No.9

Number 9 was sealed but it was not forgotten. There was a two hundred foot coal barrier between Loveridge and Nine but some of the miners wondered if the barrier had crushed where the coal was mined out on both sides. We had the barrier patrolled and checked for heat where we could get to it. Everyone talked about if the explosion could happen at Nine it could happen at Loveridge. Guys who got to there sections and hung their safety lamps in the dinner hole and forgot them, started carrying them and checking for gas continuously. 

  Consol sent many of the miners that worked at Number Nine to Loveridge and the other Consol mines. Not all of them wanted to go back to work in the mines but those that did got a job. The maintenance foreman at Nine quit the mining industry. and when Consol was making plans, eleven months later to recover the mines, they transferred a maintenance foreman there from another mine. When he found out that a big part of the job would be restoring the mine and recovering the bodies, he quit.

  One morning when I came out of the mine, the superintendent told me to go to the main office and see Mike Hudak the vice president of the company. When I got there Mike told me, I was the only foreman and electrician they had with mine rescue experience and I was going to be the new maintenance foreman at Number Nine. He did not ask me if I wanted the job, he said I was it. The job paid more money than an assistant's job and for the first time I felt like I was a part of Consol management, I attended all of the management meetings and occasionally they ask my opinion on some problem.

  When I reported for work at Nine I found out this would not be an ordinary mining operation. There would be a Federal Inspector, a State Inspector and a Union Rep. assigned to Nine all of the time and until all of the 78 bodies were recovered, they would have a vote on how the recovery operation would proceed. As usual I was in over my head. I would have to inspect the elevator and ventilation fans and I would have to be electrically certified by the state to do that. Therefore, it was back to studying and having Denise teach me the math I would need to pass the test. The coal preparation plant electrician was doing the actual checking but I had to sign the books that it had been dun properly.

   When we began to advance down the main track headings, we found massive rock falls

In addition, it would take weeks to load out the rock and bolt up the roof. The decision was made to mine parallel headings through the coal and to cut into the old headings every few hundred feet and look for bodies. Lockey Riggs the superintendent never went in the mine after the explosion and Fay Cassidy did not go in when we found bodies. It was left up to Raymond Comer, the assistant mine foreman and I to identify the bodies and to put them in body bags and transport them out of the mine. The bodies were not decayed, there wasn't any oxygen in the mine when it was sealed but the smell was overwhelming. It wasn't a bad smell but it was one you could never forget. Raymond could recognize each body and would talk to them. He would say things like "John you have been waiting a long time but now we are going to take you home." A lot of the widows would come to the mine and it was a terrible time.

  At the rate we were recovering bodies, some of the inspectors predicted it would take two years for the recovery. I was forty-two years old and I though we would still be recovering bodies when I retired.