The Daily Intelligencer Nov. 10, 1980 Charleston, W. Va. (AP) West Virginia coal helped fuel the nation's industrial groath, but the rich , dark veins have never been mined without loss of life and limb. More than 20,000 miners have been killed since men first began mining coal in West Virginia, according to the State Department of Mines. Countless more have suffered crippling injuries and contracted disabling diseases. The latest deaths came Friday, when five men were killed as methane gas exploded in Westmoreland Coal Co's. Ferrell No. 17 mine in Boone County. The force of the explosion blew large cinder blocks 150 feet. Westmoreland spokesman Steve Anderson said the mine's ventilation system, designed to prevent a buildup of the volatile methane gas, somehow had failed. United Mine Workers President Sam Church, who flew from Wash. D.C., to join relatives in a silent vigil at the entrance of the mine, told reporters at the scene "We must mine coal and mine it safely. America's coal cannot and will not be dug at the cost of mine workers blood." But history defies Church's statement. Nobody seems to know for sure when the first person died in a West Virginia mine. The first major disaster took place nearly a century ago at Newburg, in the northern part of the state. Thirty nine men were killed Jan 21, 1886, when an explosion ripped through the Mountain Brook shaft of the Orrel Coal Company. The blast was the first of some 40 major explosions to be recorded by the Department of Mines. The nation's worst mining disaster occured in N. West Virgina, at Monongah, on Dec. 6, 1907. The explosion at the Fairmont Coat Co., killed 361. Then came the explosion at Benwood, near Wheeling, on April 28, 1924, which took 119 lives. An explosion at Layland, in the New River Gorge, claimed 114 lives in 1915, and 97 miners died in 1927 when a mine blew up at Everettville. The latest such disaster, a 1968 blast that killed 78 men at Farmington, prompted the 1969 Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, which required increased inspections and additional safety equipment. Deaths were reduced, but continue. So far this year, 30 West Virginia miners have been killed. Thirty-five West Virginia miners died in 1979, compared with 29 in 1978 and 28 the previoius year. These latest deaths increased West Virginia's mine fatality count since 1900 to 19,963 an average of nearly 250 deaths a year thus far in the 20th century. Last week's acciedent marked the first multiple-fatality gas explosion in W. Virginia since 1972, when five miners were killed. In the early part of the century, most of the deaths came when methane gas and coal dust explosions wiped out significant portions of some coal mining communities. In those years, when children worked in the mines alongside adults, it was not uncommon for disaster rescue teams to find fathers with their lifeless fingers wrapped protectively around the bodies of their teenage sons. Today, the sons live to bury their fathers. "I think it's hardest on the boys, because of sports, hunting and fishing, things I'm not able to do with them," said Shirley WENTZ, a Fayette County widow whose husband, Harold, was one of last year's victims. cheryl BALOG wenberg