By James P. Dady
Special to NKyTribune
King Coal, it was called, and never has there been a more powerful force in the economic, social, and political life of Kentucky.
Mining coal has always been a job fraught with peril. The shadow of danger stalks the coal-miner, coal families, coal communities. The miner’s life is the subject of the memoir of Roger N. Braden, Always at the Edge of Death: the Life of a Coal Miner. Braden, now semi-retired and living in Taylor Mill, was born in Providence in Webster County, Kentucky. He represented families of two miners among ten killed in the 1989 explosion at Pyro Mining’s William Station Mine near Wheatcroft, Kentucky.
Braden is the son of a coal miner. He grew up around coal mines and coal miners. He explored abandoned coal mines as a teen-ager. He was, he says, steeped in coal culture. After service in the U.S. Army and a decade as a health-care worker, he enrolled at Chase Law School intending to represent coal miners. On his office wall when he took the first call from the widow of one of the miners killed at William Station was a print of an underground miner at work next to his mule. That first call from a family member of one of the miners killed at William Station was transformative. He was almost immediately caught up in the families’ personal and legal drama. It was a lawyer’s existential moment.
“If we did not prevail, the ten widows and 19 children of the dead miners, who lived in nice middle-class houses, would almost immediately be placed in poverty,” he writes.
He also observes about his first client in the case, “Either I would help her or she would find someone else who would. That phone call was the beginning of a journey that not only re-shaped my law practice, but also re-shaped my thinking as to what my capabilities were as a lawyer and as a person.”
Braden knew he needed help and soon associated with attorney John Whitfield in Madisonville. The two lawyers sought help from nine law firms capable of high-stakes litigation. All of them said ‘no.’ The last call was to the office of Stan Chesley, the mass-tort expert in Cincinnati, which agreed to help with the case, and assigned Sherill Hondorf, who was experienced in high-stakes litigation.
The lawyers faced the practice problem of how to circumvent the general rule that the sole remedy for recovery against an employer is a workers compensation claim. The claims were supported by a federal case called Boggs v. Blue Diamond Coal Co., which stands for the principle that while and employing company enjoys immunity from ordinary lawsuits by workers, their parent company does not.
Within a month of the explosion, hearings were convened by the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration in Madisonville to take testimony from survivors of the explosion. The two lawyers learned facts fundamental to how they worked up the case. The mine was a vast place, some twenty-five square miles.They learned that methane, an odorless, invisible gas formed by the decomposition of organic matter, was present in the mine, as it always is in an underground mine. Methane of sufficient quantity is lethal to humans, and can be touched off into an explosion from a seemingly insignificant spark, such as from mining equipment itself. The lawyers concluded that the spark in this case was caused by the removal of a longwall mining machine from one part of the mine before its transfer to another. The lawyers also determined that the mine operator, Pyro Mining, had been cited by MSHA 356 times in the nine months prior to the explosion, 310 of the citations for serious violations. There was an elaborate body of rules and law regulating how air is circulated in a mine to maintain methane at a less-than-lethal level. There was testimony at the Madisonville hearings from survivors close enough in time to the explosion to still be vivid.
Based upon what they heard, the two lawyers developed a theory that the venting system had been compromised by the removal of a brattice directing air flow and by a flood that had been allowed to stand in the mine, impairing air circulation.
It also became clear to the two lawyers that MSHA inspectors had been less than vigilant in enforcing rules and permits governing the ventilation system, and that the operators had altered the system and concealed alterations from the inspectors.
Methane, Braden reports, has contributed to the deaths of more than 10,000 miners in the past 60 years.
The lawyers’ resolve to see their case to the end was hardened when they were invited to a meeting at a prominent law firm defending the mine operator, where they were told, “Boys, I don’t know how to say this, and I hope I don’t hurt your feelings, but I don’t think you’re up to the task of taking us on.”
Braden remembers telling himself, “I would rather die than lose this case.”
It was a long, difficult road to obtain a proper recovery for the victims’ families. He doesn’t dwell on the intricacies of litigation, intending that his focus should remain on the miners and the survivors of deceased ones, one what he refers to as the coal culture. He attempts to set the Williams Station disaster in an historical context, reciting a litany of similar disasters; that is, those caused by methane explosions:
• August 4, 1917, at West Kentucky Coal Company’s Webster County mine; 62 miners died in a methane explosion;
• May 19, 1902. An explosions killed 216 miners near Fraterville, Tennessee. Fraterville remains the worst mass disaster in the history of Tennessee;
• April 8, 1911. A spark ignited methane causing an explosion in which 128 miners died in Littleton, Alabama. Two years later, explosions in Dawson, New Mexico, left 260 dead;
• December, 1907. The Manangah Mine Complex, West Virginia. Simultaneous explosions in two different mines killed 362 miners;
• March 5, 1930. Eighty-two men, including some inspectors, killed at Poston Mine in Athens County, Ohio;
• March 2, 1915. In Fayette County, West Virginia, a methane explosion at a mine of the New River & Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company killed 112 miners;
• March 8, 1924. 171 miners killed in a methane explosion at a mine near Castle Gate, Utah;
• July 14, 1939. The Duvin Mine Explosion near Providence, Kentucky. Twenty-eight miners were killed because of the premature detonation of explosives igniting coal dust;
• March 25, 1947. Centralia, Illinois. One hundred eleven miners killed when blown-out shot ignited coal dust;
• December 21, 1951. A methane explosion trapped 120 miners underground at a mine in West Frankfort, Illinois. Escaped miners dug frantically to free the trapped miners, but could rescue only one and the rest perished;
• November 20, 1968. An explosion at the Conrad No. 9 mine north of Farmington, West Virginia, killed 78 miners. The explosion could be heard in Fairmont twelve miles away;
• December 30, 1970. Thirty-nine men died in the Hurricane Creek, mine disaster, near Hyden, Kentucky, a year to the day after enactment of the Coal Mine Safety and Health Act. Kentucky-born musician Tom T. Hall’s “Trip to Hyden” and The Band’s song “The Caves of Jericho” lamented the disaster and mourned the miners;
• December 19, 1984. A Utah Power and Light Company’s mine near Orangeburg, Utah. A fire claimed the lives of 28 miners;
• March 9 & 11, 1976. Two different explosions touched off by a spark from a battery-powered locomotive killed 28 miners at the Scotia mine near Oven Fork, Letcher County, Kentucky. This disaster led to enactment by Congress of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977;
• January 2, 2006. Twelve miners were killed by a methane explosion at a mine in Sago, West Virginia;
• May 20, 2006. A methane explosion at Darby Mine No. 1 killed five miners at Holmes Mill, Harlan County, Kentucky;
This list fails to capture the smaller cases where one or a few miners died.
