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Death Underground: A three part series

By The Associated Press

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Thirteen men lost their lives on Sept. 23, 2001, in America's worst mining disaster in 17 years. This is the first part of "Death Underground," a three-part serial that tells the story of what happened and why. It is a story of U.S. energy policy, federal mining regulations and the bravery of working men.

BROOKWOOD, Ala. - A half-mile underground, the earth talks. Usually it just murmurs, but when a few million tons of rock come alive overhead, it makes a racket.

On the evening of Sept. 23, 2001, when most of the country was still caught up in the aftermath of 9/11, Tony Key stood in the middle of a 20-foot-wide tunnel burrowed through the heart of Alabama's Blue Creek coal seam, his helmet light tracing an arc through the blackness.

The earth groaned and rumbled like a restless beast as rock shifted above the mine's Four Section.

A foot above his head, cracks big enough to poke a fist through snaked across the ceiling. Water dripped from steel rods drilled into the roof to secure it.

The soft-spoken husband and father had 20 years of experience underground, most of them here, at Jim Walter Resources No. 5 mine, the nation's deepest vertical shaft coal mine. He knew what had to be done.

Working quickly, he and two other miners stacked chunks of wood Lincoln Log-style to bolster the ceiling. As one wedged in a final piece, a foot-long rock broke loose and hit him square on his hard hat. The three men stepped back.

Suddenly, the rumbling increased. Roof rods began snapping like .22-caliber rifle shots. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!

Then, with a loud "whoosh," a section of roof, big as a house, crashed down just 200 feet away.

Nobody got too excited.

Roof falls are not uncommon underground. As his companions sat down to swig water from their jugs, Key started back toward the section entrance to find a phone to notify federal mine inspectors.

As he moved down the tunnel, the mine's air currents blowing flecks of coal dust into his face, the mine was quiet - but not for long.

Mine is maze of tunnels

The No. 5 mine lies about 40 miles southwest of Birmingham in Brookwood, population 1,500.

Riding an elevator that drops 15 feet per second, it takes miners 31/2 minutes to descend the 2,140 feet to the bottom. There, they enter a maze of interconnected caverns and honeycombed tunnels that cover 9.2 square miles. Working three round-the-clock shifts, seven days a week, the 382 employees mine one of the most fertile coal seams in the country.

The work area called Four Section lies at the end of a tunnel about three miles east of the elevator shaft, the closest way out. Workers there first noticed the roof creaking on Friday, two days before the roof fall.

A miner spent several hours on the day shift pumping 30 10-foot-long steel rods into the roof to bolster it.

The mine's government-approved roof control plan called for steel I-beams and straps to be used when the cracking becomes severe, but supervisors didn't think they were needed. The diminished clamor seemed to indicate the rods were doing the job.

Four Section and adjoining Six Section were "under development." Mining machines, with large, rotating, drum-shaped heads studded with teeth, were hollowing out the coal in a carefully engineered pattern that left large walls of coal, more than 120-feet long, in place to help support the roof.

The plan was to connect the two cavernous sections in the back to form a straight, 850-foot "longwall" across the face of the coal seam. Then a machine would cut steadily back and forth across the coal face.

Friday evening, miners brought in some heavy equipment, including an 8-ton, battery-charging station. With the roof fixed, it seemed safe to leave the high-voltage electrical equipment there over the weekend. But on Sunday, an employee making safety checks noticed a chunk of a concrete wall crumbling under the weight of the ceiling.

Mine fatalities rising again

The men who work Jim Walter Resources No. 5 mine labor daily in a permanent night. A misstep can lead to crippling injury or even death. The specter of black lung disease always looms.

Their lives, and the lives of 95,000 other coal miners across America, connect directly to yours every time you turn on a light or recharge your cell phone. Today, more than half of the nation's electricity is still generated by burning coal.

In fact, coal mining is a resurgent industry, recovering from nearly two decades of environmental backlash that made cleaner-burning natural gas the darling of utility companies.

As coal company profits have rebounded, so have fatal mine accidents.

Death has always haunted the mines. A century ago, 2,000 to 3,000 men perished annually in coal mine accidents. By the 1980s, safety regulations and better technology had driven annual fatalities down to double digits. Fatal accidents reached a low of 29 in 1998, according to the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Since then, they have been on the rise. Last year, 42 coal miners perished.

Union officials such as Joe Main, head of safety for the United Mine Workers of America, say that safety enforcement declined during the Clinton years and has worsened under the Bush administration.

As evidence, Main points to a steep drop nationwide in citations for "serious and substantial" violations, the kind that draw the stiffest penalties. But federal mine agency head, Assistant Secretary of Labor David Lauriski, says the numbers simply mean mines are becoming safer.

No. 5 was a comparatively dangerous, problem-plagued mine.

