by Ninie Hammon
“I got a plan,” Will blurts out in an effort to diffuse the situation before it gets ugly. “How ’bout we just lay track, okay? And talk about…oh, I don’t know—ice hockey?”
“Ice hockey?” Lloyd shakes his head, makes a humph sound in his throat, turns and stalks over to a pile of rails lying up against a coal pillar.
Because the track ends here, there are supplies stacked all around. Fifty-pound bags of lime for dusting the shaft walls, extra scoop batteries, rolls of plastic for curtains, duct tape, roof bolts, and tools.
The rails are 3 inches tall and come in 20-foot sections. The metal cross ties they rest on are flat, quarter-inch sheet metal, 6 inches wide and 8 feet long. The rails fit into notches on the cross ties with a locking mechanism that has to be hammered shut.
Ricky Dan and Lloyd begin to lay out cross ties as they argue. Will grabs the end of a piece of rail and drags it along beside the cross ties, ready to clip it down once the ties are in place.
The three complete the first set of rails. Ricky Dan and Lloyd start to lay cross ties for the next set as Will hammers one last cantankerous lock shut on the first.
There is a gap in Will’s memory at this point. One minute he is pounding on a catch and the next…
His ears pop.
A tremendous, thundering boom slams into him; the sound and pressure hurl him head over heels up the shaft. His body ricochets off the roof, the floor and the coal pillar-walls like a bullet fired into a rock pile.
And then he is on his back, a ferocious roar in his ears. His eyes stare into black nothingness. Blind! Not a pinprick of light anywhere. And all around him is a stink—something’s burning.
Completely disoriented, Will has no idea where he is. Did he fall out of bed? Is he in the woods—where are the stars? He sits up slowly and turns around. Behind him, 15 feet away, a headlamp shines upward through dark air—smoke!—toward the roof, lighting up the fossil ferns like fleece wallpaper. A few feet beyond, another headlamp beam shines out across the floor.
Then realization hits him harder than the force that flung him down the shaft. The mine! Explosion!
Will reaches up; his helmet’s gone. He doesn’t trust his legs to stand, so he crawls along the rails to the first beam of light. It’s Ricky Dan on his back, his eyes closed. He’s not moving.
Will calls out his name and can barely hear his own voice. It’s as if his whole head’s packed in cotton. He touches his ears and feels no blood; his eardrums are intact. But his nose is bleeding and he wipes it on his sleeve.
“Ricky Dan!” he cries in that strange, hollow, echoing voice. He grabs Ricky Dan’s shirt and shakes him. “Wake up!”
Ricky Dan’s eyes flutter open. Then close again. Will shakes him hard and when his eyes open back up they stay open. But there’s no recognition in them; they stare out blankly.
Will slaps Ricky Dan’s face. “Ricky Dan, we gotta get out of here. It blew. The mine blew!”
Confusion downshifts into dawning understanding on Ricky Dan’s face. He rolls over on his side and Will helps him sit up.
“Come on,” Will urges. “We gotta run!”
As soon as Ricky Dan sits, he begins to cough. Thick, black smoke billows at them in the darkness. He lurches to his feet, then turns and begins to stagger back down the shaft toward the smoke.
“No, Ricky Dan.” Will jumps up and grabs his arm. “Not that way. We have to get out of here!”
“Daddy!” It is the cry of a lost little boy. He shakes off Will’s grip on his arm. “I’m not leaving my father!”
His words punch Will in the belly. It hadn’t registered. Bowman’s back there! At the face where it blew.
“Help! My leg…help!”
The light that had shone out across the floor is now pointed at Will and Ricky Dan. They hurry to Lloyd’s side and Ricky Dan sweeps his headlamp beam down the length of Lloyd’s body. His left boot is missing and his foot is cocked at an unnatural angle. His ankle must be broken.
“I can’t walk. You gotta help me!”
Will turns to Ricky Dan. “I can’t get Lloyd outta here by myself. If you go back…” He doesn’t finish the sentence because he doesn’t have to.
Ricky Dan looks toward the face of the mine. The light from his headlamp reveals a cloud of boiling smoke. He stares transfixed, an expression of yearning and horror on his face.
