Summer reading: Miners face to face with death

By DAVID HASTINGS

Jeff Goodell: Our Story

Hyperion,

$47.95 (due in NZ next month)



Down in the black depths of the Quecreek coalmine in Pennsylvania, a man's worth is measured by the machinery he operates.

In those dark and dirty catacombs, where the miners stoop in tunnels only 1.2m (4ft) high, Moe Popernack stood tall as the operator of what was known as the biggest, baddest machine underground - a 55-tonne mechanical miner which chewed into the coal face with a set of carbide steel teeth.

When it came to controlling the mechanical beast, Popernack had a justifiable reputation as the best in the business. Under his knowing hand, the miner would extract the largest amount of coal for the least possible effort.

The work was dangerous because of frequent rockfalls, so even a man of Popernack's undoubted skills stood back from the machine and guided it with a remote control.

It was just as well, because one night in July last year the miner blundered into a subterranean lake with disastrous consequences.

A wall of water, roaring like a jet aircraft at takeoff, spurted into the mine. It packed a punch so powerful that it drove Popernack's 55-tonne machine backwards.

This was the beginning of a 77-hour life and death struggle for Popernack and eight buddies who were working down the mine that night.

The men's plight and the battle to save them made world headlines. It was a story tailormade for CNN, but at the time it was told from the surface for obvious reasons.

Now the miners have given an account of what it was like from the inside in the book Our Story.

The book is ghost written by Jeff Goodell, a prolific magazine writer in the United States who is best known for his book The Cyberthief and the Samurai about the downfall of a notorious hacker.

Goodell has structured the book around a series of quotations from each of the men as well as their rescuers and wives. He himself acts the part of a Greek chorus, setting the scene and providing context to the quotations.

The scene he sets is a world of men, machines and hard physical work. It is a world ruled by the kind of masculine emotional reticence that infuriates so many women. The men conceal their true inner feelings and confine their conversation to wisecracks and shop talk. Some even forsake their true identities for unflattering nicknames like Hound Dog and Flathead.

When Popernack's great machine precipitated disaster, Flathead, Hound Dog and the others were luckily in an elevated part of the mine.

The water ran away from them down a series of tunnels leading to the hub of the mine, an area known as the mains which led, in turn, to the entrance about 2 1/2km away.

The most direct route to the mains was down the beltway, so called because it contained the conveyor belt that shifted the coal.

The men set off down the beltway in the hope of reaching the mains before it flooded, but they underestimated the volume of water, its power and its speed.

The underground lake they had inadvertently breached was actually a disused mine which had filled with water over the years. They did not realise it at the time, but as they hurried down the beltway they were racing for their lives against 265 million litres of water.

"I was holding on to the belt structure going down through there," said Hound Dog, whose real name was Ron Hileman. "The water was really swift, it almost knocked me off my feet. And it was getting higher and higher as we went down through. And I couldn't keep my feet no more. A couple time I slipped and I did go under."

Some of them climbed on the belt, which in places was so close to the roof they had to lie flat and shimmy through with the water splashing into their faces.

They pushed on grimly, determined to win the race.

But they were beaten almost before they began. John Phillippi , the man they knew as Flathead, was the first to realise it. He came to a place where the water was touching the roof and rising back along the tunnel.

They had no choice but to return to the high ground.

In the words of Hound Dog, the retreat was like trying to run upstream in a river. "You're fighting it all the way. The muscles in your legs and everything is so tense. I mean, you know, all it took was one slip. That water was raging wild. One slip and it would have took you off your feet and you'd have been gone."

After the adventure on the beltway, they regrouped and decided to try to escape through an air shaft. But again they were driven back by the rising water.

By the time they reached the relative safety of the high ground for the second time, four hours had passed.

Now they were faced with another threat. The water had cut off the ventilation system and the air was turning bad, it smelled of sulphur.

Their chests were heaving and they felt weak and lightheaded.

With the water rising rapidly, their only hope was to buy time by building a series of concrete-block walls across the various tunnels below them in the hope of slowing, if not stopping, the water's progress.