In 1995, it led the country in safety violations and had one of the highest accident rates. Injuries and fines for violations dropped sharply over the next three years as Jim Walter made improvements; but then both began increasing again as production boomed.

Federal mine agency records for No. 5 show some oddities. The mine had the third most violations in the country in 2000 but ranked only 62nd for serious and substantial violations.

Furthermore, of 520 violations cited in 2000, all but 16 were recorded as affecting only one miner, diminishing the fines faced by the company. Some of these single-miner violations were for powdery coal dust in thousands of feet of tunnels. Coal dust makes a mine prone to explosion.

Company officials say the figures reflect how quickly they respond to safety issues. Union official Main, however, says federal mine agency inspectors were cutting breaks for Jim Walter Resources, a Florida-based conglomerate that brings in $2 billion a year.

Main says the company was routinely warned ahead of time about "surprise" inspections, that federal mine agency bosses frequently overrode their inspectors' citations, that inspectors often failed to follow up to check if violations were remedied.

Federal mine agency head Lauriski declined to comment on the allegations, but the agency has launched an internal review.

In September 2001, the No. 5 mine was in the midst of a quarterly inspection. Federal mine agency officials had found more than 50 violations, including 10 "significant and substantial" ones.

On the day things suddenly went wrong, the mine had 31 outstanding violations, including an accumulation of combustible coal dust and ventilation problems on Four Section. The deadline for fixing them had passed, and no inspector had followed up.

Roof rumbles a warning

The roof in Four Section was rumbling. A few men in the skeleton crew of 32 workers that started its shift at 3 p.m. that Sunday needed to get to work building wooden roof supports called "cribs."

Michael McIe was among the men assigned to support the roof.

He and three others waited for a manbus, a motorized rail cart, to take them on the half-hour ride to the section. By the time the men got to Four Section and started building the cribs it was 4 p.m.

They had been at it for about an hour and 15 minutes when the house-sized section of roof fell.

As Key, the foreman on the job, turned away to find a telephone to alert inspectors, his first thought was of gas - the colorless, odorless methane that lurks in the Blue Creek coal seam.

Methane is commonly associated with coal, but Jim Walter Resources No. 5 is an especially gassy mine. Here, boreholes driven into the coal beds to free trapped methane are not only a safety measure but also a profitable enterprise. Twenty million cubic feet of methane a day is liberated from No. 5 and sold to a natural gas company.

Roof falls can release pockets of gas into the tunnels; if the air in them becomes 5 percent to 15 percent methane, the slightest spark can cause an explosion.

Mike Boyd and several other miners said workers often got flak from company bosses if they turned off machinery because of concerns about gas. Company officials denied it.

Key had walked only a few feet up the tunnel when a tremor of worry passed through him. He couldn't see what had happened to the battery charger that had been brought in on Friday. Had the roof fall crushed it?

Unseen behind the wall of rock, the charger was still running, its electric arc sparking in the darkness, waiting for fuel.

PART 2: Death Underground

This is the second of a three-part serial that tells the story of what happened underground during America's worst mining disaster in nearly two decades.

BROOKWOOD, Ala. - Tony Key heard the explosion before he felt it. He half-turned to look and found himself hurtling through the air.

He bounced several times on his side before coming to rest 50 feet away, half-buried in a pile of dirt and coal, disoriented and blinded by the swirl of coal dust.

As he clawed his way out of the rubble, he reached for the self-rescue apparatus in a tube on his belt. In the darkness, he fumbled with the mouthpiece and activated the airbag designed to convert carbon monoxide into breathable oxygen.

Key was terrified.

It was 5:15 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 23, 2001. Less than a minute had passed since the roof fall in Four Section of the No. 5 mine, but it had been time enough for a pocket of gas to escape, reach the electric arc of the battery charger and ignite.

A few yards from Key, Michael McIe had the vague feeling that he was on fire. He remembered the mantra his young daughter recited from school: stop, drop and roll. That's what he did, rolling about in the dark and patting himself frantically.

McIe heard moaning. He hollered for his friend, Gaston Adams Jr., the third man who had been working on the roof with them. McIe dragged himself toward Adams' headlamp, the only one still working.

McIe found his friend on the ground, surrounded by chunks of concrete blasted from the nearby wall, unable to move.

Adams gave him his light to go for help.

With Key clinging to his work belt, McIe headed down the tunnel in the direction of the section entrance, several hundred yards away.

They stumbled into Skip Palmer, who'd been ferrying materials to Four Section on a motorized rail cart.

The three of them got in the cart and rode until they could ride no farther. Across the tracks, pipes from Four Section's ventilation system lay in a useless heap.

Closer to the source of the blast, the force of the explosion had shattered concrete walls, another part of the ventilation system that carried good air into the mine and methane-laden air out.