“Ricky Dan,” Will urges, “we have to go—now!”
With a strangled sob, Ricky Dan turns back and grabs Lloyd’s arm. “We’ll have to drag ’im.”
Will grabs Lloyd’s other arm and together he and Ricky Dan pull him on his back down the shaft toward the mouth of the mine. Lloyd cries out in pain as they bump him over the left rail and pull him along between the tracks. The rails are their lifeline. A straight shot out. Without them, they’d get hopelessly lost in the dark and smoke.
Will has no helmet so he keeps his head down, but his back drags across the roof as he runs down the shaft. His shirt is soon soaked and his back is quickly scratched and bruised, scraped across the rough rock surface and an occasional roof bolt or plate. The bolts are almost flush with the roof; lean over and you clear them. But running as fast as you can, it’s almost impossible to stay bent over far enough.
The smoke grows thicker by the second, a black cloud of death that chokes them as he and Ricky Dan pull Lloyd behind them in the dirt.
They glance sideways down every break—hoping. But there are no seals on any of them. The concussion of the explosion has blown down all the curtains and cinder block walls that direct good air down the rail line shaft to the face. Without them, the fan—if it wasn’t destroyed by the blast—is merely sucking clean air across the front 50 feet of the mine and right back out the other side. The rest of the mile-deep mine will fill completely with deadly smoke in a matter of minutes.
And the three miners know they can’t possibly make it all the way out before that happens.
Ricky Dan falls, coughing.
Will’s head spins; every breath is a searing agony. He wants to urge Ricky Dan to get up, to keep running, but he has no air to speak and he can feel his own strength begin to fail, to leak out of him like water circling a drain.
Ricky Dan stumbles to his feet and they push ahead. Past one more 50-foot coal pillar, one more break with a blown-out seal. Their eyes burn; smoke has filled the shaft all around them. Lloyd’s weight drags so heavy now they can barely stagger forward.
All at once, Ricky Dan drops Lloyd’s arm, stumbles to his right and vanishes in the smoke. Will collapses to his knees, coughing violently. It’s over. He can go no farther. He is so dizzy he starts to pitch forward into the dirt. Ricky Dan suddenly reappears out of the cloud of swirling dark. He grabs Lloyd’s arm and motions for Will to follow; he has no breath to speak. Will gets to his feet and lurches after Ricky Dan, dragging Lloyd after him. He sees yellow in the smoke, stumbles down through the break toward it and falls. Ricky Dan grabs him and shoves him under the curtain…into air! Fresh air!
CHAPTER 23
Will lies where he has fallen, coughing. He gasps in lungful after lungful of smokeless air as Ricky Dan drags Lloyd the final few feet. Then Ricky Dan pulls a piece of chalk from his pocket, ducks under the curtain into the shaft for a moment, then back inside where he collapses against a pile of rocks, debris, and trash.
The only sounds for a long time are Will coughing, Lloyd moaning, and Ricky Dan sobbing.
Will is so light-headed that thoughts and images flit across the surface of his mind like skaters on ice. Unable to concentrate, it takes several minutes for him to figure out where they’ve landed. They’re obviously in a break between two sets of curtains—but why would a break have curtains on both sides? And why hadn’t the concussion of the explosion blown out these curtains like it had every other seal they’d passed?
He can’t come up with an answer to the second question, but the answer to the first finally dawns on him.
He remembers they’d used a bre
ak between the rail line shaft and the belt line shaft as a dumpsite when they mucked out the tunnels several weeks ago, filled it with trash—pieces of broken timber, empty lime bags, bent roof bolts, and curtain nails along with debris from a rockfall and several tree stumps scraped up by the scoop. In addition to the curtain seal in the middle of the break, they’d hastily put up a curtain on the rail line end of it, too, to hide the mess during a “surprise” MSHA inspection.
Will slowly lifts himself off the floor, crawls over to the coal pillar and leans back against it. He winces in pain when the scrapes on his back come in contact with the rough surface of the coal. Then he pulls his legs up in front of him and rests his forearms on his knees.
“Reckon this seal held, these curtains didn’t blow ’cause there’s two of ’em?” he asks. His voice is hoarse from coughing and still rings hollow in the roar in his ears.
