Copyright 2006 P.G. Publishing Co.
By DAN MAJORS
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
There were about 10 men working in the Twin Rocks Mine, near the Cambria-Indiana county line, when Joe Tenerowicz and a mine inspector went in on a buggy at 10:30 a.m. on a spring day in 2003. Some were digging out coal off to the side. A group of four, however, was farther down, putting timber up.
“All of a sudden a miner comes running up and he was all excited,” Mr. Tenerowicz recalled. “Personally, I thought he got hit with a rock.
“But then he was saying, ‘Help, Tenner, help. You’ve got to get these guys below me, these guys down here. Smoke, smoke, fire, smoke.’ That’s what he’s yelling.
“Then we could see the smoke coming.”
Mr. Tenerowicz, 47, has been working in the coal mines of Cambria County, off and on, since he was 18. Like all miners, he’s familiar with the tools of his trade — including the self-contained self-rescuer.
SCSRs are the lunch box-sized emergency oxygen devices that every miner wears below the surface. They’re also the subject of scrutiny since Randal McCloy Jr., the lone survivor of the Sago Mine tragedy that killed 12 men in January, said at least four of the units carried by the trapped miners did not work. Investigators said the devices functioned when tested later, but that several still had oxygen-generating capacity. Officials are trying to determine why that happened.
“All the guys here in all the company know how to put them on and how to use them,” said Mr. Tenerowicz. “But very, very few have had to put one on. Hopefully, they never do.
“But I did one time.”
Mr. Tenerowicz described the occasion in which he had to use an SCSR in an emergency with the understanding that his experience could not reflect what the Sago miners went through.
Called “Tenner” by everyone who knows him, he is a purchasing agent and mine clerk at Twin Rocks, part of the Rosebud Mining Co. The mine opened July 31, 2000.
That morning three years ago — he doesn’t recall what day or even what month — Mr. Tenerowicz was asked to escort an inspector from the Mine Safety and Health Administration into the mine. The inspector, out of MSHA’s Johnstown field office, came to do a routine roof control inspection.
Each man was wearing an SCSR 100, the same model rescuer, produced by CSE Corp. of Monroeville, that the miners at Sago were wearing. While SCSRs are for use only in emergencies, they’re still part of every miner’s standard workday equipment, just like their hard hats, steel-toed boots, safety glasses and gloves. No one goes down into the mine without one strapped to his belt, and everyone is trained in how to use it.
Miners at Twin Rocks do not pass their rescuers around. Each miner is given one, and the serial number of the unit is recorded in a log. At the end of their shifts, miners put them away in their lockers, just as they do their other equipment.
In an emergency, miners open their SCSRs, take out the nose clip, mouthpiece and hose, and put them on in a specific order. They then pull an orange string, activating the chemical reaction that produces about an hour’s worth of oxygen.
“But the average miner doesn’t know how these things work,” Mr. Tenerowicz said. “Same as you drive a car; you turn it on, you go. You don’t need to know how the combustion engine works.
“It’s like this thing. You put it on, it’s working, you go.”
That morning, there wasn’t a lot of discussion about who was going to do what, Mr. Tenerowicz said. The inspector escorted the miner closer to the safety of the surface. The mine foreman was contacted and came down to get the other miners out.
Mr. Tenerowicz was going into the smoke to find the other three miners.
“I start putting on my self-contained self-rescuer,” he said. “Basically, it’s the same thing as if you’re going scuba diving. You put the mask on, your oxygen and all that, you turn that on.
“I’d done it in practice and taught other miners. I’ve practiced it hundreds of times.
“You’re going to think I’m a nut case, but it didn’t affect me. It was like I was in a calm situation. It didn’t faze me at all.”
He then drove the buggy into the smoke and down toward the end of the mine.
“The smoke, literally, you could not see your hand,” he said. “It was that thick. So I’m going in looking for guys or lights.
“You can’t yell. You can mumble because you have your mask on.
“I’m pounding on the jeep to make a noise so that they can hear me, and I’m coming, I’m looking for lights.
“Thank God, I didn’t find any.”
That, Mr. Tenerowicz reasoned, meant that the three missing miners had already scrambled to safety. After 45 minutes of searching — and breathing with the SCSR — he turned around and headed back toward the mine entrance.
“The biggest thrill was seeing their lights up there,” he said.
The cause of the smoke was traced to a cable that had been struck by a falling rock and began to smolder. There was no fire, Mr. Tenerowicz said, and it didn’t take long for the smoke to clear. After an inspection, the mine was back in operation and little was made of the incident.
“It was the same as if you were in the middle of a street and a lady was going to get hit by a bus, and you pull her away,” he said. "[She says] ‘God bless you, honey.’ That’s it.
“Anybody else would do that. I was just there.”
Still, without the SCSR, he wouldn’t have been able to even attempt a rescue, he said.
“It worked perfect. Mostly when you practice, you go through the procedures, but you don’t turn them on,” he said.
Each SCSR is dated and supposed to be good for 10 years. Every 90 days, the condition of the units is checked and recorded in the log.
But miners are advised to check them daily.
“First thing you do is the visual check,” Mr. Tenerowicz said. “You make sure it has the blue dot. That means it’s ready to go. If it’s white or it’s pink, that means it’s been exposed to moisture and it’s no good.
“You also keep an eye out for dents.”
The SCSR that Mr. Tenerowicz used is long gone.
“Once you use it, it’s done,” he said. “You gotta get a new one.”
Three years later, he still carries the one that replaced it.