Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging(14)
The gender differentiation of courage during life-and-death situations is so vital to group survival that it seems to get duplicated even within same-sex groups. Like most dangerous jobs, coal mining is an almost exclusively male activity that generally draws its workers from a particularly undereducated, blue-collar population. Disasters happen with appalling regularity in the industry, and when they do, groups of men are often trapped miles underground for days or weeks at a time. These incidents have offered social scientists a way to examine how men react to danger and organize themselves to maximize their chances of survival.
At 8:05 on the evening of October 23, 1958, the Springhill Mine in Nova Scotia experienced what coal miners know as a “bump”: a sudden contraction and settling of sedimentary layers deep underground that generates the forces of a massive explosion throughout the complex. Springhill was one of the deepest coal mines in the world, and the bump of 1958 was so powerful that it was felt 800 miles away. There were 174 men in the mine at the time, and 74 were killed immediately as strata compressed and the passageways collapsed. Of the survivors, 81 men were able to make their way to safety and 19 found themselves trapped more than 12,000 feet down the mine shafts. Several were badly injured, and two were pinned by debris and unable to move.
The men had almost no food or water and only a few days’ worth of battery power in their headlamps. There was a group of six miners in one area, a group of twelve in another, and a lone miner who was partially buried at a third location. There was no contact between the groups and no way for them to communicate with the outside world. Within minutes of the bump, off-duty miners and specially trained draegermen were converging on the mine. Draegermen wear gas masks and breathing apparatus—invented by a German named Alexander Dr?ger—that allow them to survive the methane and carbon dioxide gas that seep out of coal strata. Another group, “barefaced miners,” can work harder and faster than the draegermen but have to be confined to areas that don’t have any gas.
The rescuers began digging their way through the collapsed passageways, working in spaces so cramped that they were forced to cut the handles off their pickaxes in order to swing them. Even a strong man could last no more than three or four minutes on a pickax in such circumstances, so they worked in four-man teams and kept rotating positions so that “the pick never stopped,” as one report put it. After several days, they started digging past the crushed bodies of dead miners. The effect of encountering a putrefying body in the close confines of the passageways was devastating, and almost everyone vomited when they encountered one. Often the dead were known personally to the men who were digging them out. Some rescuers couldn’t take the psychological trauma and asked to be taken off the job, and others were able to suppress their reactions and continue digging. There was no dishonor for those who couldn’t take it and tremendous admiration for those who could.
“The miners’ code of rescue meant that each trapped miner had the knowledge that he would never be buried alive if it were humanly possible for his friends to reach him,” a 1960 study called Individual and Group Behavior in a Coal Mine Disaster explained. “At the same time, the code was not rigid enough to ostracize those who could not face the rescue role.”
Meanwhile, two miles down the mine shaft, nineteen men sat in absolute darkness trying to figure out what to do. One of the groups included a man whose arm had been pinned between two timbers, and, out of earshot, the others discussed whether to amputate it or not. The man kept begging them to, but they decided against it and he eventually died. Both groups ran out of food and water and started to drink their own urine. Some used coal dust or bark from the timbers to mask the taste. Some were so hungry that they tried to eat chunks of coal as well. There was an unspoken prohibition against crying, though some men allowed themselves to quietly break down after the lamps died, and many of them avoided thinking about their families. Mostly they just thought about neutral topics like hunting. One man obsessed over the fact that he owed $1.40 for a car part and hoped his wife would pay it after he died.
Almost immediately, certain men stepped into leadership roles. While there was still lamplight, these men scouted open passageways to see if they could escape and tried to dig through rockfalls that were blocking their path. When they ran out of water, one man went in search of more and managed to find a precious gallon, which he distributed to the others. These men were also instrumental in getting their fellow survivors to start drinking their own urine or trying to eat coal. Canadian psychologists who interviewed the miners after their rescue determined that these early leaders tended to lack empathy and emotional control, that they were not concerned with the opinions of others, that they associated with only one or two other men in the group, and that their physical abilities far exceeded their verbal abilities. But all of these traits allowed them to take forceful, life-saving action where many other men might not.
Once the escape attempts failed, different kinds of leaders emerged. In what researchers termed the “survival period,” the ability to wait in complete darkness without giving up hope or succumbing to panic became crucial. Researchers determined that the leaders during this period were entirely focused on group morale and used skills that were diametrically opposed to those of the men who had led the escape attempts. They were highly sensitive to people’s moods, they intellectualized things in order to meet group needs, they reassured the men who were starting to give up hope, and they worked hard to be accepted by the entire group.