Coal and the coal mines

by Homer Greene

A first visit to a coal mine will be prolific of strange sights and sounds and of novel sensations. If one enters the mine by a shaft, the first noteworthy experience will be the descent on the cage or carriage. The visitor will probably be under the care of one of the mine foremen, without whose presence or authority he would not be allowed to descend, and indeed would not wish to. From the head to the foot of every shaft a speaking tube extends, and signaling apparatus, which is continued to the engine-room. These appliances are required by law. In these days the signals are often operated by electricity. At the head of the shaft is stationed a headman and at the foot of the shaft a footman, whose assistants aid in pushing cars on and off the carriages. The footman is notified of your coming, and you take your place on the empty safety carriage. It swings slightly as you step on to it, just enough to make you realize that you have passed from the stable to the unstable, and that besides the few inches of planking under your feet, there is nothing between you and the floor of the mine, five hundred feet or more below you. When all is ready the foreman cries: “Slack off!” the signal to the engineer is given, the carriage is slightly raised, the wings are withdrawn, and the descent begins. If the carriage goes down as rapidly as it ordinarily does your first sensation will be that of falling. It will seem as though that on which you were standing has been suddenly removed from beneath your feet, and your impulse will be to grasp for something above you. You will hardly have recovered from this sensation when it will seem to you that the motion of the carriage has been reversed, and that you are now going up more rapidly than you were at first descending. There will be an alternation of these sensations during the minute or two occupied in the descent, until finally the motion of the carriage becomes suddenly slower, and you feel it strike gently at the bottom of the shaft. As you step out into the darkness nothing is visible to you except the shifting flames of the workmen’s lamps; you cannot even see distinctly the men who carry them. You are given a seat on the footman’s bench near by until your eyes have accommodated themselves to the situation. After a few minutes you are able to distinguish objects that are ten or fifteen feet away. You can see through the murky atmosphere the rough walls of solid coal about you, the flat, black, moist roof overhead, the mine car tracks at your feet. The carriages appear and disappear, and are loaded and unloaded at the foot of the shaft, while the passage, at one side of which you sit, is filled with mine cars, mules, and driver boys in apparently inextricable confusion. The body of a mule looms up suddenly in front of you; you catch a glimpse of a boy hurrying by; a swarthy face, lighted up by the flame of a lamp gleams out of the darkness, but the body that belongs to it is in deep shadow, you cannot see it. Bare, brawny arms become visible and are withdrawn, men’s voices sound strange, there is a constant rumbling of cars, a regular clicking sound as the carriage stops and starts, incessant shouting by the boys; somewhere the sound of falling water. Such are the sights and sounds at the shaft’s foot. If now you pass in along the gangway, you will be apt to throw the light of your lamp to your feet to see where you are stepping. You will experience a sense of confinement in the narrow passage with its low roof and close, black walls. Occasionally you will have to crowd against the rib to let a trip of mine cars, drawn by a smoking mule, in charge of a boy with soiled face and greasy clothes, pass by. Perhaps you walk up one of the inclined planes to a counter gangway. You are lucky if you are in a mine where the roof is so high that you need not bend over as you walk. The men whom you meet have little lamps on their caps, smoking and flaring in the strong air current. You can see little of these persons except their soiled faces. Everything here is black and dingy; there is no color relief to outline the form of any object. Now you come to a door on the upper side of the gangway. A small boy jumps up from a bench and pulls the door open for the party to pass through. As it closes behind you the strong current of air nearly extinguishes your lamp. You walk along the airway for a little distance, and then you come to the foot of a chamber. Up somewhere in the darkness, apparently far away, you see lights twinkling, four of them. They appear and disappear, they bob up and down, they waver from side to side, till you wonder what strange contortions the people who carry them must be going through to give them such erratic movements. By and by there is a cry of “Fire!” the cry is repeated several times, three lights move down the chamber toward you and suddenly disappear, then the fourth one approaches apparently with more action, and disappears also. The men who carry them have hidden behind pillars. You wait one, two, three minutes, looking into darkness. Then there is a sudden wave-like movement in the air; it strikes your face, you feel it in your ears; the flame of your lamp is blown aside. Immediately there is the sound of an explosion and the crash of falling blocks of coal. The waves of disturbed air still touch your face gently. Soon the lights reappear, all four of them, and advance toward the face. In a minute they are swallowed up in the powder smoke that has rolled out from the blast; you see only a faint blur, and their movements are indistinct. But when the smoke has reached and passed you the air is clearer again, and the lights twinkle and dance as merrily as they did before the blast was fired. Now you go up the chamber, taking care not to stumble over the high caps, into the notches of which the wooden rails of the track are laid. On one side of you is a wall, built up with pieces of slate and bony coal and the refuse of the mine, on the other you can reach out your hand and touch the heavy wooden props that support the roof, and beyond the props there is darkness, or if the rib of coal is visible it is barely distinct. Up at the face there is a scene of great activity. Bare-armed men, without coat or vest, are working with bar and pick and shovel, moving the fallen coal from the face, breaking it, loading it into the mine car which stands near by. The miners are at the face prying down loose pieces of coal. One takes his lamp in his hand and flashes its light along the black, broken, shiny surface, deciding upon the best point to begin the next drill hole, discussing the matter with his companion, giving quick orders to the laborers, acting with energy and a will. He takes up his drill, runs his fingers across the edge of it professionally, balances it in his hands, and strikes a certain point on the face with it, turning it slightly at each stroke. He has taken his position, lying on his side perhaps, and then begins the regular tap, tap, of the drill into the coal. The laborers have loaded the mine car, removed the block from the wheel, and now, grasping the end of it firmly, hold back on it as it moves by gravity down the chamber to the gangway. You may follow it out, watch the driver boy as he attaches it to his trip, and go with him back to the foot of the shaft.

