Huntington, Utah – As frustration mounts over the slow pace of the digging to free six trapped miners, more questions arose Tuesday about whether risky mining methods may have left parts of the coal mine dangerously unstable.
Some mining companies consider the “retreat mining” methods used at Utah’s Crandall Canyon so dangerous that they will leave coal behind rather than risk the safety of their workers.
Video images taken early Tuesday showed miners working to clear a heavily damaged mine shaft. They were only a third of the way to the presumed location of the trapped miners – eight days after a thunderous collapse blew out the walls of mine shafts.
Bob Murray, chief of Murray Energy Corp., co-owner and operator of the Crandall Canyon mine, estimated the digging would take up to another week.
The slow pace is especially painful for a mechanic who usually works with the trapped miners but was called away shortly before the collapse to fix a truck.
Jameson Ward, 24, said he was about a quarter-mile from the men when he heard the thunderous collapse and felt the mountain tumble. The bounce and the force of the rushing air was so strong it nearly pushed his pickup sideways, he said.
“I went nose down and just heard it howl, thinking, ‘What the … was that?”‘
When he jumped out of his truck, the dust was so thick his headlamp was worthless.
“I almost turned right back around to go in there, but then I figured, better not go into a bad situation by myself,” he said.
He drove toward the mine entrance. After a rendezvous with three others, they alerted mine officials and headed back inside with rescue equipment, he said.
“Stuff was falling from the roof and sloughing off the sides,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘I’ve got to get to my guys,’ but you’re also thinking, ‘What if it keeps going?’ There’s a risk it could do it again.”
The rescue team crawled deep into the mine before finally hitting a wall of debris. Unable to do more, they started digging along the top of the debris pile to keep air going back into the blocked mine shaft.
“I think I did everything I could,” said Ward, who has three years of experience. “I just hope everybody’s OK; honestly, that’s all I can do.”
The mine may have been made more dangerous by what Murray acknowledged was decades of digging using retreat mining, in which miners yank out a mine’s pillars, grabbing the last of the coal.
Murray said the retreat mining took place before he took over the mine a year ago. He said no retreat mining was taking place at the time of the collapse, which he insists was triggered by an earthquake. Government seismologists say the mine’s collapse registered as an earthquake.
