As Sad As It Gets

I can't even begin to imagine.

(NY Times story from earlier this morning after the jump.)

12 Miners Found Alive 41 Hours After Explosion

By JAMES DAO

SAGO, W.Va., Wednesday, Jan. 4 - Forty-one hours after an explosion trapped 13 men in a West Virginia coal mine here, family members and a state official said 12 of the miners had been found alive Tuesday night.

Earlier Tuesday evening, the body of one miner was found 11,200 feet from the mine entrance, within a few hundred feet of a vehicle used to transport the workers deep into the mine, company officials said. The miner was not identified, and the cause of his death was unclear.

Joe Thornton, deputy secretary for the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety, said the rescued miners were being examined at the mine shortly before midnight and would soon be taken to nearby hospitals. Mr. Thornton said he did not know details of their medical condition.

Outside the Sago Baptist Church, where people had gathered across the street from the mine family and friends of the miners hugged each other and shed tears of joy, as they learned the news.

"It's a miracle," said Loretta Ables, who said her fiancé, Fred Ware, was among the survivors. "Everyone was telling us they were probably dead."

Earlier in the ordeal, air readings from a hole drilled 260 feet into the mine had revealed extremely high levels of toxic carbon monoxide, a likely byproduct of the explosion, mine company officials said.

After the one miner's body was found alone, Bennett K. Hatfield, the chief executive officer of International Coal Group, the mine's owner, said he considered it a hopeful sign that the other miners had abandoned the vehicle and found a safe pocket of air.

Terry Goff, a friend of one of the miners, said he learned that the miners were alive when the bell at the Baptist church began ringing just before midnight.

"People were rushing out, yelling, 'There's 12 alive!' " Mr. Goff said.

"When they found the body and said the carbon monoxide levels were high, I doubted my faith," he said, "but now we've got 12 men walking off that hill."

Throughout the day, trained rescue teams equipped with oxygen canisters had rotated through the mine, meticulously repairing the damaged ventilation system and combing through the mazelike corridors for the men.

Emotions seesawed throughout the day with each new piece of information. In the morning, hopes had run high that the miners, most of them highly experienced workers in their 40's and 50's, had barricaded themselves in a corridor with breathable air to wait for a rescue party.

By late afternoon, mine company officials said that with only a few thousand feet of mine left to search, the chances of the miners being alive seemed remote. But late in the evening, officials said the fact that 12 miners had apparently not been killed by the force of the explosion renewed hopes that they were alive.

Nick Helms, who waited all day for news of his father, Terry, said his father, a strapping 50-year-old, had endured numerous injuries in a 30-year career and hated mining because of the dangers, but refused to quit because the job put food on the table.

"He gave his life in there so I could go to the movies," Mr. Helms, 25, said of his father. Switching to the present tense, Mr. Helms added, "He is very selfless."

The explosion, which occurred at about 6:30 Monday morning in an unused part of the mine that had been sealed just last month, shook homes and woke people nearby. But it did not cause extensive damage inside the mine, company officials said.

Some concrete walls used to direct airflow had been knocked down by the force of the blast, but there were no cave-ins or piles of rubble from the explosion, officials said.

The real danger to the miners, officials said, would have come from the persistent high levels of carbon monoxide inside the mine.

A colorless, odorless gas, carbon monoxide impedes the body's ability to carry oxygen to vital organs. It can cause flulike symptoms like headaches and nausea, and in high enough quantities, it can kill a person in 15 minutes. Of particular danger to trapped miners, it can also cause confusion.

By Tuesday evening, monitors showed carbon dioxide readings of more than 300 parts per million in some sections of the mine, more than 10 times the amount considered safe, company officials said.

"The CO2 was the worst thing they could find," said Bruce E. Dial of Pineville, N.C., who worked as a federal mine safety official for more than 20 years.

Miners, after underground explosions or fires, are trained to find pockets of breathable air using special monitors, then barricade themselves in using a plastic-coated fabric known as brattice cloth.

Lewis Wade, a mine safety expert and senior science adviser for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, said a well-sealed corridor could keep a miner alive for hours. "Explosions are devastating things," Mr. Wade said, "but miners are smart and resilient people."

Federal inspectors fined the Sago mine more than $24,000 for roughly 202 violations in 2005, according to federal records.

The total monetary figure is likely to rise substantially because the federal mine-safety agency has yet to put a dollar figure on some citations.