You have seen something of the operation of taking out coal, something of the ceaseless activity which pervades the working portions of the mine. But your visit to the mine has been at a time when hundreds of men are busy around you, when the rumble, the click, the tap, the noise of blasting, the sound of human voices, are incessant. If you were there alone, the only living being in the mine, you would experience a different set of sensations. If you stood or sat motionless you would find the silence oppressive. One who has not had this experience can have no adequate conception of the profound stillness of a deserted mine. On the surface of the earth one cannot find a time nor a place in which the ear is not assailed by noises; the stirring of the grasses in the field at midnight sends sound-waves traveling through space. Wherever there is life there is motion, and wherever there is motion there is sound. But down here there is no life, no motion, no sound. The silence is not only oppressive, it is painful, it becomes unbearable. No person could be long subjected to it and retain his reason; it would be like trying to live in an element to which the human body is not adapted. Suppose you are not only in silence but in darkness. There is no darkness on the surface of the earth that is at all comparable with the darkness of the mine. On the surface the eyes can grow accustomed to the deepest gloom of night. Clouds cannot shut out every ray of light from hidden moon or stars. But down in the mine, whether in night-time or daytime, there is no possible lightening up of the gloom by nature; she cannot send her brightest sunbeam through three hundred feet of solid rock. If one is in the mines without a light, he has before him, behind him, everywhere, utter blackness. To be lost in this way, a mile from any opening to day, in the midst of a confusion of galleries, in an abandoned mine, and to be compelled to feel one’s way to safety, is a painful experience, is one indeed which the writer himself has had.

There comes a time in the history of every mine when it is pervaded only by silence and darkness. All the coal that can be carried from it by the shaft or slope or other outlet has been mined and taken out, and the place is abandoned. But before this comes to pass the work of robbing the pillars must be done. This work consists in breaking from the pillars as much coal as can possibly be taken without too great risk to the workmen. The process is begun at the faces of the chambers, at the farthest extremity of the mine, and the work progresses constantly toward the shaft or other opening by which the coal thus obtained is taken out. It can readily be seen that robbing pillars is a dangerous business. For so soon as the column becomes too slender to support the roof it will give way and the slate and rock will come crashing down into the chamber. The workmen must be constantly on the alert, watchful for every sign of danger, but at the best some will be injured, some will perhaps be killed, by the falling masses from the roof. Yet this work must be done, otherwise coal mining would not be profitable, the waste would be too great. The coal that can be taken out under the prevailing systems will average only fifty per cent. of the whole body in the mine, and at least ten per cent. more will be lost in waste at the breaker, so that it behooves a company to have its pillars robbed as closely as possible. It is after all this has been done, and all tools and appliances have been removed from the mine, that it is abandoned. Perhaps the lower levels of it become filled with water. It is a waste of crushed pillars, fallen rock, and blocked passages. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of anything more weird and desolate than an abandoned mine. To walk or climb or creep through one is like walking with Dante through the regions of the lost. There are masses of rock piled up in great confusion to the jagged roof, dull surfaces of coal and slate, rotting timbers patched here and there with spots of snow-white fungus, black stretches of still water into which a bit of falling slate or coal will strike and send a thousand echoes rattling through the ghostly chambers. For a noise which on the surface of the earth will not break the quiet of a summer night, down here will almost make your heart stand still with fear, so startling is it in distinctness.