Any methane seeping into Four Section now had no way to get out.

Key made his way down the tunnel on foot, looking for a phone. By now, three other miners working nearby had made their way up the passageway to investigate.

Key and two of the men climbed into a manbus and made it to the phone.

"There's been an explosion," Key told the control room up on the surface. "We need lots of help. Mine rescue, helicopters, ambulances, everything."

Thirty-two men were scattered throughout the vast Jim Walter No. 5 mine that evening.

Had they scrambled to the surface, only Adams, too injured to make it out, would have perished. But that is not what they did. Like the New York City police and firefighters who, just days before, had rushed to the World Trade Center towers, the miners raced not from danger but toward it.

Miners have a creed: When trouble happens, you save your brothers. You also save your livelihood. You save the mine.

"Get the hell out of here"

After Key made his call, he realized his back was bothering him. Soon, McIe and Palmer emerged from Four Section on a rail cart. They picked up Key and started toward the mine entrance.

Through the gloom they saw a light in the distance. It was a manbus carrying six men who had come from two miles away. It had been 20 or 30 minutes since the explosion. The first help had arrived.

McIe, in pain from three cracked ribs, recognized Bit Boyd, an old fishing buddy and one of several men who had been vocal recently about gas problems in the mine.

McIe and Palmer clambered into the back seat of the manbus. The rescuers helped Key lie down in front. A man was designated to bring them out.

"Get the hell out of here," Boyd told them.

Before heading off in the direction of the mine entrance, Key warned the rescuers that with the ventilation system in ruins and the battery possibly on fire, Four Section might explode again.

As the injured men headed down the tracks, Boyd and his four remaining companions headed the other way, toward Four Section.

Dave Blevins, the foreman in charge of the shift that evening, was near the elevator shaft when he first got word of trouble. He was popular with the men for his attention to safety and for his fairness.

He'd been at work a little over an hour when he heard about the trouble in Four Section, 31/2 miles east. He hopped on a manbus and headed that way.

Just ahead of Blevins, 21/2 miles west of the roof fall, Ricky Rose and two other "belt crew" workers were busy repairing a section of the mine's conveyer belt. A phone near them began bleating out an urgent page.

It was the control room, Rose says, alerting them that there had been an "ignition" of gas in Four Section and asking them to go help put it out.

Ignitions are fairly common and usually no cause for alarm, but it is paramount to jump on them quickly before they race out of control.

According to Rose, the control room made no mention of an explosion. Rose and several other miners say this was the first of several conflicting stories the control room relayed.

Harry House, the control room operator that day, surveyed an array of instruments that monitored activity underground. However, it is unclear how much information he had in the crucial hour after the explosion. House has not responded to requests for an interview but has told federal investigators he consistently informed miners there had been an explosion.

Rose's group mounted a rail cart and headed toward Four Section. A short distance down the track, they flagged down their boss and four other belt crew workers to explain where they were heading.

Were they absolutely sure? a supervisor asked. They needed to fix the belt in time for the next shift.

House was insistent, they explained.

Rose and his two companions rode on in silence, winding through the tunnels, until one of them suddenly spoke up.

"I got a bad feeling about this," he said.

Why were they going to fight a fire that was a half-hour away? By the time they got there, it would either be out or burning out of control.

A second miner agreed: They should be heading for the surface.

Rose listened in silence. He was a gruff, chain-smoking, Harley-Davidson aficionado. Usually nothing scared him.

But quietly he started to pray.

Should Four Section explode again, fire and debris would have nowhere to go but straight at them through the tunnels.

The rescuers were going down the barrel of a gun.

A half-mile underground, Tony Key trod down a tunnel, flecks of coal dust blowing in his face. He was looking for a telephone to alert mine inspectors that a house-size section of roof had just caved in. Key knew that this was a particularly gassy mine, and that a battery charger - its electric arc a potential ignition source - might still be running on the other side of the cave-in. A tremor of worry passed through him.

PART 3: Death Underground

This is the last part of a three-part serial that tells the story of what happened during America's worst mining disaster in nearly two decades.

BROOKWOOD, Ala. - Gas was slowly gathering in the mine's Four Section. A half-hour after the first explosion, it was once again a powder keg.

By now, three miners from a neighboring work area had made their way to Four Section and reached Gaston Adams Jr., the lone man who had been too badly injured to make it out.

Bit Boyd and four men who joined him along the way were in two manbuses, approaching the entrance to Four Section. Just behind them, about a quarter of a mile back, 11 more miners gathered to decide what to do.

Ricky Rose was there with seven others from his "belt crew." Dave Blevins was there with two men he had found spraying tunnels with flame retardant. Many miners felt the company had been scrimping lately on fireproofing material, a charge the company denied.

Blevins, one of the No. 5 mine's most respected foremen, took charge.

