Ninety-nine men entered the cold, dark tunnels of the Consolidation Coal Company's No.9 Mine in Farmington, West Virginia, on November 20, 1968. Some were worried about the condition of the mine. It had too much coal dust, too much methane gas. They knew that either one could cause an explosion. What they did not know was that someone had intentionally disabled a safety alarm on one of the mine's ventilation fans. That was a death sentence for most of the crew. The fan failed that morning, but the alarm did not sound. The lack of fresh air allowed methane gas to build up in the tunnels. A few moments before 5:30 a.m., the No.9 blew up. Some men died where they stood. Others lived but suffocated in the toxic fumes that filled the mine. Only 21 men escaped from the mountain. No.9: The 1968 Farmington Mine Disaster explains how such a thing could happen--how the coal company and federal and state officials failed to protect the 78 men who died in the mountain. Based on public records and interviews with those who worked in the mine, No.9 describes the conditions underground before and after the disaster and the legal struggles of the miners' widows to gain justice and transform coal mine safety legislation.

In To Punish or Persuade, John Braithwaite declares that coal mine disasters are usually the result of corporate crime. He surveys 39 coal mine disasters from around the world, including 19 in the United States since 1960, and concludes that mine fatalities are usually not caused by human error or the unstoppable forces of nature. He shows that a combination of punitive and educative measures taken against offenders can have substantial effects in reducing injuries to miners. Braithwaite not only develops a model for determining the optimal mix of punishment and persuasion to maximize mine safety, but provides regulatory agencies in general with a model for mixing the two strategies to ensure compliance with the law. To Punish or Persuade looks at coal mine safety in the United States, Great Britain, Australia, France, Belgium, and Japan. It examines closely the five American coal mining companies with the best safety performance in the industry: U.S. Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Consolidation Coal Company, Island Creek Coal Company, and Old Ben Coal Company. It also takes a look at the safety record of unionized versus non-unionized mines and how safety regulation enforcement impacts productivity.

From the 1880s to the 1980s more than eight thousand workers died in the coal mines of the Rocky Mountain states. Sometimes they died by the dozens in fiery explosions, but more often they died alone, crushed by collapsing roofs or runaway mine cars. Many old-timers in coal-mining communities and even some historians haveøblamed the high fatality rate on ruthless coal barons exploiting miners in the single-minded pursuit of profit. The coal industry preferred to blame careless miners. James Whiteside looks beyond those charges in seeking to explain why the western coal mines were (and, to some degree, still are) dangerous and why territorial, state, and federal laws failed for so long to make them safer. Regulating Danger is the first extended study of the coal-mining industry in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana. It exceeds the scope of traditional labor history in focusing on working conditions and the problems of workers instead of unions and strikes. After examining the inherent physical dangers of the work, Whiteside shows how the interplay of economic, social, and technological forces created an envi-ronment of death in the western coal mines. He goes on to discuss evolving industrial and political attitudes toward issues of responsibility for mine safety and government regulation and the fundamental changes in the industry that brought about safer working conditions.

Relive the drama of the Knox Mine Disaster of January 22, 1959, through the voices of survivors, the victims' families, contemporary newspaper accounts, and the literature and music generated by the tragedy. Read the poignant and often shocking first-person accounts of those who lived through one of the most devastating disasters in American mining history. This companion volume to the best-selling book The Knox Mine Disaster, published in 1999 by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, also offers a detailed study on how the citizens of northeastern Pennsylvania have memorialized and remembered the last major catastrophe to strike Pennsylvania's anthracite industry.

Illustrated abstracts from the official accident reports.

The searing true story of the rise, fall, and resurrection of Massey Energy, and the negligence that led to the death of 29 miners, exposing the coal-black motivations that fuel the ongoing war for the world's energy future.

In 1897 the Berwind-White Coal Mining Company founded Windber as a company town for its miners in the bituminous coal country of Pennsylvania. The Miners of Windber chronicles the coming of unionization to Windber, from the 1890s, when thousands of new immigrants flooded Pennsylvania in search of work, through the New Deal era of the 1930s, when the miners' rights to organize, join the United Mine Workers of America, and bargain collectively were recognized after years of bitter struggle. Mildred Allen Beik, a Windber native whose father entered the coal mines at age eleven in 1914, explores the struggle of miners and their families against the company, whose repressive policies encroached on every part of their lives. That Windber's population represented twenty-five different nationalities, including Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, Italians, and Carpatho-Russians, was a potential obstacle to the solidarity of miners. Beik, however, shows how the immigrants overcame ethnic fragmentation by banding together as a class to unionize the mines. Work, family, church, fraternal societies, and civic institutions all proved critical as men and women alike adapted to new working conditions and to a new culture. Circumstance, if not principle, forced miners to embrace cultural pluralism in their fight for greater democracy, reforms of capitalism, and an inclusive, working-class, definition of what it meant to be an American. Beik draws on a wide variety of sources, including oral histories gathered from thirty-five of the oldest living immigrants in Windber, foreign-language newspapers, fraternal society collections, church manuscripts, public documents, union records, and census materials. The struggles of Windber's diverse working class undeniably mirror the efforts of working people everywhere to democratize the undemocratic America they knew. Their history suggests some of the possibilities and limitations, strengths and weaknesses, of worker protest in the early twentieth century.

The "suspenseful and completely absorbing story" (San Francisco Chronicle) of how survivors of the worst coal-mining disaster in history triumphed over corporate irresponsibility—written by the young lawyer who took on their case and won. One Saturday morning in February 1972, an impoundment dam owned by the Pittston Coal Company burst, sending a 130 million gallon, 25 foot tidal wave of water, sludge, and debris crashing into southern West Virginia's Buffalo Creek hollow. It was one of the deadliest floods in U.S. history. 125 people were killed instantly, more than 1,000 were injured, and over 4,000 were suddenly homeless. Instead of accepting the small settlements offered by the coal company's insurance offices, a few hundred of the survivors banded together to sue.