The most serious of these citations are 16 "unwarrantable failure orders," which are problems that an operator knows exist but fails to correct.

Thirteen of these orders were issued in the past six months, federal records show.

"Under the Bush administration, the citing of unwarrantable failures has gone down dramatically," said Tony Oppegard, a top federal mine official in the Clinton administration and a former prosecutor of mine-safety violations in Kentucky. "So to see a rash of unwarrantable failures under this administration is a telling sign of a mine with serious safety problems."

Inspectors found dangerous accumulations of coal dust, which can be explosive. Other citations dealt with ventilation and firefighting equipment violations.

Since June, the mine has experienced 15 roof falls or wall collapses, with three causing injuries to miners, according to federal records. That is an unusually high number, Mr. Oppegard said, "and it's indicative of roof-control problems."

Asked about the violations on Tuesday, Mr. Hatfield said the mine's "bad history" had occurred before his company took it over last year, adding that dramatic improvements had been made since then.

The anxiety of the day was heightened by what seemed to be painfully slow progress by the rescue teams, which took the entire day to move 2,000 feet.

But, experts said, the teams had to proceed cautiously, frequently testing the air and repairing the ventilation system, because of an array of dangers. A weakened roof could have caved in, for instance, or trapped methane could have triggered a second explosion.

Dennis O'Dell, administrator of health and safety for the United Mine Workers of America, who was assisting in the search, said hasty rescue efforts had at times led to additional deaths. At the Blue Creek No. 5 Mine in Alabama in 2001, 10 men attempting to rescue trapped miners were killed in a second explosion.

"I know it's tough on families because every minute seems like an hour," Mr. O'Dell said. "It's just something you have to do. Everybody has done as good a job here as I have seen."

In one setback, a robot owned by the federal government became mired in mud inside the mine on Tuesday and was rendered unusable. Officials had hoped that the robot, equipped with lights, an air testing device and a video camera, would reach the trapped miners faster than human teams could.

The cause of the blast remained a mystery. Company officials said that the mine did not have a history of methane gas problems and that air testing conducted before the explosion found no evidence of methane, a highly combustible gas.

The apparent lack of methane led some mining experts to speculate that coal dust, which is highly combustible, caused the explosion. A spark from electrical equipment could ignite coal dust, they said.

Mr. Hatfield said the likelihood of a coal dust explosion seemed low because no work had been done in the mine over the weekend.

The trapped team was the first to enter the mine after the holiday layoff but had not begun work when the explosion occurred, he said. As a result, there would have been little or no coal dust in the air, he said.

Lightning was another possible cause. The explosion happened during a violent thunderstorm, and Mr. O'Dell said there had been incidents in which metal pipes extruding from underground mines had conducted lightning bolts. The bolts then ignited pockets of methane gas, he said.

Heartwrenching.

Comments

[membengal]

Good lord, they are alive?

Amazing. And good news to start a Wednesday.

[membengal]

Good lord, I should have read the first link, before the jump.

Yes, jackie, that is one of the saddest things I have ever heard. And, if one of the national tv stations gets the idea of EVER doing a movie of the week about this, they deserve some sort of apocalyptic event to befall them.

[puddy]

All of the blame for the miscommunication lay on the shoulders of the authorities who jumped the gun and told them 12 were alive. There is no way that the mine rescue teams would have miscommunicated that kind of information. This was mishandled by a group that was trying to make people happy. They should have waited for a first hand account from a team member before telling the families anything.

[Killer Marine]

What's worse is that when the 'miscommunication' was uttered, the authorities and the new media waited 3 hours before correcting it. And, just what you think they were doing all this time? Coming up with a party line, talking points and, the word 'miscommunication'.

[Jackie]

NY DailyNews lays it on entirely too thick.

[Scottie]

Westray, all over again.

[puddy]

Just did a search of the mine's citations, and a lot of them in the past two months were for the "accumulation of combustible materials." There were separate issues for failure to maintain fire control equipment and safe travel and escapeways as well.

The company should have forced their safety directors/mine managers to be proactive to these things (which are readily identifiable in a mine) instead of reactive to the citations. In most cases, they were able to clean up the areas quickly, but given the tendency of these violations, it is also likely that they were going to happen again.

The company has to take the brunt of the blame and I hate to be insensitive, but the miners know the regulations as well and need to do what they can to make their work environment safe.

Mine safety beings at the top, but it is implemented at the bottom.

[puddy]

*begins