Longtime miner tells what job is really like
Toward the center of the long wall, the 500-foot section that the continuous miner (machine) will work the rest of this year, four miners were struggling with the jacks that held up the roof.
As the machine sweeps through its route, huge jacks are inched forward into the new gaps it has made. Behind the men, the roof is allowed to collapse as the jacks are removed.
This particular stretch of roof had been especially troublesome for the last two days, more apt to drop rocks than most areas. So the propmen working on the jacks had a difficult time shoring up the metal canopies connected to the jacks.
One of them, Terry Jewkes, Sunnyside, clambered up between the canopy and the rock ceiling, prying loose slabs of rock. Then he came down, the jack was tilted, and a huge pile of rubble crashed from the roof.
"It's not normal for this rock. We're into some rock roll; it's giving us some deviations in the roof," said the foreman. "Got three men down the wall. ... "
"Right now they're in the process of attaching the roof, to re-establish the roof line," the foreman said. Then he said into the phone, "Boy, I'll prop some more jacks, and I'll turn you loose."
The artificial roof was 65 feet long, over 30 inches deep. Each canopy was about five feet long, and propped between it and the ceiling were wooden beams about a yard by a foot square.
As the miners tried to adjust the troublesome canopy, they would step back and rocks would creak and then fall in a heap. The rubble was eventually four feet deep. Fine, flying dust filled the air.
Finally the ceiling canopy was properly set, the foreman said, "Good job!" and said into the phone that the conveyor could be started.
Today, Jewkes is 55. He worked in the Kaiser mines for 23 years until they shut down.
"I wish they were still going," he said in a telephone interview. "I enjoyed the hard work."
He enumerated the jobs he carried out as a miner: a roof bolter, a certified corner man, a propman. As a propman he would pull out the shields and jacks, he said. As a corner man, he would "check for gas and rock dust."
"I had to make sure that the tailgate was pushed over," he said. The tailgate is the end of the conveyor belt that carries chunks of coal toward the mine entrance.
"I had to shovel jacks and pull in some jacks. Had built cribs" — wooden structures used as roof support.
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