the outside, Hall got new orders to work as a shop foreman, shooting and cutting coal.
The nine-man section crew worked in silence as blind, ravenous monsters gobbled at the mountain’s wealth, chewing tons of bituminous coal from the 40-inch seam each minute.
A driver sat at the controls of the joy loader, a squat machine that slashes at the glittering coal face with lobster-like arms and claws—its chain line mouthsucking the cascading coal over its own back and spewing it into a 6-ton shuttle car.
Meanwhile, about 1,200 feet away, Carlos Collier gathered his tools about him to hang wire for the sector’s power supply.
Suddenly, Collier felt a pressure on his ears.
There was little noise—only the slap of concussion. “It was like a gust of wind, a hard wind with dust and dirt, only silent, like you might feel if you were inside a gun barrel.”
Collier and his companion surmised the muffled thud and the silent wind were an echo from a slate fall somewhere in the mine’s countless chambers.
The men walked hunchbacked in a ghostly tunnel 60 inches high, three miles inside the belly of a mountain, their eyes clinging to the thin beams streaking from their helmets.
Smoke belched through the breakthroughs. The power supply shut down. Everything went quiet.
Somewhere ahead, the roof had fallen.
The face of the mine is the point of greatest danger. Newly bared roof can collapse without warning, and a careless movement of cutter bits can strike sparks from the rock, igniting deadly methane gas present in the coal seam.
Huge fans on the mountainside suck a million cubic feet of air a minute through the mine, diluting and drawing out more than 2 million cubic feet of methane each day.
Coal dust, fine particles in the air, is the deadliest enemy of all. It, too, can be ignited by a spark. A curtain of water, therefore, sprayed over the rotating bits of machinery helps blanket coal dust that otherwisecould become as explosive as gun powder.
Such a blast will propagate itself wherever there is more dust, destroying everything in its path, like a mighty powder train.
Some 2,000 feet from Collier’s section, an explosionhad ripped through 18 walls of cinder blocks.
Gene Hall and 10 other miners started walking out along a conveyor belt, about 500 feet from the main line.
“The smoke was so thick you couldn’t see the hand in front of you,” the soft-spoken Hall said of the blast. “We’d gone only a few feet when we started coughing, so we turned and went back toward the face and tried another entry.
“But we met thick smoke and carbon monoxide, just like it was coming out of a furnace.
“In case of an explosion, our orders were to barricade and wait for help. So, we gathered up brattice cloth and built 10-by-20-foot barricades.”
Two of the trapped miners were equipped with rescue breathing devices, good for about 30 minutes. They left the barricade, holding onto each other’s shirttails, feeling their way along the smoky chambers of death.
Every entry was blocked by rockfalls.
After all escape attempts in the billowing smoke had failed, the 11 trapped miners sat down in the sludge of their sealed-off arena, behind the makeshift, canvas barrier, with an estimated 30 minutes of oxygen remaining.
Then as deadly gas and smoke seeped into their final retreat, some of the miners started to cry.
“The section boss just lay down in the mud. The fellow in front of me took out a pencil and pad and started to write a letter to his family.
“The men were weeping. They didn’t mind seeing each other weep. They knew they were going to die. The foreman asked me to pray. I started praying out loud. I asked The Lord to help us get out of there. I thanked him for the beautiful morning that we had seen coming into the mine, the white clouds sailing across the blue heavens.
“I told Him how much I wanted to see my family again.”
Carlos Collier had ceased believing any more men were alive in the scorched bowels of the mine. He’d helped recover seven bodies, including that of a man who had taken Hall’s place as a roof bolter hours earlier.
“I thought they were all dead,” Collier recalled. “All of the walls were blown out. We’d started up to where we knew the other miners had been when we hit smoke.
“I thought I’d find more bodies there, so I got down and felt the dirt. I couldn’t see and I could barely breathe.
“I picked up a rock and started to beat on the floor of the mine. I don’t know why I did it, but then I heard the men pound back.
“They were only 15 feet away.”
“We had given up,” Hall said of the barricaded crew. “We were prepared to die; we had no hope. We were just sitting there, waiting to die.
“Then I heard a noise like two rocks beating together. I picked up a rock and started to beat back. When I heard it again, I knew they had found us.
“Then I heard a voice saying, ‘Stay where you are; we’ll be back to get you.’
“I immediately went back to the barricade and told the men they had found us. Some of them laughed and some of them cried. Everyone was hugging one another.”
Once they were rescued, the 11 miners learned the extent of the terrible explosion on July 23, 1966. Seven miners had died, nine were injured and 11 were trapped for almost five hours.
Both Collier and Hall remained at the mine for much of the afternoon, helping search for other possible trapped miners.
And for the rest of their careers, the two men continued to mine coal.
“After an explosion like that one, it puts the fear of The Almighty in you,” said Hall. “But once a miner, you never want to leave it.
“We knew that our time had come. But a power and strength came over us that enabled us to stay alive until help could reach us.
“We couldn’t have lived for 20 minutes more with that yellow, sulfurous smoke billowing into our barricade.
“But we simply didn’t want to die, and we faced it.”
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Top o’ the morning!
Editor’s note: The tiniest bare flame or electrical sparkcan ignite the gas underground, touching off an explosion. The late Gene Hall and Carlos Collier, both of prosperity, nearly perished in a methane explosion in the summer of 1966 at a coalmine near Mount Hope.