Never Disdain the Coal Miner

Who made, and makes, so much progress possible

I was born, raised and now (after several decades away) work in West Virginia. West Virginia is many things wonderful, and a few things terrible, but it has been defined for a century by ‘King Coal.’

I had some great-grandfathers who were miners, but that’s as close as coal ever touched my life growing up. My direct ancestors were mostly subsistence farmers and businessmen until my father and uncles decided to go to college.

My own interaction with the coal industry consisted of one summer, between my first and second year of medical school, when I worked weighing in coal-trucks that were delivering coal to be shipped by barge down the Big Sandy River in Kentucky. As trucks rolled onto the scales I made small-talk with drivers, recorded full weight and later empty weight as they left the ‘yard.’ I wrote it on a piece of paper (not a computer spread-sheet).

Sometimes I drove a water truck to keep down dust. Once or twice I shoveled spilled coal. A rock from a truck nearly took my head off when I got the mail. I drove the boss’s truck to get lunch for us. Suffice it to say, Derek Zoolander had more experience in the mines than I ever had. I had a lot of fun with that job! But I merely dipped my toe in the very furthest edge of the coal industry then went back to my regularly scheduled programing.

My wife Jan, however, is a literal coal-miner’s daughter. Her father Len spent decades in and around the mines in Southern WV, as did many of his family members. Coal provided for his wife and four children, as it has for untold families down the hundreds of years since it was first mined in the Mountain State.

For those who haven’t been around coal, it would be educational to just drive around West Virginia and see how ubiquitous it really is. Coal is on trains moving along the rails, coal lies spilled by the side of the tracks and road, coal sometimes lines the road-beds near mines. Coal piles can be found outside homes that burn it for warmth. Coal is accumulate by the entrance of mines, coal is constantly loaded onto barges on the brown rivers of the state, headed to the Ohio or Mississippi and thus to plants or factories in larger cities. Coal lies in untouched seams on hillsides, which were dug and dynamited for highways. Once formed by the crushing weight of unimaginable mountains and relentless time, it still lay in the dark silence for millions upon millions of years before which it was, obviously, living things. (The fossils in the rock have always been sources of wonder to me.)

Coal is extracted from mountain-top strip mines. There’s coal on the trucks that move it from mines along small back-roads and interstate highways. Ultimately, there are small mountains of coal by the power plants that devour it to make electricity, like great steam and smoke belching dragons shooting energy from their many claws, dragons trapped in miles of wire and concrete, enslaved to men. And of course, there’s coal on the faces of the miners, in their clothes, in the very air of homes heated by it, even in the lungs of those afflicted by Black Lung, or ‘Coal Workers Pneumoconiosis.’

The first time one sees a person walking around after work in the mine, it can be a little surprising. The thick black color of their faces is shocking. I’ve seen them on the street, in the ER, at the store or gym before they were able to clean up. They work hard and they have little free time.

The work can pay well. And owners of mines many times have been millionaires. But the price is high as well. Not only do miners suffer from lung disease and associated cancers born of the dust, they also suffer injuries, and death, from the work. My wife’s family and friends include many who died because of the coal industry or were permanently injured from it. Tunneling through the earth, ever in fear of the collapse of the roof, or of fire or explosion, or of injury by equipment, is not for the faint of heart.

What these men and women do, however, is to supply the energy that makes our electronic world possible. In the US, coal is responsible for about 19% of US energy production. While that’s falling from around 50% in 1920, it’s still remarkable.

And what that means, in essence, is that those men and women who work in coal have for just over 100 years provided much of our ability to live in an age of readily accessible electricity.

They made possible not only lighted homes but lighted streets and businesses. They helped give us the convenience of appliances (it is said that electricity freed women from washing clothes in the river). Coal miners are in no small part responsible for such modern (and now unappreciated) wonders as heating and air-conditioning, warm water, personal computers, the Internet, smart-phones, satellite communications, navigation, modern medical devices, Bit-coin mining, AI, electric trains, electric cars, the list goes on, and on and on.

Coal, lest we forget, is also essential to the steel industry. The US is in the top three steel-producing nations in the world. And without steel, modern production, modern constructions, and certainly modern national defense would be dead.

I have been in the medical profession for 33 years, give or take. I interact with many highly educated professionals. And almost all of them, all of us I should say, take for granted that we can turn on switches for light, or have our personal electronic devices powered. In hospitals we assume that the lab machines and CT scanner will run (and it’s a mess when they doesn’t). And all of this thanks to the wonder of electricity. And much of that, in the past and even now, is from the hard work of bold, resourceful human beings who bring coal out of the earth to be burned, to turn turbines and make energy.

And yet, I’m confident that one of the most maligned and mocked groups of people in the country are those in rural Appalachia. The very ones disdained for bad health and addictions, for lack of education and religious and political conservatism. The very people so often crushed by the opioid epidemic, and dying ‘deaths of despair.’ The people who gave body and soul and were rewarded by being victims of the unimaginably vicious marketing of addiction.

But these people, or their relatives, and their ancestors, made the modern age a reality by working in those mines, day and night, winter or summer, for all those years.

How many of our citizens today, outside of Appalachia, would encourage their children to work in the mines? Probably not many. But they all expect the power to come on when they want it. And their children have never known a time without all of the modern gifts that come to them directly from the earth, over the roads and rivers and rails, to the plants, and electric lines and all and directly into their lives to fill their needs and desires.

Electricity comes from many sources now. Obviously thanks to many people in many industries. But nobody should ever forget the past and present contributions of those men and women, covered in coal dust, in this too often mocked state where coal continues to rise from the earth and help carry us forward. Even if we stopped using coal tomorrow (which we really can’t) we would owe them all a great, lasting debt for their service to the nation.