Dirty Work

Life and death in Appalachia's coal country.

Seams of Coal

Coal runs through Appalachian West Virginia in grimy seams that slice through every family, across generations. Men stand next to their pickups pumping gas, the fluorescent stripes on their pant legs identifying them as miners. Barely 150 feet from an elementary school, the coal gets a chemical bath before it's loaded onto open railcars that snake through the hollows to plants across the country. Half of the nation's electric power comes from coal. Last year, the industry made headlines when 12 men died after a mine explosion in Sago, West Virginia, raising issues of safety once again. Digging deep into underground passages where coal deposits are narrow and the harvest is leaner than before is costly and dangerous. That process has given rise to a more efficient, though highly controversial method -- shearing tops off mountains to expose the coal.

Environmentalists oppose it, but advocates argue the technique helps Appalachia's coal industry to compete with the highly productive strip mines of the West.

We wanted to know how these changes were affecting underground coal miners and their families. So Reader's Digest sent a reporter to southern West Virginia to find out.

Clyde McKnight, Jr., steers his weathered silver Camry through a mountain pass on the way to the Harris No. 1 Mine in Boone County, West Virginia. Six days a week, he sets out at 5 a.m. and works a ten-hour shift there. He points at a six-inch band of coal running alongside the road and says it's what a coal miner encounters underground. "The seam is pressed in between two layers of rock," McKnight says. "It rises and falls and twists and turns."

The days of blasting with dynamite and wielding picks are long over; today, underground miners ply the coal seams with enormous computerized shears. Improvements in technology have led to a 96 percent increase in coal production since 1973, requiring a work force a third of the size it was 50 years ago. Inside the mines, the main working area is well lit, and white curtains hang throughout to keep coal dust out of the air. Still, says McKnight, "it takes a certain kind of person to do this work. You've got to listen to the mountain as it pops and cracks. As you advance the machines, the mountain falls in behind."

Black Lung Disease

McKnight, 51, a utility man at Harris No. 1, began working underground in 1976. A fourth-generation miner, he has experienced the death of a friend, his own hour-long burial in rubble, and subterranean geological wonders most of us will never see. Once he found hanging overhead an entire petrified tree that predated the dinosaurs. "It was the prettiest thing I've ever seen in my life," he says.

When nine Pennsylvania coal miners were trapped underground in 2002, Anita Cecil, a single mother of a 12-year-old, sat glued to the television, praying for their safety. Four years later, she became a miner herself, following in the footsteps of her father, who worked the mines for 33 years. Today a sticker on the back of her truck reads "Chicks Dig It Too."

Says Cecil, 31, "There's something different about coal miners. There's a trust you don't get with any other group of people." She swears the men at her mine have been completely accepting of a woman in their midst.

Miners start at about $20 per hour, a wage nearly impossible to get elsewhere in rural southern West Virginia. Cecil's job has allowed her to remodel her home and add a basketball court for her son, Christopher.

Though her income doesn't depend on how much coal she produces -- the old "root hog or die" practice -- the business today is a 24/7 proposition. Like many new miners, Cecil got stuck working the second shift -- the hours her son wasn't in school -- when she first started. Still, she's grateful for the pay, which she hopes will help send her boy to college.

On his day off, Clyde McKnight sits on a recliner in the trailer he shares with his wife, Cheryl, talking on the phone with their son, Clyde III. The 25-year-old has done four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and was recently working as a prison guard in West Virginia. Married with a one-year-old son, he has now decided to reenlist with the Marines as a sergeant for four more years.

The news -- that in all likelihood their son is headed back into harm's way for the fifth time in six years -- does not resonate as one might imagine. Truth is, Cheryl says, she would rather he be fighting in foreign wars than going underground every day.

"A lot of the good, big coal is gone," her husband explains. "Now you have to go deeper into the mines. Once you get below creek level, gas builds up and can become explosive. You don't want to think of your kids working in those conditions. Plus, there's the long-term stuff to worry about."

The "long-term stuff" is black lung disease. Miners who breathe coal dust for decades often end up with the disabling and deadly condition. Federal legislation passed in 1969 established a fund to compensate miners with black lung, but only about 13 percent of claims result in payment -- even for McKnight, who had part of a lung removed seven years ago. Respirators and dust-control measures have improved things, but McKnight doesn't believe the risk is gone. "If you come home after a ten-hour shift with coal dust in your nostrils," he says, "you've got coal dust in your lungs too."

Fighting for the Union

It was in battling such conditions that the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) rose to prominence in the early 20th century, helping secure collective bargaining power and health and retirement benefits for its workers. While the majority of local miners once belonged to the union, a West Virginia Coal Association spokesman says that today, only 25 to 30 percent do. McKnight shudders to see young men surrendering union membership for "the quick dollar" they get by signing onto a nonunion outfit. Often under cover of darkness, he still knocks on coal miners' doors to try to convince them to organize. He has been chased off people's property more times than he can remember. "But everything we have, we have because our fathers and grandfathers shed blood for it," he continues. "To just walk away from that is wrong."

Andrew Lucas works at a nonunion mine. At 23, with a wife, a new house, and an eight-month-old son, he isn't thinking about anyone's grandfather.

Already, Lucas has been injured while at work. His job is to insert long bolts overhead to keep the mine ceiling from caving in. One day a piece of slate the size of a classroom chalkboard, only thicker, came down, pinning him. Luckily, he walked away.

His wife, Veronica, comes from a mining family; she fears for her husband's safety. "Every miner's wife is the same way," she says. "You try not to think about it."

Clyde McKnight once coached Lucas in football. What goes unsaid when the two talk about the union is that, these days, many think it's just for old guys. The countryside is teeming with older, laid-off union miners; they get preference when a union job comes up. Young men like Lucas, who want to feed their families, can take a nonunion job or leave the area. "The ratio of young to old in my mine is about six to four," Lucas says. McKnight estimates that 90 percent of the workers at his mine are older than 40.

Lucas says he gets good benefits from his nonunion company. McKnight argues that the reason for preserving the union is for the day those benefits are no longer available.

Experts expect West Virginia's production to peak within the next couple of decades; the underground Appalachian coal miner could one day become an endangered species.

McKnight takes in a lungful of the mountain air as he drives away from the Lucas home. He will keep mining coal until he is no longer able. And, he says, he will fight for the union to his dying breath. But, as the last in a long line of McKnight coal miners, what happens after he is gone is a problem for somebody else's son.