 I'm Charles Vaught. Roof foals are the number one immediate killer of miners today. Sometimes however, a roof foal doesn't kill, it simply maims. I have Larry Strayer with me today, and Larry will tell the story of the accident that occurred at his mine. He'll begin at the beginning, take us minute by minute through what happened to him, and then tell us a little bit about what his life's been like after. Larry? Well, I'll try to tell the story the best that I can remember. It was just another June day, June the 5th of, my brother worked on our crew. I went down, I always picked him up on the way to work, and while I picked him up when we went out to work, and went in and got dressed and got on a man trip and started in the mine, and we got in there and we was pulling stumps, and we just finished up on the right side pulling the last stump, and we started moving on machinery and that over. I was a border operator, and my cousin Ernie was the other border operator on that crew, and we was moving the border over to the left side to start pulling across again, and we was hanging cables up in that, and I don't know where Ernie got to, but we was going to belt off that night, we was working second shift, we was going to belt off that night, so we finished hanging cables up and I started down towards the feeder to help them guys start belting off, and as I was going down there, they took a, they started splitting the stump, they took one cut out of the stump there, and I noticed that Barry was, the miner operator was up looking at the roof, he just pulled the miner back, and so I figured I'd get him a hand, it looked like he was getting ready to pull down some loose rock, so I went up and talked to Barry, and he told me that there's a loose piece of rock hanging in there, and he tried to cut it down with the miner, but he was turning the cross-cutting, he couldn't get the bullwills on the roof the whole way to cut it down, so we caught the rock bar, and we tried to pry it down, and it was sort of feathered edged out, maybe two foot from the last row of bolts there, so Barry was on the other side of the miner, and we was trying to pry it down there for a few minutes, and we decided that we'd just leave it up and bolt it up, so I, I just turned to start walking back towards the back end of the miner, and I just got a glimpse of something out of my right side there, and it was like, like the whole, the whole cut came down, and I sort of seen it got a little glimpse of it coming down, and I tried to jump at the same time, I tried to yell over to Barry for him to get out of the road, and but before we had, you know, time to do anything, it was like down, come down really fast, and it caught me right on my left leg, right about from the knee down, and I was laying on the ground there for a couple seconds, I could hear Barry over there trying to yell, I guess, I talked to him after that, and he said that there was like a lot of rock on him, and he couldn't, couldn't breathe too good, I guess, you know, a lot of rock was pressing on him. Well, I was laying there for a couple seconds, and the boss came running up around the corner, and he stopped at me, and I told him that I was all right, that Barry was on the other side of the miner, and he, I figured he was in pretty bad shape, so I told him to go over and help Barry, and a few seconds after that, Ernie came up, and he came to me first, and I told him to go over and help the boss get to rock off of Barry over there, so I was laying there for a few seconds, and there was a few other guys came up from the crew, and he was all over trying to get Barry off from underneath the rock, and while I was laying there, I wasn't too worried about my leg, I was just wondering if Barry was going to be all right, because I knew he got covered up pretty good, and I didn't know if he was going to make it or what. Well, they finally got Barry out and got him on a stretcher, and Ernie came over, and there's a pile of posts laying there behind me, he grabbed two, two props, and put a prop underneath the rock, and put another prop underneath the post to try to wedge the rock up so I could pull my leg out. We got his back against the roof and put his feet on the props, and he got her up so far, but I still couldn't pull my leg out. Then my younger brother, Brian, came up, he was a buggy runner on the crew, and Ernie tried to pry him down again, and then Brian pulled me out from underneath the rock. Well, luckily Ernie was an EMT. He cut my pant leg up and cut my boot off, and he was pretty messed up, and there was a lot of blood in that, and he put one of them air splints, so you blow up on it, and then they put you on a man-tripping. We was on our way out, and I remember there were a couple of times, and there were a couple of low spots there, the roof was only a couple inches from my face, I just wonder if he was going to clear or not. But we finally got outside then, and that was towards the end of the shift then, and a lot of the guys from the shift starting were standing around a