The town of Saarwellingen in the German state of Saarland is used to tremors but this one was an exception.

The quake, measuring 4 on the Richter Scale, struck at mid-afternoon on Saturday, bringing down large chunks of the gable adorning the local church and rattling the porcelain in everyone's homes.

The residents of the 14,000-strong community that poured out onto the street, many of them in tears of fear and anger, knew the cause without asking: pit coal mining at Ensdorf nearby.

Saarland Premier Peter Mueller experienced those emotions at first hand when he visited the town on Sunday. Some 6,000 were on hand with placards calling for an immediate halt to all pit mining in the region along the French border.

"Stop mining forever," the demonstrators shouted, some shaking their fists at the premier.

"Now it's a matter of life and death," said Peter Lehnart, who represents the interests of those who have suffered losses through the tremors.

On its way out

The kind of deep coal mining carried on in Ensdorf and seven other remaining German pits is on its way out, although open-cast mining of low-quality lignite remains big business in eastern Germany.

Instead of the short, sharp end to anthracite mining, as was agreed across the border in France, the RAG company was established in 1968 to scale down slowly the sector using state subsidies.

The hard, high-quality coal played a central role in establishing the Ruhr as Germany's industrial heartland in the 19th century and was key to postwar reconstruction. In 1956, there were 600,000 miners hauling 150 million tons of "black gold" to the surface from 130 pits every year.

Dying out hard

Long traditions die hard, and to this day, the miner's good-luck greeting of "Glueck auf!" can be heard across the region, even though there are now just 30,000 miners producing 22,000 tons a year.

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