(Minews) - For most of 12 years, Ruan Fayou walked into a hole eight feet high to go to work, one among a ragged line of bobbing helmets wending nearly a mile deep into the hills of China’s Guizhou province.
For eight hours each day, he and his colleagues would dig up more than 400 metric tons of coal, feeding the power stations that helped fuel the rise of China’s industrial seaboard.
Life in a coal mine is tough, miners say. But the job pays twice or more the income of a farmer, the other usual vocation in the area. Coal money paved roads and rebuilt shanties into townhouses. In Mr. Ruan’s case, in 2009, it let him leave behind the mud-walled three-room hut he shared with nine other family members, for a modern white-tiled two-story row house, complete with a gray roof and Chinese-style tufted eaves.
When he took the job in 2001 at Shiqiao Coal Mine, he was assigned to be a digger. He used drills and picks to break up the coal face and then scooped up the mineral with a shovel at the other end of the pick.
“It was pitch black,” he said. “The entrance was two meters, maybe three meters high. I worked eight hours every day inside.”
Miners stayed in the pit even for lunch. Staff on the ground would throw a ball of rice into thin plastic bags, mix it with garlic, cauliflower or tomatoes, and dispatch the bags into the hole, along with disposable chopsticks. “Eating was better than not eating,” Mr. Ruan said.
Work went on around the clock, divided into three shifts. Those on the graveyard shift didn’t even get full meals. “Just some crackers and mantou,” Mr. Ruan said, referring to a steamed Chinese bun. “You have to bring it down yourself.”
At the mouth of the pit on a spring day, men shambled out smeared in black dust, on a narrow serrated concrete path that dips 25 degrees into the ground. Naked light bulbs line the tunnel’s main shaft every 50 yards or so, though the side tunnels are still unlit. Until a few years ago, even the bulbs in the main passageway weren’t there.
A stiff draft sometimes wafted through the tunnels, powered by turbines to flush out toxic coal gas and carbon dioxide. Once the miners began blasting the coal face, the dust would be so thick that two friends standing three feet apart couldn’t see each other, Mr. Ruan said.
Masks appear to have been provided erratically. Some miners said they got a mask every three months. Some said they’ve never seen one. The mine bosses didn’t care whether miners wore masks, said Mr. Ruan.
Mr. Ruan remembers colleagues suffocated by black damp, a deadly mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen released from coal seams. Two people he knew were crushed to death by coal cars.
“No one will look out for you,” he said.
