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More bad news at site of Utah mine rescue attempt

Posted by: Sister Toldjah on August 17, 2007 at 8:38 am

Via CNN:

HUNTINGTON, Utah (CNN) — Three rescue workers were killed and six injured Thursday night during an apparent “seismic bump” at a Utah mine, according to state and hospital officials.

The workers were attempting to reach six miners who have been trapped in the Crandall Canyon mine since an August 6 collapse. There has been no contact with those miners.

Emergency work to clear a tunnel leading to the trapped miners will resume once the mine operator receives safety clearance from federal officials, Murray Energy Group Corp. spokesman Michael Knowles said.

Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. early Friday said “underground mining for the time being is going to cease” but added above-ground work to drill a fourth hole into the mine would continue.

Huntsman said he would meet with officials from the Mine Safety and Health Administration and Murray Energy Group “to get word on what they expect to do in hours and days ahead.”

The three who died did so in a “remarkable act of selflessness,” Huntsman said. “There is nothing more selfless than giving one’s life while rescuing another.”

He also pledged to improve mine safety — “not only in Utah but throughout the country.”

They just can’t catch a break out there. There’s a lot of sadness right now in Huntington, Utah. Keep praying.

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14 Responses to “More bad news at site of Utah mine rescue attempt”

Comments

  1. Scott Pleune says:
    August 17, 2007 at 10:48 am

    Keep praying? To what? An all powerful and perfectly good force that allows our most noble rescue desires and efforts to be answered with death and serious injury from “an apparent ’seismic bump’?” We humans need to take full responsibility for creating optimal conditions for working people to act on their most noble, useful, and productive desires. The hard work of one person is worth more than the prayers of a trillion!

  2. TedintheShed says:
    August 17, 2007 at 11:06 am

    All that we can do is pray for their well being.

  3. onenibble says:
    August 17, 2007 at 12:35 pm

    My prayers go out for the miners and thier families. It appears that this mine was a death trap with these seismic shifts occurring in the mine. It also appears that safety is not a great concern of the mine owners. These miners have no tracking devices and no plan of rescue for the mine established before mining operations originated. This mining operation was probably too dangerous from the start and should not have have been attempted.

  4. Shaun says:
    August 17, 2007 at 3:15 pm

    Bob Murray is completely insincere and simply looking to cover himself from any future liability. He makes me sick with his staged emotion. I find it funny that he keeps insisting on assigning blame to an “earthquake.” He is a bad person and I hope he pays dearly for what happened to his employees.

  5. Baklava says:
    August 17, 2007 at 3:33 pm

    Commenters #3 and #4 are sudden experts…

    I know they are bad and beat their wives…

    Tragic situations like Katrina, bridge collapse in MN and mine tragedy will ALWAYS bring out people who are mean and comment without actual knowledge.

    Why can’t we pray (or for the secular – hope) for the best outcome without making accusations that we don’t know are true?

  6. TedintheShed says:
    August 17, 2007 at 3:37 pm

    5.

    Great comment.

    Unfortunately, the answer to your question is no we can not as it is human nature.

  7. Baklava says:
    August 17, 2007 at 3:40 pm

    Ted,

    I know… When my love passed away in 2006 I was looking for blame in myself. Enough people told me that was ridiculous.

    Fromt the AP

    The cave-in at 6:39 p.m. was believed to be caused by a “mountain bump,” in which shifting ground forces chunks of rock from the walls. The force from the bump registered a magnitude of 1.6 at the University of Utah seismograph stations in Salt Lake City.

    Stickler said it unleashed a huge blast of coal and support material that hit the miners working to clear rubble from the underground tunnel. The blast created a destruction zone about 30 feet long along a wall of the chamber, and knocked out steel posts, chain link fencing and the cables that tied everything together.

  8. TedintheShed says:
    August 17, 2007 at 3:45 pm

    7.

    You have my belated condolences for your loss.

    That said, I am not trying to lay blame or to assign wrong, I am just saying that is the nature of things. It is instinctive for us to find the “why” about any given situation.

    But is seems you’ve know that already.

  9. Baklava says:
    August 17, 2007 at 4:11 pm

    Yes. And thank you.

  10. Steve Skubinna says:
    August 17, 2007 at 5:00 pm

    This is the worst thing I’ve heard all day, and I am not being flip. A shipmate just today received the AMCROSS message that his mother was dying.

    And Scott, thanks for the lucid and to-the-point admonition. You get right on it and fix the problem, okay? Stop wasting your precious time sneering at the simpletons who are praying. I can understand your frustration at all the lesser intellects, but losing even a second of your supreme brainpower makes it look as if you don’t care how many die.

  11. Scott Pleune says:
    August 17, 2007 at 5:14 pm

    I too send out my most deeply heart-felt feelings and hopes for the individuals, families, and community that have been directly effected by the death and serious injuries in Utah. And, i with all veracity (devotion to the truth/facts) hope that nobody else will be hurt in a dangerous ‘leap of faith’ attempt to save someone else. We have only one life that we know we can live and only one body and brain that we can live it in! So, we better take very good smart and loving care in this only known world/reality! And, i don’t wish any harm to anyone associated with the events in Utah, including Bob Murray. My greatest wish and hope is that all needed lessons are learned from what has happened.

  12. Big Bang Hunter says:
    August 17, 2007 at 6:14 pm

    em>”My greatest wish and hope is that all needed lessons are learned from what has happened.”

    - I echo your hope, but the examples from coast to coast of bureaucratic indifference is legion. All the time, all the money, and all the “experts”, and still the bridges fall down.

    - For now we need to be as supportive, and comforting to the families that have experienced this unimaginable loss.

    - But sooner or later people have to start paying attention to the sad state of our infrastructure, and not just during the days when its 28 pt headlines in the media. we seem to play that game over and over, letting the politicians that get paid to address issues of safety off the hook as soon as the dust settles.

    - Adding yet another layer of “watchers”, watching the watched, the classic answer to everything run by the government, isn’t going to help. We need oversight by people that have no political or financial axes to grind. Letting Murray run the recovery operations was unbelievably wrong headed, but typical of big dollar operations. Hour long wind bag speeches, designed to limit liability, is not a recipe for safe viable outcomes.

    - BBH – **==

  13. Carol Brown says:
    August 17, 2007 at 9:35 pm

    I’m just wondering if there is a chance that the mine bumps are caused by the drilling that is happening from the top. If you put a stick in a cup of sand, the sand is going to adjust to accomodate the change that happened in the once undisturbed structure.

  14. cathy says:
    August 20, 2007 at 1:33 am

    The likely lost miners and the injured and killed rescuers are tragedies but so is the fact that if/when this mine shuts down, up to 90% of residents in Huntington will be out of work and this will become yet another ghost town. My guess is that if you poll the residents, they would rather continue to work this dangerous mine than have it shut down, even in part.

    Further, although I truly sympathize with the families of the lost miners (as much as one who is not in their shoes possibly can), I see tonight on CNN that they are demanding that the rescue effort continue. Haphazardly risking other lives (as has happened and is highly likely to happen again) is absolutely ridiculous and these families need to grieve, pray for their missing loved ones and move on so they are not joined by other grieving families. God help us if the trapped miners are still alive but how many other lives are worth the tiny possibility of saving the six? Nine dead or injured is already too many. Risking one more is unthinkable.