“Or ’cause the break’s mostly solid; there’s more rocks in here than air,” Lloyd says.
The pile of rocks and trash stretches from the curtain seal in the back to the curtain in the front, all the way to the roof and out across the floor, leaving only the small open area they’ve tumbled into.
Lloyd raises up on his elbows and drags himself slowly to the pillar, turns over carefully and eases into a sitting position. Then he leans against the pillar with his injured leg stretched straight out in front of him.
“Ya’ll need to do what you can to seal this off better,” he says, his pain-filled voice tight and breathy.
Ricky Dan doesn’t respond, doesn’t move. Will looks around. The enclosure is already about as airtight as they can make it. Curtains are strung from one roof bolt to the next. Using a masonry hammer, the ventilation man drives a large-head roof tack through the plastic and jams the tack between the roof and the 6-inch-square metal plate on the bolt. Then he pulls the plastic taut, snug against the roof and moves on to the next bolt plate. Curtain plastic comes in a two-hundred-foot roll, not in pre-cut standard-sized pieces, and Hob Bascomb always cuts curtains too large. So there is plenty of excess plastic on the bottom and sides of each curtain. Will piles rocks on the bottom plastic on the rail line side, then on the belt line side. The extra 2 or 3 feet of leftover plastic against the coal pillars form good seals on the sides of the enclosure.
The only light in the break comes from Lloyd’s and Ricky Dan’s headlamps, so until Lloyd turns toward him, Ricky Dan’s face is in shadow. When Lloyd looks at Ricky Dan, Will sees that the layer of black coal dust on Ricky Dan’s cheeks has been wiped almost clean by tears. It looks like his nose bled and blood oozes out of both ears, too.
“You okay, Ricky Dan?” Lloyd asks, speaking too loud. Ricky Dan turns to him and illuminates Lloyd’s face with his headlamp. It appears Lloyd’s right ear has bled, but not his nose. His lip is split, though, like somebody’d punched him in the face. It’s bleeding and he has managed to smear the blood all over his chin.
Ricky Dan’s breath wheezes in and out in a gasping rasp. “He’s gone, ain’t he,” he croaks. It isn’t a question. “Daddy hit old works and it blew.”
If his continuous miner had broken through into old works full of methane and the sparks from the bits hitting rock above the coal set it off, there’d be nothing left of Bowman or the machine—or anybody anywhere near it.
But the explosion could have been a spark that ignited methane built-up somewhere else on the face—rather than an abandoned tunnel full of it. A bomb, sure, but not as big a bomb. Or maybe the other crew hit old works. They’d all have died instantly, but there was a chance Bowman’s crew…
At this point there was no way to tell what had happened.
“You don’t know that, Ricky Dan,” Will says. “It coulda been—”
“No, it was Daddy.” He is an open wound, pours out pain with every word. “I know.” Ricky Dan’s breathing is labored and he’s seized by a fit of coughing. When he regains his breath, he bleats, “Daddy’s gone.” He puts his head in his hands and makes a kind of strangled sound that could be crying or coughing. Likely both.
Will glances at Lloyd, who is wiping at his split lip with the back of his shirt sleeve. What is there to say? Then he leans back carefully against the pillar and concentrates on breathing without coughing. And struggles desperately not to panic. It’s all he can do to sit still. He aches to leap out of this little rabbit hole and run and run and run until he is out from under the smothering mountain, out in the sunshine and the fresh air—out in the open.
But if he does, he’ll die. The air out there in the shaft is a lethal concoction of swirling death, and he knows the source of the boiling, sooty black smoke that’s as thick as chocolate pudding. Ignited by the explosion, the coal seam itself is on fire. And nothing short of an ocean full of water could put that kind of fire out. Will knows of a coal seam in West Virginia that has been on fire for 18 years! Along with setting the coal on fire, the explosion released methane and carbon monoxide, too. Take two or three breaths of the noxious smoke-and-poison-gas cocktail beyond the yellow plastic curtains and you’d be dead in less than a minute.
