Into the Darkness

Here and there, a break in the dust coating allows a glimpse of the coal itself, a 4-foot-thick slab of black rock sandwiched between layers of shale and sandstone.

In the glare of headlamps, it sparkles like millions of tiny black sequins.

But as the transport scuttles along, the single impression that crowds out all others is the sheer vastness of the place. The tunnels stretch on, mile after mile, bisected by countless smaller tunnels leading off into blackness. All told, this underground city covers 40 square miles, an area nearly two-thirds the size of the District of Columbia. It is traversed by hundreds of miles of tunnels and chambers, each carved out by people and machines.

Nearly all this space is empty and essentially abandoned. But a flickering of lights, like distant fireflies, signals the approach of the coal face, the active mining area and the reason for this massive hole in the earth. The coal here is nearly 1,300 feet below the surface, and it lies in a thick band that follows the contour of an ancient landscape of swamp forests that existed in this part of North America more than 300 million years ago. The decaying remains of plants deposited here over millennia were eventually buried under layers of sediment and squeezed under immense pressure to form the carbonized substance that humans have used for fuel since Roman times. As a reminder of the extreme age of the rock, miners daily encounter fossilized remains of ancient trees and plants that last saw sunlight more than 200 million years before Tyrannosaurus rex lived here. Entire tree stumps of petrified wood sometimes fall from mine ceilings, creating such a hazard that miners refer to them as "widow makers."

At the coal face, the air, always cool under-ground, becomes damp and slightly hazy from the combination of coal dust and the mist from giant sprayers that drench the newly cut coal to reduce the risk of explosions and fires. The silence of the upper mine is replaced by a jumble of sounds: shouts, the hiss of water, the clacking of conveyor belts and, finally, the low throbbing of the extra-ordinary, 1,000-foot-long machine that scrapes the coal from the bedrock. The longwall plow, as it is known, costs $50 million and takes weeks to set up. But once working, the plow's carbide-tipped claws slice through coal with breathtaking speed. In a typical year, the plow will deliver 4 million tons of coal, or enough to fill 350 rail cars.

To prepare an area for longwall mining, workers first use smaller tunneling machines to dig a perimeter around a huge underground block of coal measuring up to two miles wide. Next, they position the plow on a track and drag it across the width of the coal block, scraping off a few inches of coal like a giant cheese grater. With each slice, a row of mobile, hydraulic jacks called shields lurches forward, pressing the plow ever deeper into the coal seam, allowing the black rock to tumble into conveyor belts for the nine-mile trip back to the surface.

Four times during each 10-hour shift, a supervisor must crawl beneath the 1,000-foot line of advancing shields to check equipment and test levels of methane, a natural byproduct of plant decay released from the coal as it's exposed. Both methane gas and airborne coal dust are highly explosive, and modern coal mines build elaborate ventilation systems to keep them in check.

These are some of the toughest, least comfortable and arguably most dangerous jobs in the mine. But those who sign up to work at the longwall say they prefer being at the heart of the action.

Leslie Hurley, 48, does most of the crawling on the "hoot owl," or overnight, shift. It takes 30 minutes each way, sloshing through water and mud and wriggling over pipes and cables, to pass from one end of the shields to the other. When the coal seam is narrow, the height of the crawl space drops to as little as 36 inches.

The petite but muscular Hurley, a one-time aspiring schoolteacher who took a mining job when she ran out of college tuition money, insists it's the best job she's ever had. She says she likes it precisely because it's hard -- the same reason she prefers grueling hikes on the Appalachian trail to leisurely strolls through the local shopping mall. "You push your body to the point that it can't go further," she says, "and that night when you sleep, you have the best dreams. It's like you've done all you can do."

Could she have done something else? She shrugs. After nearly three decades as a miner, the question seems irrelevant. "I don't want to do anything else. I don't know that I could do something else," she says. "I'm good at what I do, and now it's like a security blanket. None of us want change."

"That hole in the ground has been a gravy train"

ON THIS DAY, MIKE PLUMLEY IS FAR FROM THE LONGWALL, walking alone through a pitch-dark back tunnel. He will pass much of his day in this fashion, rarely seeing another soul. The beam of his helmet lamp is fixed straight ahead, but his eyes simultaneously scan ceiling and floor, looking for cracks, fallen rocks, sagging roofs, water leaks, anything that might signal trouble. The mine's only hourly employee with an MBA degree works as a pumper, a sort of troubleshooter-at-large who oversees a complex network of drainage lines and pumps intended to keep the mine from filling with groundwater.