Surviving miners from '68 - voice of hope
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/us/20survivors.html
HOMINY FALLS, W.Va., Aug. 16 — Since Aug. 6, Jennings Lilly finds himself turning again and again to the television news reports, his thoughts flashing back nearly four decades to a time when he and five fellow miners were trapped for 10 days in a cold, flooded mine only three feet high in these Appalachian hills.
It was pitch black most of the time, and the men had no contact with rescue crews, who had all but given up hope of finding them alive; that they were found has been known ever since as the Miracle of Hominy Falls.
“Given what happened to us, I wouldn’t give up on them,” Mr. Lilly said of the six miners trapped for nearly two weeks inside the Crandall Canyon Mine outside Huntington, Utah. “But it doesn’t look too good.”
Gene Martin, now 73 and retired after 35 years in the mines, said he felt about the Utah miners as he had about himself and his colleagues: “If anyone comes out alive after that, well, I guess it is a miracle.”
Frank Davis, now 82 and speaking at his home in Beckley, W.Va., was the superintendent of Saxsewell Mine No. 8, where Mr. Lilly and the others were trapped in May 1968. Mr. Davis said, “Knowing where they were, there was no doubt in my mind that they were dead.”
The Saxsewell mine flooded when Mr. Martin and four other miners dug into a thin seam of coal and inadvertently hit an abandoned, flooded mine. Faulty engineering maps were later blamed for the error.
Mr. Martin recalled that as the Saxsewell crew pulled on that seam, another miner, Frank Burdette, shouted, “Hit water!” Kneeling about 75 feet away, Mr. Martin said, he turned toward Mr. Burdette “and then that water hit me in the chest and knocked me back, end over end into a brace and somehow away from the flow of water. I was the only one in that room who lived.”
The onrushing water — “like they opened up the Summersville Dam,” Mr. Martin said — killed Mr. Burdette, Claude Roy Dodd, Renick McClung and Eli Walkup.
But in the next mine “room,” another crew — Mr. Lilly, Frank Scarbro and three other miners — managed to scramble away from the water and pull Mr. Martin from its torrent.
“We tried to get out, but we couldn’t” get through the water, Mr. Lilly, now 69, recalled. “We backed ourselves off, branched ourselves off and built a barricade, and we were in there for 10 days.” The water poured into the mine for hours toward the small, high spot the six men had found, stopping only 20 feet from them.
The water had also trapped 15 other men, including the superintendent, Mr. Davis, in other, relatively safer, parts of the mine. Bore holes reached those miners, and rescue crews passed them food and drink during the five days before they were rescued.
For the remaining six men, the challenge was much tougher.
[“It was 10 days of hell,” Mr. Scarbro, 66, said by telephone on Friday. “Some of them guys broke down and cried just like they were little kids. I’d never let a man see me like that, but I was just as scared as they were.”]
The six managed to salvage four sandwiches, a couple of candy bars and a canteen of water.
They scrounged some cloth and metal to form a small shelter to hold in what body heat they could in the cool conditions, and rubber conveyor belts to sit on and lie on. They used their miner lights only for short periods.
After the fourth day, when the fresh water and then the food ran out, they were left with just the mine water to drink. It was cool but filled with dust.
“I told those boys, ‘A man can live a long time without food, but not water,’ ” Mr. Lilly said. “And that’s what saved us.”
The hunger pangs stopped after about the fourth day, as their bodies started drawing energy from within. Mr. Lilly shed 30 pounds from his 170-pound frame.
Between conversations about their favorite foods, the best country singers and what had gone wrong inside the mine, they wrestled with hope.
Mr. Lilly, a man prone to easy smiles and quick laughter under most circumstances, told jokes and tried his best to keep spirits up.
“Some of the other guys would say, ‘We ain’t going to get out of here,’ ” Mr. Lilly remembered. “And I’d say, ‘Oh, they’ll eventually come to get all this expensive equipment.’ ”
Hope was strongest when they heard drilling the first two days.
But the drill hole, through 80 feet of dirt and rock, was in the wrong area of the mine, over the water-filled section, and the rescue crews decided not to drill more holes, assuming everyone was dead.
Even that did not cause the men to lose hope, though they felt their bodies slowly withering.
Finally, rescue crews were able to pump out all the water. They expected to find 10 bodies and were stunned when they found six miners alive. “It was a joyous day,” said Mr. Martin, a soft-spoken man who said the experience had helped him to find God.
[Mr. Scarbro, who calls himself “hardheaded” with a temper, said that in the years since he has been in his share of fights that ended with his staring into the barrel of someone’s gun, thinking he might die. But the 10 days in the mine were worse, he said.
[“When I came out of there, I said, ‘$100 a day isn’t enough for a coal miner.’ ”At the time, he was making $30 a day.
[Unlike Mr. Lilly and Mr. Martin, Mr. Scarbro never went back to the mine and moved to Michigan for 18 years, where he worked in construction. He returned to West Virginia to live in 1986.
[Even as long as he has been away from mining, Mr. Scarbro, too, is drawn to the news about Utah, spending much of the day watching the 24-hour news channels.
[“Well, it kind of looks grim right now,” he said, after learning of the deaths of the Utah rescuers. “But I’m not going to say the miners are dead. They could be alive. We were.”]
