Strange sounds offer hope for miners

RESCUERS searching for six coal miners who have been trapped for 10 days got two pieces of hopeful news yesterday — images of an intact chamber with potentially breathable air and the sound of mysterious vibrations in the mountain.

Officials are studying the results of air quality samples taken from a third borehole.

Video images from the same shaft showed an undamaged section complete with a ventilation curtain that divides intake air from exhaust air. Behind the curtain, in theory, the men might have found refuge and breathable air.

Company officials planned to begin drilling a fourth hole yesterday, but that did not get under way by midmorning, and there was no explanation for the delay.

The hole had been planned for more than a day, but its location was changed after the noise was detected on Wednesday by devices monitoring vibrations in the mountain, raising some hope the men might be found alive.

“If the men went in there, they could be alive,” mine co-owner Bob Murray said. “There was no damage at all. The roof is intact; no ribs have outburst. The floors are in place — it looked just as it did when we mined it.”

The sounds detected could be a rock breaking underground or even an animal, said Mine Health and Safety Administration chief Richard Stickler.

As crews slowly dig a path to the men’s presumed location at the Crandall Canyon Mine, the choice of where to drill the narrow holes sunk deep into the mountain amount to little more than educated guesses.

“There are a lot of possibilities,” Stickler said. “We started with logical thinking: ‘If I were in this situation, what would I do?’ That has guided us in where we look.”

The men, if they survived the collapse, could be huddled together in an underground area the size of several football fields.

“There’s always a chance. You have to hang on to that chance. But realistically it is small, quite small,” said J Davitt McAteer, former head of the Mine Health and Safety Administration. “You would have to have every single break and divine intervention to successfully extract these guys.”