The Widows of Harlan County

Chances are the electricity powering your appliances comes from coal. Coal, not oil, provides half the country's electricity. And there's a cost.

Miners die, and last year was the deadliest in American coal mines in more than a decade. As correspondent Bob Simon reports, 47 miners died, six of them from just one county in eastern Kentucky, Harlan County. That's twice the number that died there in 2005.

And their widows tell 60 Minutes all the accidents could have been prevented. The "widows of Harlan County" say their husbands deserved more protection in the coal mines, mines that widow Melissa Lee says her husband Jimmy loved.

For Jimmy Lee, mining wasn't just a job. "It was his second home. He would always say it was time for him to leave me to go to his second wife, which was the mines," his widow remembers.

Jimmy Lee loved his job, but he also knew that mining was just about the only job he could find to support his family. Harlan County is one of the poorest counties in the country. Life revolves around church and family and the mines. And if you're a coal miner, your life, as the country song goes, is always on the line.

"And it's there I read on a hillside gravestone, you'll never leave Harlan alive," the lyrics of the song go.

Men, hundreds of them, have been dying in the mines here for generations. Fewer have died in recent years, but mining still has the highest fatality rate of any job in the state.

Kent Hendrickson is a lawyer who represents mine owners in Harlan County. He agreed to talk to 60 Minutes, but because of potential lawsuits, he declined to speak about specific accidents.

"Now when I was a kid and growing up here, it was so commonplace, it was almost accepted. You wouldn't know a miner died unless you read his obituary. And you know, and it was almost a natural death. There wasn't … a guy died of a heart attack or he died in the mines," Hendrickson explains.

Asked how he would explain to people who live far from Harlan County why so many people have been killed there in the last year," Hendrickson tells Simon, "As far as I know at this point, it's a fluke."

He thinks it's just been a string of bad luck.

That explanation does not sit well with the widows of Harlan County, who held a memorial service for their husbands.

Nine men died in four separate accidents in 2005 and 2006. The widows told 60 Minutes their husbands would still be alive if the mines had been safe. The deadliest accident took place at the Kentucky Darby mine last May. State investigators concluded that methane, undetected, leaked through a wall that had been improperly constructed to seal off an abandoned part of the mine. The gas was accidentally ignited by a blowtorch. The explosion was horrific and killed Melissa Lee's husband Jimmy

"He lost the top of his head. He had an O2 tank impaled through his body. The force was so magnificent, it shot him backwards so fast, it pulled his pants over top of his mining boots. It tore his hard hat into 45 different pieces. He laid dead and stepped over top of, not even recognizing it as a human body," Melissa says.

"He left me with two babies to raise by myself," she adds.

Jimmy's wedding ring was never recovered. "He wasn't supposed to die yet," Melissa tells Simon.

Neither was Stella Morris's husband Bud. He died at Harlan County's H and D mine after an underground coal car ran him over. "From the reports it said that it knocked his body in the bucket. The, you know, it, amputated one leg and crushed the other," she explains.

With the price of coal up dramatically, Stella Morris and the other widows say some mine operators in Harlan County are sacrificing safety for profit. They say they see indications of that in the official report on the accident.

In their report, investigators concluded that the coal car that ran over Bud Morris was overloaded, obstructing the driver's visibility. Their report also says that Bud Morris did not receive proper medical treatment from an owner of the mine, who had been trained as a medic.

"They didn't elevate his legs. They didn't do the tourniquets properly," Stella says.

"And your understanding is that if he'd been given a tourniquet it might've been different?" Simon asks.

"He would still be here today. He would've lost his legs but he would still be here today," she says.

Emergency medical personnel who talked to the investigators agree with Stella Morris. 60 Minutes tried to talk to the operator of the mine, but he refused. And although 60 Minutes made more than a hundred telephone calls, no one would let us into a mine in Harlan County. To see first-hand how mining can be so dangerous, Simon and the crew was allowed to visit a mine in neighboring Pike County, where no one has died.

Just a year ago, the tunnel the crew walked through was solid coal. The tunnel is five to seven feet high and twenty feet across. You can hear the coal's ominous snap, crackle and pop, caused by the enormous weight of the mountain above pressing down on the coal seam.

The tunnel is so long that miners don't walk to work. They squeeze into squat little rail cars called "man-trips" for a 20-minute commute that feels less like Disneyland and more like a ride into hell. On both sides of the tracks, the 60 Minutes team saw rocks that had fallen from the ceiling. The black coal walls of the tunnel had been sprayed with crushed limestone to control the amount of coal dust in the air; coal dust can fuel explosions. It also causes a fatal illness, black lung disease.

Some 1,400 feet underground, one finds a machine called the continuous miner. It claws its way through the mountain, mining coal and digging the tunnel at the same time.

It's a noisy operation, but the 60 Minutes team never felt unsafe. So much coal is moved so quickly in such confined spaces, however, that the team did feel that almost anything could happen at any time.

