Reporter’s notebook: inside a Chinese coal mine
Mary Kay visits the Jin Hua Gong mine
I arrived early one Saturday morning, got suited up in a hard hat, baggy black pants and a jacket, rubber boots – even white gloves and a white towel to put around my neck. I was more interested in the hand-held light and attached battery pack since, in some places we’d be visiting, these were the only lights we’d have. A huge banner in red and white, in the locker room, warns visitors not to bring cameras, cell phones or recorders down into the mine. The official reason is these could spark and cause an explosion if there’s an elevated level of gas. I’m skeptical, but I’m not about to test it and find out.
My guide, Zhang, a lanky 28-year-old, is the third generation of his family to work in this coal mine. His grandfather took care of payroll. His father used to load coal. He, with some tertiary education, gives tours – and he hopes his 3-year-old won’t even have to think about working in a mine. “It’s a hard job,” he says.
There are sobering reminders of that as we go along. The first part is easy – get into a narrow elevator, and slowly descend almost 900 feet. Then get on a little child-sized trolley – one that real working miners have to cram into to go to work – and travel long minutes in the dark to a tunnel once mined and now abandoned.
Zhang points up to the ceiling, where there are sheets of plastic pouches filled with water, ready to be released down into a line of walls, if an alarm sounds to warn that noxious gas has reached dangerous levels. An electronic box, called “Canary auto monitor” – really, that’s the name on the box – monitors those levels.
“If the alarm sounds, the lights go off, and miners then have to run to somewhere safe,” Zhang says. “The walls of water buy them a little more time.” So when was the last accident? A shadow passes his face. “Well, there was a gas explosion in 1993,” he says. “29 miners were killed.” I wonder how many of them his father knew, and how close to the blast he was.
We walk in a darkness lit only by our little hand-held lights, down a long tunnel where, in the mine’s early days, miners would insert sticks of dynamite to blow up the coal and make it easy to carry out. Now, much of the mining here is automated. Zhang says this coal mine used to have 10,000 workers. Now it has 8,000 – and the number would be even less except, as a state enterprise, the mine is letting older employees keep working until retirement age.
Just 70 or 80 new employees are hired each year, and those younger miners have to have three years of training, and a month of intensive review before they can start working,
But our tour includes a glimpse of how it used to be. After our trek through claustrophobic darkness, with Zhang helpfully pointing out a place where the tunnel had partially, due to seismic activity, we emerge into a lit tableau of life-sized statues of coal miners, using pick axes and pulling heavy carts filled with coal. We see the mine’s first, primitive, mechanized equipment, and an example of what they use now. And just near the heavy equipment, we see a sign commemorating this little open space, 900 feet underground, as a “wedding chamber,” where 10 couples from this coal mine married in 2001.
And then it’s back, through the semi-collapsed tunnel, past the Canary and the walls of water that just might save you from death, onto the cramped trolley and up the narrow elevator. This time, it’s filled with sooty-faced coal miners, coming off their shift. A few of them lean, exhausted, against the wall. And even though I know this is one of the better, safer coal mines in China, that they’re not badly paid and that China needs this coal to fuel its growth, I feel for them. I wonder how many of the guys in this elevator would reply as my guide Zhang did to the question of what they’d like their kids to do when they grow up: “Anything, but this.”
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