Touring the coal plant by Nemorino
Until nearly the end of our ninety-minute tour, our guide kept us wondering how he had acquired his detailed knowledge of every square centimeter of the plant. We knew he couldn't have been a miner, because he was over sixty, and miners didn't live that long. In fact he told us that the miners typically died a horrible death at around age forty-five, essentially suffocating from the layer of rock dust that had collected in their lungs. He said it was the rock dust that did it, not the coal dust. These men usually felt all right during the day, but were in agony when they lay down at night.
There were lots of men like that in his neighborhood, because he grew up right here on the minefield. 800 meters from their house there was a huge ventilating fan that blew the used air up out of the mines, meaning that if the wind was blowing from that direction their house was soon covered with coal dust. His mother didn't have a chance of getting or keeping the laundry clean. As the youngest child he was the last to bathe in the weekly bath water, which was a black brew before he ever got in it.
When he was seventeen he wanted to become a miner, but his father vetoed the idea ("for which I am eternally grateful"), so he joined the Essen fire department instead. For the last seventeen years of his career as a professional fireman he was in charge of fire prevention at the old Zollverein plant and spent most of his working days there.
Second photo: Our tour group looking at the huge sorting machines.
Third and fourth photos: From the roof we could look out at the nearby coke-producing plant, and out over the Ruhr Valley area.