Mountain Heartbreak
I got a long distance call from my youngest daughter this evening. She wanted to know if I had been called to go to West Virginia where thirteen miners are trapped below the surface.
She remembered the story I had told her. And her call brought back memories. None of them were good.
In Whitesburg, Kentucky in the late 1970's, The Scotia Mine blew up. And when a crew went in to rescue trapped miners, it blew up again.
More than twenty men died. I remember the family members standing, waiting on word on their loved ones. The weather was cold, miserable, and wet. And the inky dark seemed to soak up the illumination from your headlights.
Nobody was telling reporters much of anything. I spent the night in some guard shack, waiting on any information to call back to Channel Ten. This was before cellular phones, but I doubt they would have worked in Letcher County, anyway. We had to bum a telephone, and call the newsroom collect.
But my misery was nothing. Those people waiting to hear if their daddy, brother, uncle, husband was alive or dead...that was misery.
The story ended like so many other mine accidents where men work way below the earth's surface to gouge coal out of the Kentucky earth.
They were all dead.
And I don't care if I ever cover another mine explosion again.
