Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 13, 1993 TAG: 9306140099
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B4 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: DAVID REED ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NORTON LENGTH: Medium
Fleming, 21, doesn't want to go back underground, but the lack of jobs in the coalfields may force him to.
"I'm scared it's going to leave me no other choice," said Fleming, who is out on disability pay.
He said he's haunted by a recurring nightmare in which he's shoveling coal onto a conveyor belt near the mine opening when he sees a cloud of dust coming toward him. His ears pop from the pressure, and the heat is intense.
That's just the way it looked and felt near the end of his hoot-owl shift Dec. 7, but in the dream, his friend Brian Owens is walking slowly toward him in front of the rolling dust.
"I yell, `The mine's blown up; get out of here,' and try to pull him with me," Fleming said. "But it just kind of catches us both all up inside. Then I wake up."
Owens, who actually was a mile underground when he was killed in the explosion, rode to work with Fleming each day from their homes in Clintwood.
Most of the miners who worked other shifts at Southmountain are back underground at other coal companies.
"I really didn't want to go back, but I've got to make a living," said James E. Mullins, 29, a conveyor belt cleaner from Clintwood. There are few jobs available outside the mining industry, and most of them pay minimum wage, he said. Most Southmountain employees were making about $11 an hour.
"It was scary for a while," said Jessee Darrell Cooke, 44, of Norton. "My nerves, it took me awhile to get my nerve back up. I still have a lot of bad dreams and wake up with the guys I worked with who died on my mind."
But Cooke said he was fortunate in a way, because he had to go right back into the Southmountain mine the week after the explosion to guide inspection teams.
"If I didn't, I don't know if I would have gotten enough nerve to go back in," he said.
Cooke said he and several other Southmountain workers got jobs at Plowboy Coal Co., another mining company owned by Southmountain operator Jack Davis.
But a few remain unemployed as the number of coal mining jobs continues to shrink, and the area jobless rate remains in the double digits.
"I've applied to different companies, but things are slow, and nobody needs nobody," said Shane Adams, 23, of Pound. "I've been wondering about going back down, but now . . . a man's got to do something."
The number of coal miners working in Virginia in 1992 was at its lowest level in nearly 80 years. The Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research at Virginia Tech said 9,009 miners were employed in the state last year compared with 9,755 the year before.
Although it's dropped a few percentage points this spring, the unemployment rate has been averaging 17 percent in Dickenson County and 13 percent in Wise County, where nearly all of the former Southmountain miners live.
The section of the mine where the explosion occurred has been sealed off, but another contractor, Big Laurel Mining Corp., has been issued a license to take over Southmountain, state Division of Mines spokesman Mike Abbott said.
As soon as the company submits a mining plan and the state approves it, workers will be hired to start taking coal out.
Clearsy France, a 40-year-old former Southmountain employee from Clintwood, said it would "be crazy" to go back inside the mine near Norton.
"With all that gas down there, if they have another spark, it's going to go off again, and there are going to be a bunch more miners killed."
Keywords:
FATALITY
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.