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BBC MUNDO RADIO
President Obama before delivering a eulogy for the 29 miners who died in an explosion earlier this month during a memorial service in Beckley, W.Va., on Sunday. More Photos »
By PETER BAKER
Published: April 25, 2010
BECKLEY, W.Va. — Twenty days later and twenty miles away, they came to say farewell to the dead of Upper Big Branch on Sunday, the widows and orphans, the friends and neighbors, and a president of the United States.
The faces of the 29 men killed in the nation’s worst coal mining disaster in four decades stared out at their loved ones, now just a series of photographs projected on a pair of giant screens in a convention center and a series of cherished and haunting memories to contemplate afterward.
They smiled in those photographs, those images from happier moments of men casting for fish, dancing with a wife or just sitting on a couch or in the back of a pickup truck. There was Griff one last time. And Cuz. And Boone and Pee Wee and Smiley and Dewey. A couple had “Senior” after their names, an all-too-searing reminder that left behind were “Juniors.” A tiny girl in a pink dress in the family section yelled out “Daddy, Daddy,” and it was hard to tell if she still had one.
They called it a “healing convention” but the wounds were fresh and deep. The explosion deep under the earth on April 5 ripped through not only the mine in nearby Montcoal but also the fabric of a community, and a nation has looked on to ask why it happened and how it can be kept from happening again.
“How can we fail them?” President Obama asked in his eulogy. “How can a nation that relies on its miners not do everything in its power to protect them? How can we let anyone in this country put their lives at risk by simply showing up to work? By simply pursuing the American dream?
“We cannot bring back the 29 men we lost,” he added. “They are with the Lord now. Our task, here on Earth, is to save lives from being lost in another such tragedy. To do what we must do, individually and collectively, to assure safe conditions underground. To treat our miners like they treat each other — like a family. Because we are all family and we are all Americans and we have to lean on one another.”
Mr. Obama was joined here by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gov. Joe Manchin III, Senators Robert C. Byrd and John D. Rockefeller IV and a host of Congress members and local officials. This is a place with an uneasy relationship with this president, a state that voted against him in the Democratic primary in 2008 and again in the general election later that year. It is a place that views his environmental agenda with suspicion for the damage it fears could be done to industry and livelihoods.
But for this day, at least, he was their president and their chief comforter, and they greeted him with loud applause and cheers. He met first behind closed doors with the families of the 29 fallen miners before the service started, making his way from one folding table to another across a low-ceilinged room amid a cacophony of wrenching sobbing by the relatives. “It was like 29 funerals in one small church basement,” Bill Burton, a White House spokesman, said afterward.
Then Mr. Obama joined the main service in the Beckley-Raleigh County Convention Center, standing solemnly as the relatives were introduced, one family at a time, to applause from the audience. At a few points, he reached out to one or another woman struggling with the emotion of the moment and wrapped his arms around her.
Each family carried a miner’s hat, which was placed on top of one of the small white crosses in front of the presidential rostrum. Some of the children clutched stuffed animals. Some of the adults wore T-shirts memorializing their lost loved ones. Small packages of tissues were waiting for them on the chairs in the family section.
“All of West Virginia is in pain and not without some anger,” Mr. Rockefeller told the 2,000 or so people in attendance. “But we will bind together as a community because that is what West Virginians do. We will find a way to go on.”
The politicians vowed to pursue investigations and legislation. “I don’t have the answers about why this has happened, but I promise we will find the answers,” Mr. Manchin said. “And I pledge to each and every one of you in these wonderful families that your loved ones will not have died in vain.”
The president has ordered a review of mine safety as attention has focused on the succession of violations issued in recent years against the owner of the mine, the Massey Energy Company. The company defended its safety record in the days leading up to the memorial service, saying it is committed to worker safety and promising that “there will be accountability” if improper conduct is found.
In his eulogy, Mr. Obama emphasized the human stories of the men who died, “this band of 29 roughneck angels,” as Mr. Biden called them. The president read each of their names, a roster of pain and emptiness for a small community. He paid tribute to their risky trade and honored their contribution to the nation.
“Day after day,” Mr. Obama said, “they would burrow into the coal, the fruits of their labor what so often we take for granted: the electricity that lights up a convention center; that lights up our church or our home, our school, our office; the energy that powers our country; the energy that powers the world.”
Mr. Obama, who represented a coal-producing state as a senator from Illinois, invoked the dangers of their work. “They understood there were risks,” he said, “and their families did, too. They knew their kids would say a prayer at night before they left. They knew their wives would wait for a call when their shift ended saying everything was O.K.”
But he said they had gone down into the tunnels far beneath the surface to follow in the footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers and to provide for their families. “It was all,” he said, “in the hopes of something better.”
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