Huntington, Utah – He’s a bulldog in a 5-foot-11 frame, bellowing about earthquakes, global warming, helicopter noise and traffic on national TV as six of his miners are trapped underground.
Bob Murray, though, prefers another description for himself: underdog.
A fourth-generation miner who grew up poor in the hills of southeastern Ohio, Murray chose mining over medical school and says he has the scars – which he readily displays – that come from years of toiling underground.
A simple miner, he considers himself (“That’s all I am. That’s all I am.”), despite rising through the industry to become chairman of the nation’s 12th-largest coal company, Murray Energy Corp. of Cleveland.
What he has become this week is the very public and complex face of the nation’s latest mine disaster.
Murray’s company is part owner of the Crandall Canyon mine, where six workers were buried 1,500 feet down in a cave-in early Monday. The 67-year-old Murray was working in Montana when he got word of the collapse. He hopped on a private jet and was on the scene within hours.
He has since been the main spokesman in front of the cameras, holding nothing back as he takes on scientists, the media and federal regulators in a way that leads some to wonder why he isn’t expending more of his considerable energy on trying to reach the miners instead.
His main beef has to do with the possible cause of the collapse, which Murray insists was triggered by a 3.9-magnitude earthquake.
Government seismologists say the ground-shaking was caused not by a quake but by the cave-in itself.
Holding back has never been Murray’s style. He has testified testily about climate change before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, butting heads with Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer.
He called Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton “anti-American” for suggesting the nation needed a president who is pro-labor. He sued a Pennsylvania agency over environmental regulations that Murray’s company contended resulted in the shutdown of a mine.
In 2001, he sued the Akron Beacon Journal for $1 billion over an unflattering profile. (Among other things, the story said: “Even his friends roll their eyes at his hyperbole.”) The case was settled out of court on undisclosed terms.
“What you’re seeing is Bob. He tells things exactly like he thinks that it is,” said R. Larry Grayson, a professor of mining engineering at Penn State University who has known Murray for more than a decade. “He doesn’t mince words. He’s driving and passionate about what he does, which I think comes out. He wants very much to get his message across.”
Murray says he lied about his age to start working in the mines at 16 after his father, also a miner, was paralyzed on the job years earlier.
Murray also recalls being trapped in a mine for 12 hours. “It seemed like an eternity,” he says. “When you’re in there in the dark, life goes by. There’s nothing you can do but sit there and wait. And if these folks are alive, that’s what they’re doing right now.
“I understand it.”
