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Growing Up in a Coal Community
"If you decide to stay here it means that you've chosen coal as a part of who you are."
By Natasha Watts
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For people in Letcher County Kentucky, the media coverage of the mine disaster in West Virginia brings back many of the same images that they saw broadcast in 1976 when they had their own disaster at their local Scotia Mine. The community lost 26 miners.
Natasha Watts is a college student who lives in the area, and although she wasn’t alive during the 1976 disaster, she’s grown up seeing the ripple effects on the community. She describes what it’s like to live in a community where coal is your life. Her essay is a collaboration between Youth Radio and the Appalachian Media Institute.
Not wanting to leave home, many mountain youth find themselves buried 12 inches deep in coal. Underground mining is hard work that sometimes requires crawling through spaces not even 12 inches tall. Growing up in a coal community, we understand the danger involved in mining. We realize it more than anything; because mining coal puts food on our tables and clothing on our backs.
I think all the time about whether I should stay here. It's hard to explain to outsiders the connection we feel to the mountains. I want to stay because I don't want to leave my family, and there's something about being from here that means we know who we are, and that we won't be understood anywhere else. To leave means we become outsiders ourselves, but if we stay, we sacrifice opportunities others have.
My family always encouraged me to become a nurse. That's because here, it's either mining or medical. If you're a girl you do nursing. If you're a guy, you become a miner. Mining is one of the few jobs in this area with a salary big enough to support a family. If we stay here, we've chosen coal as a part of who we are.
Nowadays, parents push their children away from the mines, yet we have no alternative if we want a decent income. So what do we do, when leaving is not an option, and when staying may cost us our health, or even our lives?
When I first heard the news that miners were trapped in West Virginia, I didn't pay much attention. It was yet another sad story coming out of Appalachia. Then I saw the images on TV, of families huddled at the mine entrance, waiting for word of their loved ones. That broke my heart, because I had seen the same images before, in old video from a mine disaster in my home town. In 1976, there were two explosions at the Scotia Mine in Letcher County, Kentucky. 26 people died. Some were killed in the first explosion. Others died two days later, in a second explosion, when they went back in to secure the mine.
People who lived through that told me they lost their best friends. But they went right back underground. They were miners and that's what miners do. I find it hard to believe that something that happened 30 years ago can still happen today. It's shocking that the nation still produces coal at the expense of people's lives.
In West Virginia, the media will leave in a matter of days. Yet the people there will forever feel the effects of this disaster and the ones to come. Some of the losses don't get much attention but they continue to occur. We can hear it in the raspy voices of retired miners with black and rock lung. It's easy to forget how dangerous mining is. To me mining is just something that takes place everyday in the place where I grew up.
In my eyes, miners should be viewed as heroic for lighting our houses and keeping us warm. For my parents and grandparents mining wasn't something you talked about, it was something you did. Talking about it meant they might actually leave the mountains, which they didn't like to think about. I'm still not sure what I should do.
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