man-trip there. Everybody was standing around, nobody was, it just seemed like nobody knew what to say, everybody, everything was quiet, and there was a guy there that I ran track with in high school, I just more or less stucked up and said, I guess we won't be running no races within an near future here, and just something to break the ice to let everybody know that I was all right, and he was getting buried in the ambulance then, and then another ambulance came and they put me on the ambulance, and I remember it seemed like a long, long time to get to the hospital. Whenever we got there, one of the owners of the mine was there, whenever he opened the ambulance, he asked me how I was in that, and it was pretty late at night then, and then my wife came running over, and she was all shook up in that, and I sort of wanted to say something though, it was, it was her birthday then, so I just told her happy birthday and see, to settle her down a little bit, and then, well they took me in the operating room then, and then they just, while they put me out, I guess I woke up the next morning, and they had my leg strapped up in the air with all kind of pins and stuff going through it, and they, the next couple days, they took me down to the operating room and operated on about once a day, and to try to fix it up, but after a couple days, a doctor came in and said that there was nothing they could do to save it, they'd have to take it off, so at the time it really didn't bother me too much, because it was just like, I don't like a bad toothache or something, it really hurt a lot, and I just wanted to, you know, quit hurting, so I just wanted the pain to go away, I guess, so then they came up one day, and they took me down, and they took my leg off, and then I woke up back up in the hospital room, I just remember, I kept looking down on my leg, and it seemed like it was, you know, supposed to be there, for about a day or two there, I just was sort of, in the days, I guess, you know, sort of, but after a while, after a while, I got over it a couple weeks later, I went home, I was happy to be home with my kids and my wife, and then I got an artificial leg, and then the company, I was lucky the company left me go back to work, they have a pretty big shop outside the mine that they rebuild my equipment and work on man trips and that, so they gave me a job out there, that's what I'm doing now, and Barry, he, the other guy that was in the accident, he had pins put in his legs there, I guess he had them in for almost a year, and then he finally did get them taken out then, and he's doing all right, he's probably loading coal right now somewhere, he's one of the hardest workers I ever worked with, and I can't say enough about him, he's a really nice fellow, and anything I have to say is, I know there's a lot of you guys out there who likes to fish and hunt and stuff, I like to fish and hunt a lot, and I miss going jumping on the brush pile and waiting for a rabbit to come out the other end, or dragging a buck out at the end of a hunting day, or putting a pair of sneakers on and go wading in a river fishing for bass or whatever, and I have four kids at home, my little boy is five years old now, and he's just learned to ride a bike this year, and it just seems like it's really hurt you whenever you can't run alongside them to try to help them ride a bike for the first time, there's like a lot of things that you want to do that you can't do anymore, and then I know a lot of you guys who've probably gone into mind after watching this film, or tomorrow, or whatever, all I can say is, when you go in there, you know, if you're going to do something stupid or whatever, you ought to just start thinking about it for a couple seconds, because it may, you know, mess your life up forever, which really isn't worth that one mistake, you know, I mean, worth to your family, or to the guys that you work with. They say hindsight is 20-20. What could you have done differently looking back that would have kept this from happening? Well, like, well, I guess whenever me and Barry was pulling out roof down, we got pretty involved in what we was doing there. We would just, like, we was in by the bolts there a few feet, if we would have, you know, just stopped and thought about what we was doing there before, you know, we went ahead and did it, you know, we'd probably be all right today. Were you still in by the bolts when it fell on you? Yeah, we was, we wasn't in rough while, we just like maybe two or three feet, like I said, I really didn't even get time, I just turned around and come down, I can remember laying there and looking up at the bolts, hoping that the bolts above my head was going to hold the rest of the roof up there. So you almost got back under the bolts before it fell? Yeah. Like I said, you know, a lot of guys, things, they're fast in the mining, they can get out of the road in time, but for as fast as that roof come down, like I said, I just turned around and I didn't even get a chance to jump or nothing, the whole place was down.