Desperate Hours
By Clyde Weiss
Working around the clock, AFSCME members — and a former member — help rescue nine Pennsylvania miners. Heroes all, these public employees say they were just doing their jobs.
Somerset, Pennsylvania
The 77-hour ordeal of nine coal miners trapped 240 feet beneath Pennsylvania soil gripped the nation this past July. As the men relied on their wits, training and prayers to stay alive, a group of professionals — state, federal and private — worked feverishly to save them.
Almost immediately after the miners were brought to the surface, early on a Sunday morning, the Walt Disney Co. bought the rights to their stories. But rescuers who work for Pennsylvania's Bureau of Deep Mine Safety — many of them members of Locals 2246 and 2541 (Council 83) — won't be paid to tell their stories. As public servants, they cannot accept outside compensation for simply doing their jobs. They can, however, be saluted for doing them exceedingly well.
Lynn Jamison — one of the bureau's soft-coal mine inspectors (and president of Local 2541) — was home when his phone rang at 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday, July 24. Black Wolf Coal Co. Pres. Dave Rebuck delivered the chilling news: Thirty minutes earlier, men working the com-pany's Quecreek Mine near Somerset, 55 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, had inadvertently cut into an abandoned, water-filled mine that — according to a map — should have been 300 feet further back, behind solid rock. Of the 18 men working at the time, Rebuck said, nine were missing deep in the mine.
Jamison told the company president, "There's a mine-emergency list on your wall — make your phone calls." Before rushing out the door for the 30-minute drive to the mine, Jamison called Ellsworth Pauley, his supervisor and a member of Local 2246.
"I'll be right behind you," Pauley replied, after a short briefing. He delayed just long enough to call his boss, Joseph Sbaffoni, chief of the Division of Bituminous Mine Safety.
Hitting a bulls-eye
Sbaffoni, a member of Local 2541 during the 1980s when he was a mine inspector, phoned Rebuck. After determining shaft depths, Sbaffoni quickly realized that millions of gallons of water pouring into the Quecreek Mine would block the men's escape route — if they were still alive. As he later put it, "The only place for [the trapped men] to go was higher ground — which just happened to be where they cut through into the old mine."
Sbaffoni advised Rebuck to get a drill rig to the site to open a hole to provide air at that location. Using computers and a satellite global positioning system, engineers later selected the spot to drill — and exactly located the missing men.
That was no accident: The miners had learned the lessons taught a year earlier by Jeff Stanchek and Don Eppley, bureau rescue and first aid instructors who also belong to Local 2541.
Arriving at the mine, Jamison joined Quecreek's foreman on a squat vehicle called a "mantrip." They drove through the main entrance but were soon stopped by the slowly rising water. Shouting into the blackness, in hopes of contacting the miners, brought no response. So they retreated. "It really looks bad," Jamison reported to Pauley, who would later be assigned to lead the state's investigation into the near-tragedy.
Making contact
If the trapped miners were to be saved, the water level had to be lowered. Pauley headed down a hill with a Quecreek engineer to search for a discharge pipe from the abandoned mine. They found one, and opened it with a backhoe, but little water flowed out. Holes were later drilled into the mine and — for the next 72 hours — water was pumped out at a rate of more than 20,000 gallons per minute.
Meanwhile, work began on the air hole shortly after midnight Wednesday. Within hours, workers punched a small hole through the roof of the miners' four-foot-high chamber. As a hammer-wielding operator banged a drill casing three times as a signal, Stanchek crawled beneath the drill machinery and put his ear to the pipe. Mercifully, in response, the miners banged three times loudly, then twice faintly.
Final push
Oxygen, heated to more than 100 degrees by the drill-bit compressor, was fed to the miners through the pipe, which also created an air pocket that held back the water. Without it, says Sbaffoni, "they would not be here today."
Then, while drilling a rescue hole, the bit broke less than halfway down, and some rescuers began to lose hope. Sbaffoni, in charge of the rescue operation, did not. He told reporters, "Coal miners are a special breed. If anybody can get through it, a coal miner can."
Drilling immediately began on a second rescue shaft as workers labored to extract the broken drill bit from the first one, but it wasn't needed. Once drilling resumed on the original shaft, it wasn't long before its operator reached the miners' chamber. Then, through a telephone lowered into the six-inch air hole, one of the trapped miners said: "There's nine men ready to get the hell out of here."
"We started hugging and kissing," says Stanchek. "I knew that half the battle was won, and all that remained was to get them out of the mine."
'Jubilation'
Eppley and others then rigged a 22-inch-wide rescue capsule with a video camera and communications gear. Eppley stationed himself beneath the crane to watch if any rescuer had problems and needed a backup.
At 1 a.m. on Sunday, the first of the coal-blackened miners was hoisted from the hole. All of them emerged in relatively good condition, considering their ordeal. Sbaffoni summed up his feelings: "jubilation"— and he allowed himself some tears.
Rescued mine crew leader Tom Foy embraced Stanchek when the two met, and both men cried. "He called me his brother for life," Stanchek recalls. His work as a trainer was rewarded when Foy told him he hadn't given up hope because of their earlier lessons.
None of the bureau's rescuers consider themselves heroes. Stanchek, saying that word is overused, explained: "We did what we had to do. The end result is that nine people came out of that hole alive, and whoever gets the credit for that, so be it."