He sent Rose and three others off to find a telephone and alert the control room that three injured men were on their way out. And he asked for volunteers to go with him to fight the fire they believed was burning in Four Section.

Immediately, three men from the belt crew jumped on the bus.

Leaving three miners behind to await Rose's return, Blevins and his three volunteers drove toward danger, Boyd's group already on the move ahead of him. Now a dozen men were inside Four Section or approaching the entrance.

Rose had ridden about two minutes, searching for a telephone, when he bumped into a crew coming from the mine's main production area. They needed to go help fight the fire, Rose told them. The longwall crew couldn't believe what they were hearing. The control room, they said, had just ordered them to evacuate.

Rose didn't know what to make of that. Seconds later, out of the corner of his eye, he saw dust swirling straight toward him down the tunnel.

Four Section had exploded again, 50 minutes after the first blast, this time much more powerfully. Flames at 2,500 degrees barreled through the section at 900 feet per second. At the spot of ignition, the blast tore out a crater 50 long and 30 feet deep.

Eight men - the three who had first reached Adams and Boyd's group of five - were hurled through the air. A 1,500 pound rock landed on Adams.

A ball of fire rushed over the eight men so quickly that it barely burned them, but it consumed all the oxygen in the section.

Lying there in the darkness, in a fierce rain of debris and coal dust, all eight suffocated.

At the entrance to the section, a manbus carrying Blevins and two of his volunteers was blown off its tracks. When it slammed back down, Blevins was crushed. Then the fireball rushed past, sucking the oxygen from the air, killing the other two.

The fireball rolled on through the tunnels, setting equipment on fire and seeking an outlet. It found an air shaft, rocketed 2,100 feet up and lighted the evening sky. By diverting the fireball, the shaft saved Rose.

Around him, Rose heard men yelling to get out. He felt his way back to the manbus and flipped on the headlight switch. The soot was so thick that he couldn't tell if it was working. As others piled on, he grabbed the gas lever and raced toward the mine entrance.

A few hundred yards closer to the blast, the three men who had been waiting for Rose to return scrambled to their feet. Holding onto one another, they felt their way along the tracks in pitch darkness for 15 minutes before finding clean air.

There they encountered a miner just arriving from another part of the mine. The control room operator had told him a ventilation wall had fallen and sent him to help, he said. The others ordered him to go back the way he came.

It took Rose and his group 20 minutes to reach the elevator shaft. It was 6:30 p.m., and the elevator cage was still up top.

Rose grabbed the telephone: "You got people on the bottom that's scared to death and want to come out." He called three times before the cage came.

Rescuers enter the mine

The mine's rescue team interviewed the 19 miners who escaped to learn what they were dealing with. Of the 32 men who had been working the shift, 13 were still inside.

About 8 p.m., rescuers entered the mine. They found Raymond Ashworth, Blevins' third volunteer, near the Four Section entrance. He was conscious but burned from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.

At 11:30 p.m, he was evacuated from the mine and flown to a hospital. The next day, he died.

At the entrance of Four Section, the searchers found the bodies of Blevins and his two other men. The methane concentration was high. So was carbon monoxide, indicating that the section was still burning.

About 6:30 a.m., with no hope of finding more survivors, the rescue team pulled out.

That morning, the mine was flooded to put out fires raging in the tunnels. On Nov. 2, more than five weeks after the explosion, searchers recovered three bodies at the entrance to Four Section. Six days later, the last nine bodies were found.

Questions abound

The mine reopened in mid-December.

Today, there are still more questions than answers: Should more have been done to fix the roof in Four Section before the accident? Had the company been dealing adequately with the mine's gas problems? Why were so many men directed to a section of the mine that had already exploded once? The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration has investigated but has not completed its report.

But the agency has admonished the mine owner, Jim Walter Resources, for having "no responsible person who took control of the situation" during the accident. The agency also declared the mine's firefighting plan inadequate.

The company declined to comment on firefighting procedures, citing the pending investigation. But the mine's firefighting plan has been revised to improve coordination.

In recent months, the mine has been cited for numerous violations, including accumulations of coal dust, ventilation problems and inadequate roof support.

The Bush administration's new budget calls for a 5 percent cut in funding for the MSHA's coal mine enforcement. Experts say that could mean fewer inspectors.

In September, 1,000 miners, family members and company officials marked the first anniversary of the accident by erecting a memorial.

Ten of the 13 families that lost breadwinners have filed wrongful-death lawsuits against the company, alleging negligence.

Jim Walter Resources denies it was negligent and characterizes the accident as unforeseeable.

Rose, the miner who prayed as he headed toward Four Section after the first explosion, is among those who have gone back underground. It's the only work he knows.

After the mine reopened, he went to the spot where his crewmates' bodies were found, knelt in the coal dust and wept.

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