Families of trapped US coal miners vent frustration

A narrow hole being drilled in the side of a Utah mountain holds perhaps the last, best chance of finding six coal miners trapped for more than two weeks in a cave-in.

If, as expected, searchers fail to find any sign of life, the rescue effort might be called off and the Crandall Canyon mine turned into a tomb.

And the miners’ family members, who have stubbornly clung to the hope the men might be found alive, will finally start “to grieve and to heal”, said Sonny Olsen, an attorney acting as spokesman for the families.

“I’ve witnessed these families and they’re strong people,” he said. “These are very hardy people, and tragedy is not new to the mining industry. These families know what can happen in these mines. I don’t know that it makes it any easier.”

Relatives and friends vented their frustration at the mine’s owner and questioned whether it was too dangerous to be working there.

Mine co-owner Bob Murray, who after the first collapse on August 6 became the public face of the rescue effort, today said he is hurt by critics who say he ran an unsafe mine and was not doing enough to find the miners. He said he emotionally “came apart” after a second cave-in killed three rescuers.

“I didn’t desert anybody,” Murray said. “I’ve been living on this mountain every day, living in a little trailer.”

Murray, 67, described the scene of the second collapse that killed the three rescue workers and injured six others last Thursday.

He said he rushed into the mine in his street clothes and began digging out the men, buried under 5 feet of coal, with his bare hands. “I never hesitated to go in there. I was the first man in and the last man out,” he said.

He later dropped out of a debriefing with federal officials and began wandering around the mine yard in the moonlight, reliving the collapse, he said.

“I came apart,” he said. “I was under a doctor’s care for a couple days.”

Murray spoke bitterly of the United Mine Workers of America, which has called his company callous for planning to resume mining at other parts of 5,000-acre Crandall Canyon.

“They’re twisting it all around to discredit me and my company,” he said during the 12-minute phone call.

After the first collapse, Murray said that the men could have survived and he would bring them home, alive or dead. But he retreated from that view after the deaths of the rescue workers. He re-emerged Monday to announce that the trapped miners would likely remain entombed in the Crandall Canyon mine, 1,500 feet underground.

A drill crew expected to break through today.

Searchers plan to bang on a drill bit and wait for a response, take air readings, and lower a microphone and camera. Officials said they expect the results to be the same as the four previous tries: no signs of life.

Critics are now saying the mine was a disaster waiting to happen and pointing fingers at Murray Energy Corp. and the federal government.

Miners’ advocates accuse the US government’s Mine Safety and Health Administration of being too accommodating to the industry at the expense of safety.

They also say the agency was too quick to approve the mining plan, despite concerns that it was too dangerous.

“No one took the time to see that it was a recipe for disaster,” Phil Smith, a spokesman for the United Mine Workers of America, said yesterday of the non-union mine.

In question is the decision to allow Crandall Canyon’s operators to mine between two sections that had already been excavated.

In that middle section, the mine was cut like a city block, leaving pillars of coal holding up the mountain.

The Mine Safety and Health Administration approved a plan allowing the operators to pull out the pillars, a practice called “retreat mining”, which causes controlled roof cave-ins.

Experts say that the operators and the government should have been aware that deep mines are prone to “bumps” – an unpredictable phenomenon that happens when settling layers of earth bear down on the walls of a mine. The force can cause pillars to fail, turning chunks of coal into deadly missiles.

The August 6 cave-in that trapped the men is believed to have been caused by a bump.

There have since been other bumps, including one last week that killed the rescue workers, injured six others and led the mine agency to call off efforts to dig underground.