Rescuers to drill 5th hole in Utah mine By MICHAEL RUBINKAM, Associated Press Writer

Rescuers to drill 5th hole in Utah mine By MICHAEL RUBINKAM, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 52 minutes ago



HUNTINGTON, Utah - Rescuers banged on a drill bit and set off explosives, hoping to elicit a response from six men trapped deep inside a collapsed coal mine. Their efforts were met with silence — again.

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Rescuers found no signs of life Saturday after drilling a fourth hole into the Crandall Canyon mine, where the men have been trapped for nearly two weeks.

"We did not detect any signals from miners underground," said Richard Stickler, head of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

A microphone lowered into the new hole revealed nothing to indicate that anyone was in the cavern. A video camera recorded images from the void that were being analyzed early Sunday.

Despite the lack of evidence that the miners have survived since the initial Aug. 6 collapse, Stickler said drillers would start on a fifth hole.

"As long as we have hope, we will continue working and doing everything we can. Our goal is to find these miners alive," he said.

Underground tunneling has been halted since a mountain "bump" Thursday killed three rescuers and injured six others. Officials had hoped the fourth hole would finally offer clues to whether the men were alive 1,500 feet below ground. Instead, the results were the same as the three previous tries.

MSHA summoned experts from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, West Virginia University and private engineering firms in the hope that they can develop a safer way of tunneling toward the trapped miners. Their first meeting at the mine was scheduled for Sunday morning.

Stickler acknowledged the challenge of working on a mountain where there have been 23 seismic tremors since the initial Aug. 6 collapse.

"They continue to occur and there's no way of knowing when they're going to stop," he said. "We have never seen a situation like we have at this operation."

Rob Moore, vice president of Murray Energy Corp., co-owner of the Crandall Canyon mine, remained optimistic.

"This is an effort that consumes every second of our time," Moore said. "Make no mistake about it: This continues to be a rescue effort," Moore said. "We have encountered setbacks. We've incurred losses, but we have not and will not give up hope."

Even if rescuers found any of the six miners alive — an increasingly unlikely prospect, given the amount of time elapsed — it would take weeks to lift them out.

Crews would have to drill a much larger, 30-inch hole and lower a metal rescue capsule, the same method used in 2002 to pluck nine trapped miners from the flooded Quecreek mine in western Pennsylvania. But there are key differences between Quecreek and Crandall Canyon that would make the effort far more complicated.

At Quecreek, rescue workers heard tapping sounds only six-and-a-half hours after the miners became trapped, indicating at least some of them were alive. Work began on the rescue shaft later that day, and the whole ordeal was over in 77 hours. It has been nearly two weeks since the cave-in at Crandall Canyon, with no sign of the missing men.

The miners in Pennsylvania were only about 230 feet below the surface, and the drilling took place on a gently rolling dairy farm. The Utah miners are believed to be more than 1,500 feet beneath the surface, with drillers having to work atop a steep sandstone cliff.

But now that tunneling has stopped, a rescue capsule is the only way of getting the miners out.

"If it's the only option you have, you make it work," said Kevin Stricklin, chief of coal mine safety for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

The three victims of Thursday's mountain "bump" were identified as MSHA inspector Gary Jensen, 53, of Redmond; miner Dale Black, 48, of Huntington; and Brandon Kimber, 29, a miner from Price.

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Associated Press writers Jessica Gresko and Alicia Caldwell in Huntington, Jennifer Dobner in Carbonville and Brock Vergakis in Price contributed to this report.