It was a warm, fall day when we went to the Lackawanna Coal Mine in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  We were excited to be going into an underground slope mine.  Coal had stopped being mined in 1966 and now the mine is an area tourist attraction.  This was an anthracite coal mine that had layers of sandstone in between the coal beds.  The tour guide told us that the sandstone made a strong roof.   They stopped mining here because it cost a lot of money to pump the water out of the mine all the time and they couldn’t pump it into the river anymore.  This is because there are toxic chemicals in mine water and the Environmental Protection Agency of our government would not allow it to be pumped into rivers anymore.
     First we got into the bright yellow mine car on the right.  This was used to take the men down the slope and into the mine.  It had a very low roof, even for us.  You could not stand up in the car.  We had no idea what we would find below.  The first thing we saw was that it was cool down there and we were very glad that we had worn jackets.  Mine temperatures stay the same most of the time--even when it's really hot outside.
     One of the biggest threats in a coal mine is the natural gasses that form below the surface.  Coal mines need to have very good ventilation or the miners will die from inhaling the gas.  This mine is set up for tourists and someone goes down into the mine a couple times a day to check the gas levels.  It made us feel very glad to hear that until our tour guide said that the gas level was at its worst in the morning because the blowers were turned off at night and gas accumulated in the mine.  It was 10 o’clock in the morning. 
     Mines like this one use wooden beams, or timbers, to hold up the walls and roof of the mine.  Wedges, which are triangular pieces of wood, were used to make the beam fit tightly against the ceiling.  The picture on the left shows the beam and wedge.
     There is a passageway through the middle of the mine that is called a gangway.  They used this to get the coal out of the mine, to support the land above it, and to be a firebreak.  A firebreak is an empty space that is used to help stop fire from spreading to the whole mine. 
     In this mine, rooms or chambers opened off of this gangway.   Pillars of coal form these rooms and support the roof.  Each room opened off the gangway but it also opened into other chambers so that a miner had different ways to escape if something went wrong in the mine. 
     A mine is “played-out” when the rock or mineral that is being mined has all been taken out, or it would cost too much money to keep digging for it.  Mine engineers and owners figure out how much money they can expect to get for the rock or mineral before it is even taken out of the mine.  Then they figure out how much money it costs to pay the miners and run the machinery and equipment.  The cost includes things we never think of like electricity, insurance, and other things like gasoline.  The engineers figure out how many hours and days it will take to get a certain vein mined and then compare it to what they will get when they sell it.  For example, let’s say that the mine is coming to the end of its coal.  An engineer knows that the company will get $100.00 for a ton of coal—which is just an example and not a fact.  He knows that two men will have to work for two days to get that ton of coal out because it is a hard place to get to, water has to be pumped out first, and the miners have to crawl to get to it.  Let’s say the two men each get $50.00 a day.  This equals $200.00 just to pay the men to get the ton of coal out of the mine.  It doesn’t include the electricity, insurance, and other costs and still goes over the $100.00 that the company would get for it.  In this case, the mine owner would decide not to do it because it would cost more to mine than he would get by selling it. 
     When the mine owner and engineer decide that it’s time to stop mining, the miners begin to chip away at the pillars of coal that formed the chambers or rooms.  Starting at the back of the mine, they take the coal out of the pillars.  This is called “robbing the pillars.”  Once you take the coal out of the pillars, the roof begins to fall.  This is why you do the back first.  If they started at the front, they would be trapped when the roof fell.
     Our tour guide told us that 70% of hillside mining is done on the miner’s hands and knees or on their stomachs.  In the picture on the right, we see an example of this.  We saw chambers where we, as children, could not stand up.  There were life-size, make-believe miners set up to show the way coal was mined.  In some places, the ‘miners’ were lying down on their stomachs or backs and chipping at the ceilings and walls.  It would have been a good thing to be small in coal mining!
    As we walked along, there was a damp, musty smell everywhere even with ventilation. The walls were damp or wet in many places.  In order to mine the coal, the walls were broken into pieces that could be hauled out.  The process for doing that is this:
 

    We found this interesting and a couple of us were allowed to push the plunger down on a make-believe dynamite explosion.  There were explosion sound effects!  Mr. Ben, our tour guide, told the group that we made him a little nervous because we obviously enjoyed ‘dynamiting’ a little too much! 
