Barton, Md. – Crews trying to free two miners buried for more than two days beneath a huge mound of rocks and dirt reached the backhoe one of the men was in, a federal official said late Thursday.
Workers found the heavy vehicle shortly after 6 p.m., but it could take some time to gingerly remove the unstable remnants of a collapsed wall that surround it, said Bob Cornett, acting district manager for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.
“All we can see is a piece of it. They’ll have to do it slowly” to avoid further damage to the vehicle, he said.
Cornett said he told family members of the progress.
“We said a prayer,” he said. “If I was in their shoes, I would have hope.”
Cornett said earlier Thursday that he believed the miners were operating heavy machinery side by side and the vehicles would be found near each other.
The men were trapped Tuesday morning when the bottom of a massive wall at the open- pit coal mine collapsed on them and the equipment they were operating. Trucks have been hauling about 2,500 tons of debris each hour from the pile at the western Maryland mine since then to try to reach them.
Efforts bogged down earlier in the day when excavation equipment got stuck in mud. Work also stopped for several hours early Thursday so explosives could be used to clear a dangerous area.
Despite the delays, Cornett said the agency still considers the operation a rescue mission. He cited two recent mining disasters, the July 2002 Quecreek accident in Pennsylvania where nine miners were rescued after four days and the Sago mine tragedy last year in West Virginia where 12 miners died and one survived.
The miners were working at the bottom of the pit when the wall collapsed. One was operating a tracked backhoe and the other was using a loader. Both have CB radios, although the men have not communicated with anyone.