It would have been a tough job under ideal conditions, but in the bad air the effort was almost crippling. By the time they had finished, they were exhausted. Some of them vomited and two - including the leader Randy Fogle - were suffering chest pains.

Death seemed certain. The only question was how. Would they drown when the steadily rising water broke through their concrete walls? Or would they suffocate before the water reached them?

The rescue team on the surface tried to answer those questions by drilling a ventilation shaft into the mine through which they forced fresh air at high pressure. The air would save the trapped miners from suffocation. The high pressure would help to hold the rising waters back while the rescuers drilled a wider rescue shaft.

The first objective was achieved immediately. The threat of suffocation disappeared with the screaming sound made by the high-pressure air coming though the narrow pipe.

The second objective was not so easy. Despite the high pressure, and the efforts of numerous powerful water pumps over 3km away at the mine entrance, the subterranean tide kept rising steadily.

The Quecreek men were not going to suffocate, but there was still a very real possibility they would drown before a rescue shaft could reach them.

The miners, huddled under a piece of filthy canvas at the highest point of the mine to ward of the subterranean chill, were no longer competitors in the race. The race was now between the drillers on the surface and the rising water. If the drillers won the Quecreek miners would live, if the water won they would die.

Sound became increasingly important to them as their lights faded. They could hear the drill and they heard the tone of the air pipe change as it was swallowed by the rising tide.

The slightest change could send them into bouts of depression or panic.

The cruellest moment came when the sound of the rescue drill stopped. It was broken but the men were not to know that, and as the hours passed they convinced themselves that they had been given up for dead.

Under such extreme psychological pressure, the hard outer shell of the men cracked. In the face of death they expressed their emotional distress in different ways. Most worried about what was to become of their children and anguished over missing those landmark events in life like graduations and weddings.

Seemingly trivial things bothered them, too. Blaine Mayhugh, at 31 the youngestof the nine, had been late for work thatday and had not kissed his wife goodbye.He agonised over this omission as hesat in the dark waiting to die.

It was Mayhugh who initiated the most poignant scene in the book when he ripped the flap off a cardboard box and borrowed a pen. With a shaking hand, by the light of his helmet, he composed a final message to his family. When he finished he noted the time - 11.45 am on Thursday, July 25. The Quecreek miners had been trapped for 14 hours.

No one asked him what he was doing or why but, one by one, the others took the pen and a piece of cardboard and composed their own notes.

Tom Foy wept as he did it. Popernack was reluctant to write at first because it seemed to him like giving up. But the menace of the water showed no signs of abating, so he too picked up the pen.

When the nine notes were written, the men sealed them in a plastic bucket with electrical tape and wired it to a piece of heavy machinery to make sure that, whatever befell them, it would be found.

Not only does Our Story deliver a compelling narrative of what it was like beneath the surface, it tells the stories of the people on top as well. The wives and families of the miners explain what it was like to be driven to despair by a potent combination of anxiety and lack of sleep.

And of course, there were the other heroes of the piece, the drillers who faced their own excruciating dilemmas in those 77 hours. Were they drilling in the right place? Would the rescue shaft release the air pressure allowing the water to surge into the last safe place in the mine and drown the miners just when they were about to be saved?

These people also tell the story in their own words.

There is good reason to suspect that the as-told-to method of writing was chosen simply because it was a good way to produce the book quickly. In parts it reads like the notes for a book by Jeff Goodell rather than a completed work.

On the other hand, as the title suggests, it is the miners' story rather than Goodell's, and the vivid language of those men carries the narrative along with enough vigour to match the torrent that nearly cost them their lives.

Yet compelling as the narrative is, the most interesting aspect of the book is the way the miners gradually reveal the characteristics that lie beneath their wisecracking, tough-guy exteriors.

Those characteristics were enshrined in the sealed plastic bucket which was obviously of great importance to them because it was the only item they brought to the surface when they were finally hauled out.

At the same time it seemed to represent the tension between the two sides of their characters - the tough guys and the loving family men.

How they planned to resolve that tension forms the last act of Our Story, and it is best left to them to tell.