     Mr. Ben told us that one coal miner dies each day.  This is a dangerous job with lots of things that can go wrong.  During work, miners listen for sounds that will tell them that the walls or ceilings are going to fall in.  We were told that it sounds like the screeching of rock against rock and that the pillar wedges break.  If the roof collapses, the force of the air knocks miners down if they weren’t already buried by it.
     Methane gas is given off by coal in mines.  It comes out of the coal through breaks or holes in the coal.  After coal is broken up with dynamite, methane is given off and rises to the ceiling.  This is called Fire damp.  When air combines with methane gas it makes a mixture that is very explosive.  The old gas lamps would blow up in the mines when they were around the air-methane gas.  Sometimes miners dig into a coal bed that has lots of methane under pressure.  This means that it was trapped in there and couldn’t get out.  The minute that the miners open the coal bed and the methane and air combine, it could explode rock right at the miner.  Many miners died because this happened.
     Canaries were used to warn the miners of white damp, or carbon monoxide.  We tried not to feel sorry for the birds, but it was really hard not to.  Mines had a canary in them because the birds would feel carbon monoxide right away.  The birds were colorful and kept in a cage that could be seen from far away.  Miners would check the canary to see if it was alive and well.  Then they would know that carbon monoxide wasn’t in the mine.  Unfortunately, if there was carbon monoxide there, the canary died.
     It is the foreman’s job to check on mine gasses.  After Damp is what they call carbon dioxide.  The bad thing about gas is that most of the time it is colorless and odorless so no one knows they are breathing it into their body.  The foreman will send the miners home if it is dangerous.
     Donkeys or mules were used in mining.  They lived in the mine their whole life and were treated better than the men were.  Donkeys were used to pull the coal wagons out of the mine.  If they worked in a dusty mine, they might live from 8 to 10 years.  They would live from 28 to 30 years if they were in a mine with cleaner air.
     As the men went to work, they ‘pegged in’ which was signing into the section of the mine where you would be working that day.  This helped the fire boss keep track of who was in the mine if an explosion or cave in happened.   He would check on the miners every few hours just to see that they were okay.
     There were different kinds of chutes for the coal.  With the shaker chute, the miners chipped the coal from ceilings and walls as they lay down.  This was for places that were so low that the men couldn’t stand.  Then they took the coal and put it into the chute. The chute was shaken from side to side to help the coal move down and fall into the coal wagon.  Sometimes chutes would get clogged with chunks of coal that just wouldn’t slide down.  This was dangerous for the miner because he would try to kick it free.  If nothing worked, sometimes they would dynamite the chunks.  This might cause the roof to cave in and trap them.
     This mine had an air lock in it.   A boy called a nipper boy [to the left] would spend twelve hours a day opening the doors when the coal wagons came through.  The nipper boy was usually between 7 and 9 years old.  Kids worked in the mines a long time ago.  The nipper boy might fall asleep and not hear the wagon coming.  The wagon had lots of coal in it and was very heavy so it would blast through the doors, pin the boy against the wall, and kill him.  Lots of little boys died that way.
     Miners would work in darkness with only their headlamps on.  While we were there, Mr. Ben turned off the lights in the mine.  It was the darkest dark we had ever seen!  If case of a fire, the miners know that they might need their headlamps if they get trapped so they turn them off.  Then they would walk [in the dark] right next to the right rail that the coal cars travel on and follow it out of the mine.  This was like a life line to them.  They would not leave the rail or they might get lost.
      During our tour of this coal mine, we found out lots of information that made us stop and think about mining.  When we came into the mine, we thought it was going to be an exciting underground adventure.  We didn’t realize that miners had to stay in their chamber all day, were in danger every minute they were on the job, and then ended up with Black Lung Disease.  This disease is caused by breathing in coal dust every day for years.  A miner starts to show Black Lung after working in a coal mine for five years.  Mr. Ben said that after twenty years in a mine, the miner would be very sick and need oxygen all the time.
     Today, machines do most of the mining except for poorer countries that can’t afford the equipment.  This makes a safer place to work for miners.  There are still mine accidents all over the world and, even with machinery, we think it is a very dangerous job.   At the end of the tour, we were able to chip off and pick up our own pieces of coal!  As we got back into the mine car that would take us back to the surface, we knew that we would never forget this trip.  We learned a lot about coal, but more about the people who mined it.  Miners are strong and brave people who do a job that most people would not be nearly as strong or brave enough to do.