But it is not only in abandoned mines that falls of roof take place, nor yet alone at the unpropped face of breast or gangway. They are liable to occur at almost any point in any mine. Sometimes only a small piece of slate, not larger perhaps than a shingle, will come down; again the roof of an entire chamber will fall. It is possible that two or more chambers will be involved in the disturbance, and instances occasionally occur in a working mine where a fall covers an area many acres in extent. The falls that are limited in extent, that are confined to a single chamber or the face of a chamber, do not interfere with the pillars and can be readily cleared away. They are due to lack of support for the roof, to insufficient propping and injudicious blasting, and may, to a great extent, be guarded against successfully by care and watchfulness. But to foresee or prevent the more extended falls is often impossible. They are due to the general pressure of overlying strata over a considerable area, and both props and pillars give way under so great a strain. Sometimes they come without a moment’s warning; usually, however, their approach is indicated by unmistakable signs days or even weeks in advance of the actual fall. There will be cracks in the roof, small pieces of slate will drop to the floor, the distance between floor and roof will grow perceptibly less, pillars will bulge in the middle and little fragments of coal not larger than peas will break from them with a crackling sound and fall to the floor, until a deposit of fine coal is thus formed at the base of each pillar in the infected district. This crackling and falling is known as “working,” and this general condition is called a “crush” or a “squeeze.” If one stands quite still in a section of a mine where there is a squeeze, he will hear all about him, coming from the “working” pillars, these faint crackling noises, like the snapping of dry twigs under the feet. Sometimes the floor of underclay or the roof of shale is so soft that the pillar, instead of bulging or breaking, enters the strata above or below as the roof settles. When this occurs it is called “creeping.” In the steep-pitching veins the tendency of the pillars on the approach of a squeeze is to “slip,” that is, to move perceptibly down the incline. When these indications occur the workmen are withdrawn from the portion of the mine which is “working,” and vigorous measures are taken to counteract the pressure, by props and other supports placed under the roof. Sometimes this work is effectual, sometimes it is of no avail whatever. Often the fall comes before the first prop can be set; and when it comes the crash is terrible, the destruction is great. However, not many feet in thickness of the roof strata can come down; the slate and rock which first fall are broken and heaped in such irregular masses on the floor that they soon extend up to the roof and afford it new and effectual support. It is therefore only near the outcrop, or where the mine is not deep, that a fall in it disturbs the earth at the surface. But in the mining of the upper veins such disturbances were frequent. In passing through the coal regions one will occasionally see a depression, or a series of depressions, in the earth’s surface to which his attention will be attracted on account of their peculiar shape. They are not often more than ten or fifteen feet in depth, and though of irregular outline their approximate diameter seldom exceeds sixty feet. They are the surface indications of a fall in shallow mines, and are known as “caves” or “cave holes.” A section of country one or more acres in extent may, however, be so strewn with them as to make the land practically valueless.

