With their efforts to drill deep inside a Utah mountain yielding no signs of six trapped miners, exhausted rescuers pondered alternatives including drilling another hole big enough to accommodate a human-size capsule to get inside tunnel.

A video camera lowered into the mine where six miners have been missing for more than five days shows “survivable space”, a US official said today.

A second drill broke through to a Utah mine shaft today and a video camera was lowered inside, searching for the fate of six miners believed to be trapped nearly 2,000 feet below.

The massive rescue effort to find six coal miners caught in a cave-in took a disheartening turn when a narrow hole drilled more than 1,800ft into the earth yielded no sounds of life and barely any oxygen.