Nine Came Up. One Went Back

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One night last November, Randy Fogle was snoring in bed. His wife Annette poked him and told him to roll over. This has happened regularly over 24 years of marriage. But on this particular night, Randy said, "I can't." Annette asked why not. "I can't," he repeated. "If I roll over, I'm going to drown." Months later, thinking back on the incident, Annette smiles ruefully. "I let it go," she says. "I figured in his mind he was back underground."

That Randy Fogle should dream of drowning is not surprising. Unlike the millions of other people who battle demons or wolves or rising waters on their bad nights, Fogle actually lived the nightmare, escaping only at the last minute. A year ago, in the midst of a bad case of level-orange jitters about national security, Americans got a bit of good news. After three days of suspense, nine miners who had crouched 240 ft. beneath a dairy farm in Somerset County, Pa., gasping as the last of their air leached away, were delivered from their flooded mine. The first figure millions of TV viewers saw emerge from the land of the dead, cradled in a yellow rescue capsule, was the crew foreman, Randy Fogle, 45, sent up before the others because he had developed a heart palpitation.

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No, the occasional nightmare seems natural. Far more surprising is that today, a year after the disaster, Fogle, as he has been doing each workday for the past six months, will go down into the mine. He will descend and walk through tunnels that were deathtraps, past sledgehammer marks that commemorate his crew's desperate attempts to be heard on the surface, past the date, time and initials he scrawled in chalk on a coal face the day of the disaster--7/24/02 3:55 p.m. RF. Fogle is the only one of the rescued miners who has returned.

On July 24 last year, shortly before 9 p.m., a mirror in the Fogle bathroom crashed to the floor, startling Annette. At almost the same instant, millions of gallons of water in an abandoned mine slammed through a thin coal wall and into the working mine, called Quecreek No. 1, where her husband and his eight-man crew were drilling bituminous coal. "It blew hard," he now says. "It was moving fast. Oh, man, it was wicked." Over the next 78 hours, the nine men fled rust-colored torrents through 4-ft.-high tunnels and ended up stranded in a huge air bubble. Its oxygen became so depleted that by the time their rescuers managed to bore a fresh air hole for them, they had begun to vomit.

No one passed this unimaginable trial by water better than Fogle. In the first chaotic minutes, he picked up Dennis Hall, who had fallen into the swift-running current, and threw him to the safety of a raised conveyor belt. "He saved my life right there," says Hall. Later, Fogle risked his own life driving a coal scooper into a cataract to rescue miner Mark Popernack, who was stranded on the other side. It is Fogle who is acknowledged to have kept his crew focused, adamantly refusing to let them give in to despair. If anyone epitomized their fierce solidarity, which Pennsylvania Governor Mark Schweiker captured in the phrase "Nine for nine" before he had even met them, Fogle did so.

For the most part, the nine, many of whom have known one another from childhood, have maintained that unity. Confronted with the craziness, boosterism and venality that attend every American miracle, they found strength in group identity. They greeted George W. Bush together, attended NASCAR races and Pittsburgh Steelers training camp in large subunits, and still hunt and fish together. Early on, when scores of reporters and producers a day called, jockeying for the story, the nine agreed to sell their rights to Disney and split the money evenly, at $150,000 apiece. With their anniversary looming, five of them gathered at a local church, signed autographs and subjected themselves yet again to the attentions of the press, as local and national outlets squabbled for sound bites. ("That was worse than being trapped in the mine," Hall joked afterward.) They have maintained a common restraint following the suicide last month of Bob Long, an expert surveyor who aided the rescue and received his own deal from Disney after being touted on TV as "the man behind the miracle." Long's uneasy relationship with the miners — he called them "bastards" once — may have had something to do with his despair, although the parties are said to have reconciled before his death. Fogle, echoing the off-the-record comments of his colleagues, will say only, "It's a shame. Everyone did such a good job to get us out, and then something like that happens."

But there are two key ways in which Fogle's road diverges from his friends'. One is his refusal to join a lawsuit. In May, six of the miners (the other abstainers were Mark Popernack and John Unger) filed a civil suit against Quecreek's operator, Black Wolf Coal Co., claiming that it should have known how close the water hazard next door was. Fogle opted out. The second divergence is his decision to go back into the mine. Some say the two are intimately connected.