Into the Darkness

Yet tens of thousands of men, and scores of women, continue to go into the mines each day, digging up the brittle black rock that provides more than half the electricity used by Americans to light their homes and run their computers and plasma TVs. As generations of their forebears did, miners don hard hats and lamps and travel a quarter-mile or more into the Earth's crust, into a world without sun. They work in an environment that carries inherent risks that seem extreme to outsiders. Rocks fall from walls and ceilings, sometimes without warning. Coal mines naturally give off gases that are highly flammable, such as methane, or asphyxiating, such as carbon dioxide. Each year, miners are crushed, electrocuted, suffocated, buried, or even drowned in underground floods.

Ask coal miners about the risks, and they acknowledge them. But on the balance sheet of pluses and minuses, such hazards barely register. To many, coal mining is a good living, especially in rural southern West Virginia, where high-paying jobs are relatively few. With ample overtime -- 60-hour workweeks are typical -- miners can easily earn in excess of $80,000 a year, plus medical care and a pension. But that doesn't explain, by itself, why people keep coming back to the mines after tragedies. Or why many of them, when given a chance to take a safer job, choose to stay exactly where they are. And it doesn't account for the deep bond that miners say forms among men and women who work year after year in the dark, cramped space of a mine shaft, beneath an overburden of millions of tons of rock and dirt, where daily survival depends in part on the skill and competency of those around them.

"I Broke Down And Cried Like A Baby"

NOT UNTIL THE ALMA MINERS HAD PASSED THROUGH THE EMERGENCY DOOR DID THEY REALIZE THAT TWO OF THE GROUP WERE MISSING. The crew chief and two others scrambled back into the smoky tunnel, shouting the missing men's names for several minutes until the choking fumes drove them back. At that point, one of the men glanced down at his carbon monoxide detector and saw the numbers climb to 650 parts per million, a lethal level.

Reluctantly, the miners joined the scores of others waiting near the mine entrance for news of the missing men. Frantic mine operators scrambled to organize a rescue, calling on volunteers from other coal mines as far away as Pennsylvania and Kentucky.

Hours later, Plumley, one of those volunteers, stood at the portal of the same underground shaft, shielding his face from the intense heat and calculating the odds that Elvis and Don might still be alive. As he peered through an opening to look at the fire, a finger of scalding hot gas shot past him, blistering the skin on the top of his exposed ears.

Plumley had never set foot in the Alma mine before this night, and he didn't know the missing men's names. Yet he knew, in essence, who they were: They were West Virginia coal miners, just like him.

With the deaths of the Sago miners just a few weeks earlier, and the grimness of the Alma search setting in, Plumley found himself struggling to emotionally detach from the task at hand. He resolved to think less about the missing men and more about the mechanics of the search. To do otherwise was too painful. Too personal. Too close to home.

Plumley had worked his entire adult life around Pineville, W.Va., in a mine known as Pinnacle, a subterranean city of coal-lined streets and alleys that, in many ways, resembled this one. The Alma mine is a full hour's drive from Pinnacle -- even longer on a January night when the narrow mountain roads became even more treacherous. At 9:30 p.m. on January 19, when the call for rescue workers went out, most of the Pinnacle team's members had worked a full day in the mine and were already asleep, or nearly so. But when team leader Richard Crockett summoned them, each of the men slipped on his boots and drove to the rendezvous point at the team training center. Even Darren Blankenship, who had missed work that day because of a severe cold, turned out for the rescue.

By 11:30 p.m., the Pinnacle team had arrived at the entrance to the Alma mine, joining a larger force that would eventually include rescuers from 16 mines. Inching their way through dense smoke, the Pinnacle miners were halted by a wall of heat coming up from the burning coal. "We would look down into the area of the fire, and it was just one huge, orange glow," recalls Blankenship. "Coal was burning. So was the fabric of the conveyor belt, the rollers. Everything that was remotely combustible was on fire."

Working in shifts, the group spent two days beating back the flames until the tunnels could be safely entered. Then they split up into groups and began combing the smoky tunnels for the missing men. As they so often did, Plumley, Blankenship and Crockett ended up together.

"From where I was in the middle, I could barely make out the lights on the helmets of the others," Crockett says. "And they couldn't see each other at all."

After hours of searching, the three friends returned to an underground staging area for fresh oxygen bottles, when word came that Don's body had been found. The young miner was discovered lying face down, about 300 yards from the emergency door through which the surviving minors had escaped. He was still wearing his oxygen mask, goggles, miner's hat and the nametag that read "Don." The cause of death was asphyxiation. Recovery teams would find his tools and lunch pail, still containing the sandwiches he had packed that morning.