But the mine Simon visited does have a good safety record, and 60 Minutes noticed methane monitors showing low levels of the potentially dangerous gas.

In Harlan County, investigators will never know whether a methane reading was even taken before miners there used a blowtorch to deadly effect. But two women who were widowed in that accident say their husbands felt they were frequently asked to cut corners by mine management.

Mary Middleton says her husband had to work six, sometimes seven, days a week repairing broken equipment, usually with old parts.

Asked if she remembers her last conversation with Roy, Mary tells Simon, "I tried to get him to stay home. He was so tired. And I remember I was in the kitchen when I was getting his lunch ready. And I kept saying, 'Please just stay home.' I just begged him. And he wouldn't."

Mary Middleton and Priscilla Petra's husbands both died from carbon monoxide poisoning after the explosion. They were found wearing emergency breathing equipment. But state investigators concluded they had used less than 25 percent of their emergency oxygen supply.

It is unclear from the report why both men had plenty of oxygen and yet suffocated. Priscilla Petra believes the equipment must have been broken.

"I just know that if that had worked, he would of walked out of there. They weren't that far underground. They were under there, I'm not sure exactly how far. But they could of walked out of there had they had the oxygen," Priscilla says.

"I feel like these men are a dime a dozen in the coal operator's eyes. It's all in the product. 'We want the money. Get the coal out. Get the coal out. Get the coal out,'" Melissa Lee tells Simon.

"Why do you think the families of the miners who died are blaming the mine operators to such an extent? Why do you think they're so convinced that the mine operators were at fault here?" Simon asks attorney Kent Hendrickson.

"It's always that way. It's never been different. If I had a family member who died in the mines, I might feel the same way. That's an emotional response. And it's, you want somebody to blame," he says.

"Are you saying that the reality is that the mine operators are not responsible for the fatalities?" Simon asks.

"Yes. I'll say that," Hendrickson replies.

Kent Hendrickson says that miners are often responsible for accidents and some of them, he points out, go to work under the influence of drugs. Toxicology reports show that both Bud Morris and the man who ran over him at the H and D mine had painkillers and illegal drugs in their systems. But the head of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, Richard Stickler, says mine operators are to blame for most accidents underground.

"The majority of the fatalities occur because of the lack of compliance with the mine health and safety laws," Stickler says. "By the operators."

Stickler himself used to be a mine operator. "The law holds the operator accountable for complying with all the laws. And to seeing that the employees comply with the laws," he explains.

"There was nine deaths in a period of ten months. Not one of those men needed to die. Not one of those accidents was not preventable," says Tony Oppegard, a lawyer representing some of the widows of Harlan County and who has worked on mine safety issues for both the federal and Kentucky governments.

He says many small mines in Harlan County are run unsafely and he calls them "dogholes." He says one mine, the Stillhouse mine, is one of them. Two miners died there after the roof collapsed.

When 60 Minutes went underground, our crew saw how miners try to prop up the roof after the coal is removed. It's considered the most dangerous job in the mine. In the Stillhouse accident, investigators cited the operator for high negligence and reckless disregard and concluded that he had not followed an approved roof control plan.

Asked how this mine operator stayed in business, Oppegard tells Simon, "Well, there is no mechanism under the federal law to shut a mine down. It doesn't, I mean, if you have a disaster today. As soon as that investigation is over, the mine's going to be reopened. And you're going to be running coal again."

The federal mine agency fined the Stillhouse mine $360,000 after the fatal roof collapse there. But the mine, 60 Minutes has found out, is appealing and has so far paid less than $3,200.

"There are mines that are, continue to operate that have not paid their fines," Stickler says.

Asked how operators get away with not paying their fines, Stickler says, "Well, there are a few that do. My understanding, from what I've seen about, 15 percent of the debt goes uncollected."

But the figure is much higher at many mines with fatal accidents. Almost 75 percent of the fines originally imposed on those mines have not been paid. The mines get courts to reduce the fines, and sometimes they just don't pay. Relatively few mines are prosecuted when they don't pay their fines.

The widows of Harlan County think the government has failed to make mine owners accountable for safety violations. That's why Melissa Lee says she's speaking out even though she says it's caused trouble for her in the county.

"I was receiving phone calls blocked calls, out of area phone calls, making ugly comments that I need to shut up, that I talk too much," she says.

The callers, Melissa says, don't give their names. "I have men calling and saying, 'You know your kids catch the bus right down here below your driveway.'"

She believes she is getting the threatening calls because she is speaking out on mine safety. Why is she so persistent and doesn't follow other pursuits?

"Because there's too many people still here in Harlan County who have husbands underground. And if me speaking out keeps their sons safe, their grandsons safe, their son-in-laws safe, then I've done something good," she says. "My husband's death wasn't in vain."
Produced By Tom Anderson