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."

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