Mining disaster

by Thomas Dimopoulos

I remember being 5 years old and sitting with my classmates in a circle of chairs that weaved around Mrs. John's kindergarten room.

"Today class, we're going to play a game called telephone," Mrs. John explained. She went on to tell us that she would make a sentence, whisper it to one of the students, who would in turn whisper it to the next person until the phrase worked itself through the room.

"Nicky painted his doggie Louie," she began, hands clasped around whispering lips, sending the phrase around the room, until it reached the last person in the semi-circle. He promptly stood up and recited the phrase that had reached his ears: "Icky-doo Louie is a pain in the coo-lee."

If you were unlucky enough to be channel surfing Tuesday night, you probably were seduced into staying up into Wednesday's early hours where you saw a modern version of the kindergarten game played live on TV by adults using cell phones and satellites. In spite of the technology, the connection hasn't gotten any clearer.

Three minutes to midnight, the flammable words came across the news wire: "Family members report 12 miners are alive." It came just in time to make it into East Coast newspapers with midnight deadlines, and was perfect for breaking news TV.

A community's worst fears had turned into "unbridled joy," read the story. Bells rang out from the church, and the townspeople, who were previously keeping a solemn vigil, streamed into the streets screaming "Praise the Lord!" and "They're alive!"

"Miracles happen in West Virginia and today we got one," said the wife of one of the men who had been trapped in the mine. As ambulances screamed by her flashing their red lights, she said, "The Lord takes care of them."

On MSNBC, an excited Rita Cosby popped in with the breaking news, which silenced the stories of bodies being pulled from a collapsed ice skating rink in Germany, multiple car bomb attacks north of Baghdad, and the rising death count in a landslide in Indonesia. She too, invoked divine intervention.

"It's miraculous," cooed Cosby as she lumbered up to the townspeople, poking a microphone into their faces.

"What did it feel like when you thought they were dead?" she asked breathlessly.

"Uh, it felt bad."

"How do you feel now that he is alive?"

"Well gee Rita, it feels great."

All this and yet no one had seen any of the miners. Nor did they pay much mind to the report that had come over the news wire which began with the sentence: "Family Members REPORT." It just spun and spun, until it was out of control. A few channels away, CNN's Anderson Cooper was not faring much better.

Touted by the network as its new primetime poster boy, Cooper is a lot of fun to watch in his raingear while he's trying to keep his balance on a rooftop during a hurricane. There, you could see the winds whipping by in a fury and hear the shredding of metal debris caught in the hurricane's path.

In West Virginia, the story was literally, underground. Mine workers have their place in America's tragedy as well as in its history. Many of their stories captured in old black-and-white photographs, laboring beneath the earth with oil lamps fastened to their helmets as they shoveled through damp tunnels, the unhealthy air pouring into their lungs.

The site of the tragedy at Tallmansville, W.Va., is about 50 miles south of the city of Monongah, site of a mine disaster in 1907 that killer more than 360 miners and is the country's worst mining tragedy.

What the scene needed early Wednesday morning was an experienced hand. Unfortunately , CNN decided to remove its last newsman a few months ago when they took away Aaron Brown's chair and put Cooper in it. Ratings, you know.

Had Brown been on the scene, you could be sure he would have asked the question nobody else seemed to want to know: "Do we know where this information came from?"

Three hours after the first reports of survival, the other shoe dropped. "Families say 11 of 12 miners reported to have survived have died," read the reports on news wires. The previously jubilant family members said they had been "misled."

The owner of the mine blamed the error on a "misunderstood conversation."

A woman looked into the lens of the TV cameras and cried. "We had a miracle and it was taken from us. Can you explain to me why?"

No one could explain the misunderstood miracle, but in the news, like in life, you always need to get another source. At the very least, you can never believe everything that you hear.

It was a simple lesson Mrs. John taught her kindergarten class.

published in The Saratogian