J. Davitt McAteer, left, the state's lead investigator of the Sago coal mine explosion and Gov. Joe Manchin share a laugh Wednesday, March 1, 2006, before entering a discussion of mine safety rules at the West Virginia Energy Forum at the Charleston Civic Center in Charleston, W.Va. (AP Photo/Jeff Gentner)

There was an expression heard in San Giovanni in Fiore, and the other little mountain and coastal towns near the arch of the boot in southern Italy that had West Virginia coal-mining connections. People would say it when they were on the way to work, an errand or evening with friends.

Roughly translated, it was: “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. It’s not like I’m going to Monongah.”

It meant that the loved one leaving through the front door at that moment fully anticipated safe travels and a routine return.

And, yes, they were referring to Monongah in Marion County.

On the morning of Dec. 6, 1907, in the ragged coal camp, hundreds of miners — many of whom were immigrants from San Giovanni — had gone out the door for their shifts at Fairmont Coal’s adjoining No. 6 and No. 8 mines.

A coupling snapped on a trainload of cars laden with coal coming up a shaft from the processing plant. Like a roller coaster ride, the cars clanked and banged as they rolled down the slope and back into the mine.

Metal on metal in the ensuing crash created sparks, which ignited the very air. The highly flammable “black damp” coal dust was thick and ever-present, and the explosions that followed were horrific.

As many as 500 lives were lost that day, and 100 or better of the death toll, as it came out later, were boys — many not even out of their teens — working underage and off the books.

“And now, with one wave of the hand, this administration is going to put us right back to where we were,” J. Davitt McAteer said Tuesday.

Trapped?

McAteer was assistant secretary for the Mine Safety and Health Administration for most of the 1990s during the Clinton administration. Among his subsequent roles was a stint as vice president at the former Wheeling Jesuit University overseeing sponsored programs — including the National Technology Transfer Center.

He’s a Fairmont native who grew up watching his father — who sailed to the U.S. from Ireland to carve his purchase of the American dream in coal — go out the door every day to a job that could have killed him in the blink of an eye.

In 1968, when the Farmington No. 9 Mine blew, McAteer was a WVU law student with an eye toward labor relations.

His resulting whitepaper on the disaster got him a job with consumer activist Ralph Nader and helped line the portal to the country’s first comprehensive miner safety and health legislation a year later.

McAteer has been watching with dismay while scientists and researchers who have been furloughed from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Morgantown have been swapping their lab coats and laminated employee badges in exchange for protest signs.

A total of 10,000 workers in NIOSH divisions in Morgantown, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Spokane, Wash., were told in early April by the Trump administration that their jobs are going away in June. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is carrying out the reduction in force mandates as part of ongoing initiatives to “right-size” government, which the president says is bloated by bureaucracy.

Other layoffs are reportedly looming at MSHA, which has McAteer doubly concerned.

“There’s nothing ‘right’ about compromising miner safety and health,” he said.

Life, death and other assessments

Following Monongah and other disasters, safety analysts had formulated a grim analogy about mining and the Mountain State in the 1920s.

If given a choice, they said, of spending a day in a West Virginia coal mine or a day on a World War I battlefield, you would have been statistically safer taking your chances in the war, those analysts determined — even with the bombs, bullets and mustard gas.

NIOSH in Morgantown has its beginnings in coal miner health, in particular, with its early research looking at the scourge of black lung, which robs miners of their lives — one breath at a time.

That includes providing regular chest X-rays, along with research and development of respirators and other protective equipment to quell the amount of coal dust a miner will take in during a shift.

Continuous “long wall” mining machines and other innovations in the industry move metric tons of coal like never before, that also means more potentially lethal coal dust, McAteer said.

And with the Trump administration wanting to increase coal production at the same time coal safety effects such as NIOSH and MSHA are being curtailed, that means, McAteer said, the inevitability of even more Monongahs to come – in an already tenuous industry.

“In mine safety, the lessons are in blood,” he said.

“The only way you can measure what you’re doing is by asking, ‘How many miners were hurt and killed last year? How many have been hurt and killed so far this year?'”