The title of Braden’s book is Always at the Edge of Death, and his book is primarily about mine explosions and their consequences for the miners, their families and communities. But then there are the slower but still fatal consequences of coal mining: pneumoconiosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, disabling injuries, orthopaedic conditions.
The rate of fatal injuries in the coal industry was 24.8 per thousand, nearly six times the rate for all of private industry. Regulators at the state and federal level have sought for more than a century to make coal-mining safer, but the evidence is that underground mining is and always has been an inherently dangerous occupation.
The events of Braden’s formative case in representing the families of deceased coal miners happened more than 35 years ago. Beyond the threat of methane the methane explosion has been the downward spiral of the coal industry itself.
Coal faces the existential threat of the scientific consensus that burning coal leads to climate change. The industry has been in steep decline over the past decade. The insistent push for air-quality regulation and competition from other fuels in the energy marketplace. As of 2023, coal-fired power plants generated 16.2 percent of U.S. electricity, down from 52 percent in 1990. About 200 coal-fired plants are still operating.
Dr. Thomas Clark, the noted Kentucky historian, wrote in his standard text that “The existence of the vital coal resource has shaped the quality of the lives of hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians. The tentacles of the mining industry and the mineral run deep into the human resource, Kentucky politics, and even into the physical topography itself.”
Coal is formed from organic matter that is buried and subsequently altered by a combination of time, pressure, and heat. Coal has been mined in what became Kentucky since 1750. The first known commercial production of coal occurred in Lee County in 1790. Intrepid geologists gauged the extent of the coal resource in the eastern mountains as early as 1836. Canny entrepreneurs in Perry County began to dig coal by the bushel to be floated down the Kentucky River for sale at Richmond or Frankfort. There was also some early small-scale mining in Bell County.
The second half of the nineteenth century brought a worldwide expansion of industrial activity, much of it powered by coal, with more than half of Kentucky coal production coming from the Western Coalfield. By 1912, rail lines had been run through the mountains to Middlesboro, Harlan, and Hazard.
The world clamored for coal to feed its industrial production and war-making capacity, and demand as a home-heating and electricity source, and Kentucky coal met the market. At the onset of World Ward I, Pike County in 1920 produced as much coal as had the entire Commonwealth in 1900. Coal has been found in 57 counties. Coal employment in Kentucky peaked at 76,000 in 1949. Coal supplied Kentuckians incomes, profits, and tax revenues for state and local governments.
King Coal reigned in Kentucky, subject to the booms and busts of the business cycle and to seismic events such as the Great Depression, World War II, and the oil embargoes of the 1970s. For a time in the 1970s, coal was a rather better buy in the energy market than other fuels, and Kentucky coal boomed. Coal production peaked in Kentucky in 1992 at 173.3 million tons.
Coal has been found in 57 of Kentucky’s 120 counties. The ratio of production between the western and eastern coalfields is roughly 60-40. East Kentucky coal tends to have a higher heat content but is more difficult and expensive to mine. Seventy-six percent of Kentucky coal production is deep-mined; the rest, surface-mined.
Kentucky in a recent year ranked fourth among states in coal production.
Former President Donald J. Trump is very popular in coal country and has promoted the development of American fossil-fuel energy. But his four years in office failed to reverse the steep decline for the industry.
King Coal has shrunk to a relative commoner in the Kentucky economic hierarchy. More than 100,000 Kentuckians are employed in the automotive industry, 76,000 in agriculture. Tourism accounts for 91,000 jobs; bourbon distilling 23,000. More than 300,000 are in some form of government service. Kentucky coal employment is now about 5,000.
The Administration of President Joe Biden, as have others before him, has been a full-throated advocate for green energy and for tighter restrictions on the burning of coal. The Biden coal policy has been met with push-back from the Kentucky legislature, which has funded a lawsuit to be conducted by Attorney General Russell Coleman and other attorneys general in raising legal challenges to the Biden environmental regulation. The General Assembly has also enacted a law intended to prevent utilities from decommissioning coal-fired power plants.
Braden’s book is an homage to the miner, but in view of the fate of the industry itself since its main events occurred 35 years ago, it feels like an elegy.
See all of Roger Braden’s books here.