KFTC member recalls Scotia Mine disaster

KFTC member Mimi Pickering of Whitesburg has a great article in the Daily Yonder about the Scotia Mine disaster of 1976, in which 26 miners died in two explosions within two days. Pickering recently joined families and friends of the dead miners at the unveiling of a memorial in Oven Fork in Letcher County.

In March 1976, Pickering was a young filmmaker who had just completed a film on the 1972 Buffalo Creek flood in West Virginia that killed 125 people when a dam collapsed due to coal company negligence. She waited outside the Scotia Mine, along with the families, for hours. During the vigil, a miner told the crowd that an inspector had been in the mine the day before and given the company three notices for insufficient ventilation.

Here is an excerpt from her piece in the Daily Yonder:

More than 12 hours after the explosion, the names of the 15 miners trapped inside were released. By 1:30 am the last body was found and it was announced that all were dead. Their average age was 27 years. At dawn, hearses dispatched from every funeral home in Letcher and Harlan counties carried their bodies away.

I went home, numb with cold and sadness but also angry. It was just like Buffalo Creek. Once again laws intended to protect miners had been violated or ignored in the push for production, and lives had been sacrificed

Unbelievably, two days later, on March 11, a second methane explosion ripped through the mine killing 11 members of a work crew, including three federal inspectors, who had been sent inside to begin repairs. By the end of the week, 26 men had died at Scotia.

Pickering's article also describes the recent rise in black lung disease and touches on the coal industry's claims of a "war on coal."

This "war on coalâ€ campaign has succeeded in badly frightening our people, people who already fear they are close to losing what little they have. And with the fear comes a growing hostility towards those who speak out, even timidly, against coal industry abuses of the land or the people.

To read the full article, click here:  Speak Your Piece: Scotia Then and Now