When the upper vein in the Wyoming region was being mined, buildings on the surface were occasionally disturbed by these falls, but not often. If houses had been erected over a shallow mine before the coal was taken out, strong pillars were left under them to support the roof, and if the mining had already been done and the pillars robbed, no one would risk the erection of a building over a place liable to fall, for these places were known, and points above them on the surface could be definitely located. Sensational stories are sometimes started concerning a mining town or city that it is liable any night, while its inhabitants are asleep, to be engulfed in the depths of some mine, the vast cavities of which are spread out beneath it. It is almost unnecessary to say that such dangers are purely imaginary. There is probably not a town or city in the mining districts so located that a single stone of it in the populated portion would be disturbed by a fall in the mines underneath it, supposing there were mines underneath it, and that a fall is liable to take place in them. The areas of surface which could possibly be disturbed by a fall are too limited in extent, and are too well known, to make such a general catastrophe at all within the possibilities. The mines in the upper coal seams have for the most part been worked out and abandoned long ago, and the roof rock has settled into permanent position and rigidity. In the deep mines of the present day no fall, however extensive, could be felt at the surface. The broken masses of roof rock that come down first would have filled up the cavities and supported the strata above them, long before any perceptible movement could have reached the surface. The conditions that lead to surface falls in the Middle and Southern regions are somewhat different from those that prevail in the Wyoming field. In the first-mentioned districts steep-pitching coal seams are the rule, and they all come to the surface in lines of outcrop. In driving breasts up from the gangway of the first level, it is intended to leave from ten to twelve yards of coal between the face of the breast and the outcrop; while over the outcrop will be from twelve to twenty feet of soil. Any experienced miner can tell when the face of the breast is approaching the outcrop; the coal becomes softer, changes in color, breaks into smaller pieces, sometimes water runs down through. It is obviously unsafe to erect buildings on the line of this outcrop, or immediately inside of it, where the roof is thin. There is no assurance that the body of coal left will not slip down the breast; and the pillars of coal near the surface are so soft that any disturbance of this kind may cause them to give way and let down the entire thickness of strata above them. This was what occurred at the Stockton mines near Hazleton on December 18, 1869. Two double tenement houses were situated over the face of a worked-out breast, near the outcrop. About five o’clock in the morning the roof fell, carrying both houses down with it a distance of about eighty feet into the old breast. The inhabitants of one of the houses escaped from it a moment before it went down, those in the other house, ten in number, were carried into the mine, and were killed. The buildings in the pit took fire almost immediately, and rescue of the bodies crushed there among the débris was impossible.

GANGWAY IN KOHINOOR COLLIERY, NEAR SHENANDOAH, PA.

