Every time there is a mine disaster Kadizzle remembers his days as an underground coal miner. Kadizzle was young and in college, for a summer job he was an underground coal miner. One thing he was told as part of the safety training, which was damn little in those days, was that when you heard and explosion and the air stopped moving you better be on your way out.
One day just as we started the shift we got the two classic signals. There was a loud muffled boom, and sure enough the air quit moving. At the time we were at least a mile underground. Worse yet smoke was pouring into where we were. After you are in mining awhile you get the feeling most miners don't expect to survive an explosion. I was amazed how calm everyone was. I think everyone thought we were just walking dead men. As a crew we gathered together and decided we were going to try to walk out. I suggested we take our water and lunches.
After we had walked a relatively short distance the air cleared up. This meant we had walked past the explosion. The foreman figured out pretty quickly what had happened. When our crew walked in to work we had walked through a puddle of water about thirty feet long. The puddle had a huge power cable in it. The cable had shorted out in the water and exploded. Now, we found out we would be fine, but had we been in that puddle five minutes later, we would all have been electrocuted. The cable was illegally laid through the puddle, it should have been hung up. Kadizzle always clearly remembers that day, and what he remembers most was how calm everyone was. It was like telling eight people you are dead, and looking at the expression on their faces. Miners are a unique breed, and some of the best people you will ever meet. There are no phonies down where the coal is.
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