The three miners are trapped, marooned in the air bubble in the break until they’re rescued—or until their air runs out. They could have made it all the way to the mine entrance, of course, if they’d each had a self-rescuer—an 8-inch metal container with a charcoal filter and a mouthpiece. Self-rescuers provide more than an hour of breathable air and are standard issue in most coal mines. But not in Harlan #7.
Time falls off the clock. Will has no watch to measure the seconds as they tick away. His heart bangs in his chest like a lunatic piston, thump, thump, thump and he can’t do anything to slow it down. He gasps for air he knows he should try to conserve, but he continues to suck it into his lungs in great heaving gulps anyway. Terror, like swarms of dark, winged things, buzzes in his belly and makes his head spin.
Ricky Dan breaks the silence that may have lasted for 5 minutes or 5 hours—Will honestly does not know.
“I’m gonna turn off my headlamp,” he says to Lloyd. “Save battery power.” A charged headlamp will last about 12 hours, but both of theirs have been on since they came on shift at seven this morning—at least 6 hours ago. “We’ll swap out.”
Lloyd removes the headlamp from his helmet and hands it to Ricky Dan, who props it on a rock so it shines at the roof and bounces pale illumination out into the rest of the enclosure. Ricky Dan reaches up and switches his own light off. His breathing is still noisy and ragged, his voice a hoarse bark. Though Will is wheezing from the smoke he inhaled, Ricky Dan obviously got a worse dose. But other than his noisy breathing, Ricky Dan seems remarkably composed. The young man who sobbed brokenheartedly over the loss of his father just minutes—was it hours?—ago has vanished into a dark, untouchable calm. His damaged voice is level when he says, “We need to do the math here, boys.”
They know the arithmetic problem he’s talking about. In fact, Will has been trying to work it in his head but he can’t concentrate, gets more lost and confused with every effort.
All miners know the simple cave-in principle: one cubic yard of air will last one miner 1 hour.
The mine roof is a little over 4 feet off the floor. The distance between the coal pillars enclosed by the two curtains is 18 feet, and the back curtain has been placed where all seals are placed—halfway down the 50-foot pillars. So doing the math should mean multiplying 4 feet by 18 feet by 25 feet. Then divide the result by 27 to convert the number to cubic yards.
Except there are two critical variables here. To keep it from getting tangled up in the scoop, the front curtain was set back five feet into the break, which reduces the 25 feet of length to 20. But much more important are the rocks piled up to the roof and all the way across the far pillar. The pile takes up way more than half the enclosure.
“What’s the open area we got to work with? Four by twenty by…what?” Ricky Dan picks up Lloyd’s headlamp off the rocks and shines it around. “Ten feet, maybe?”
“More like eight,” Lloyd says.
“Ok—help me out, I never was no good at ciphers—4 times 20 times 8—
“I already done it, worked it out,” Lloyd says. His voice sounds hollow, but not because of the ring in Will’s ears. “Seven hours. With three of us breathin’ it, we got 7 hours of air.” Lloyd looks at his watch and when he speaks again, his voice is shaky. “Had 7 hours of air. That was almost 2 hours ago. Now we got 5.”
Terror as real as a gust of wind passes among them; the chill ruffles Will’s hair as it blows by.
Two hours! They’ve been here 2 hours already! Will is almost more shocked than frightened. Where did the time go?
But he doesn’t ponder the mystery for long. There’s an even more important one to consider: if 5 hours is the time they’ve got, how much time do they need? Lloyd has been a miner for 2 years, Ricky Dan for almost 10. As the rookie, Will has only a vague idea how long it takes to conduct a rescue operation.
“How long…the rescue team…how…?”
“Two to three hours on the front end,” Lloyd says. “Let’s say three.” It’s clear he’s already added and readded the numbers in his mind. “Gotta send out the call and gather up a rescue team. Some—probably most—are down in a mine somewhere workin’ and they gotta get ’em out and then get ’em here.”
Only the large coal companies have on-site rescue teams, but when an alert goes out that there’s been an accident anywhere, teams from every mine around converge on the scene. Harlan #7’s outside foreman had most certainly been on the phone to the federal and state mine inspectors, the Harlan County sheriff and rescue departments and the Kentucky State Police before the ground stopped shaking after the explosion.