Accidents of this class are happily very rare. The exercise of ordinary judgment is sufficient to prevent them. The list of disasters due to falls of roof at the faces of chambers might, as has already been explained, be greatly reduced by the same means. But it is often impossible to prevent, or even to guard against, those falls which cover a large area, though their coming may be heralded for days by the working of pillars and all the indications of a squeeze. This was the case at the fall in the Carbondale mines in 1846, one of the most extensive falls that has ever been known. It covered an area of from forty to fifty acres, fourteen persons were killed by it, and the bodies of eight of them were never recovered. Although this disaster occurred more than forty years ago, the writer had the privilege, in the summer of 1888, of hearing an account of it from one of the survivors, Mr. Andrew Bryden. Mr. Bryden is now, and has been for many years, one of the general mining superintendents for the Pennsylvania Coal Company, with headquarters at Pittston, Pennsylvania. His story of the fall is as follows: “This disaster occurred on the twelfth day of January, 1846, at about eight o’clock in the forenoon. It was in Drifts No. 1 and No. 2 of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company’s mines at Carbondale. The part of the mine in which the caving in was most serious was on the plane heading, at the face of which I was at work. We heard the fall; it came like a thunderclap. We felt the concussion distinctly, and the rush of air occasioned by it put out our lights. I and those who were working with me knew that the fall had come, and we thought it better to try immediately to find our way out, although we had no idea that the fall had been so extensive or the calamity so great. We did not doubt but that we should be able to make our way along the faces of the chambers, next to the solid coal, to an opening at the outcrop; so we relighted our lamps and started. We had gone but a little way before we saw the effects of the tremendous rush of air. Loaded cars had been lifted and thrown from the track, and the heavy walls with which entrances were blocked had been torn out and the débris scattered through the chambers. We began then to believe that the fall had been a large one, but before we reached the line of it we met a party of twenty-five or thirty men. They were much frightened, and were running in toward the face of the heading, the point from which we had just come. They said that the entire mine had caved in; that the fall had extended close up to the faces of the chambers along the line of solid coal, leaving no possible means of escape in the direction we were going; and that the only safe place in the entire section was the place which we were leaving, at the face of the heading. This heading having been driven for some distance into the solid coal, the fall could not well reach in to the face of it. We were greatly discouraged by the news that these men told us, and we turned back and went with them in to the face of the heading. We had little hope of being able to get out through the body of the fall,—the way in which we did finally escape,—for we knew that the mine had been working, and that the roof had been breaking down that morning in the lower level. Indeed, we could hear it at that moment cracking, crashing, and falling with a great noise. We felt that the only safe place was at the face of the heading where we were, and most of the party clung closely to it. Some of us would go out occasionally to the last entrance to listen and investigate, but the noise of the still falling roof was so alarming that no one dared venture farther. After a long time spent thus in waiting I suggested that we should start out in parties of three or four, so that we should not be in each other’s way, and so that all of us should not be exposed to the same particular danger, and try to make our way through the fall. But the majority of the men were too much frightened to accede to this proposition; they were determined that we should all remain together. So when some of us started out the whole body rushed out after us, and followed along until we came to the line of the fall. We had succeeded in picking our way but a short distance through the fallen portion of the mine when we met my father, Alexander Bryden, coming toward us. He was foreman of the mine. We heard him calling us out before he reached us, and you may be sure that no more welcome sound ever struck upon our ears. He was outside when the fall came, but the thunder of it had scarcely ceased before he started in to learn its extent, and to rescue, if possible, the endangered men. He had not gone far when he met three men hastening toward the surface, who told him how extensive and dreadful the calamity had been, and urged him not to imperil his life by going farther. But my father was determined to go, and he pushed on. He made his way over hills of fallen rock, he crawled under leaning slabs of slate, he forced his body through apertures scarcely large enough to admit it, he hurried under hanging pieces of roof that crashed down in his path the moment he had passed; and finally he came to us. I have no doubt that he was as glad to find us and help us as we were to see him. Then he led us back through the terrible path by which he had come, and brought us every one beyond the fall to a place of safety. When we were there my father asked if any person had been left inside. He was told that one, Dennis Farrell, was at the face of his chamber, so badly injured across his spine that he could not walk. The miners in their retreat to the face of our heading had found him lying under a heavy piece of coal. They had rolled it off from him, but seeing that he could not walk they set him up in the corner of his chamber, thinking it might be as safe a place as the one to which they were going, and gave him a light and left him. My father asked if any one would go in with him and help carry Dennis out, but none of them dared to go; it was too dangerous a journey. So my father made his way back alone through the fallen mine, and found the crippled and imprisoned miner. The man was totally helpless, and my father lifted him to his back and carried him as far as he could. He drew him gently through the low and narrow passages of the fall, he climbed with him over the hills of broken rock, and finally he brought him out to where the other men were. They carried him to the surface, a mile farther, and then to his home. Dennis and his brother John were working the chamber together, and when the piece of coal fell upon Dennis his brother ran into the next chamber for help. He had scarcely got into it when the roof of the chamber fell and buried him, and he was never seen again, alive or dead.

“It was only a little while after we got out before the roof fell in on the way we had come and closed it up, and it was not opened again for a year afterward. But we knew there were others still in the mine, and after we got Farrell out my father organized a rescuing party, and kept up the search for the imprisoned miners night and day.

“John Hosie was in the mine when the fall came. He was one of the foremen, and he and my father were friends. Two days had passed in unavailing search for him, and it was thought that he must have been crushed under the rock with the rest. But on the morning of the third day my father met him face to face in one of the desolate fallen portions of the mine. He was in darkness, he was almost exhausted, his clothing was in rags, and his fingers were torn and bleeding. When he saw my father he could give utterance to only two words: ‘Oh, Bryden!’ he said, and then his heart failed him and he cried like a child. He had been caught in the fall and had lost his light, and though he was familiar with the passages of the mine he could not find his way along them on account of the débris with which they were filled, and the utter confusion into which everything had been thrown. He had wandered about for two days and nights in the fallen mine, clambering over jagged hills of rock, digging his way, with torn fingers, through masses of wreckage, in constant peril from falling roof and yawning pit, hungry, thirsty, and alone in the terrible darkness. What wonder that his heart gave way in the moment of rescue!