No Response To Rescuers' Attempts To Signal Miners

April 7, 2010 | By NPR Staff and Wires | NPR

Crews finished drilling a vent hole meant to help clear toxic gas and allow rescuers to resume the search for four missing miners Wednesday. But efforts to get a response from survivors who could be trapped 1,000 feet below were unsuccessful. The cause of Monday's deadly explosion at West Virginia's Upper Big Branch mine is still under investigation.

There was no response to rescuers' attempts to signal four possible survivors in the Upper Big Branch mine Wednesday, as vent holes were drilled in hopes of clearing toxic gas and allowing crews to re-enter the West Virginia coal shaft.

Workers labored through the night, finishing the first of the 1,200-foot vertical vents drilled to release dangerous methane and carbon dioxide at the mine, where a massive explosion Monday killed 25 miners and left four others missing in the nation's worst mining disaster in a quarter-century.

At a news briefing early Wednesday, West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin said rescue workers banged on a pipe and set off a small explosion on the surface to send a seismic signal deep into the mine.

"We did not get any response back," Manchin said.

He said the first vent hole drilled by rescue workers overnight entered a section about a football field's length away from the rescue chamber where officials hope the miners sought refuge from the toxic gas, he said.

Meanwhile, the CEO of mine owner Massey Energy Co. said he has done everything possible to make his company's mines safe, despite some 50 violations cited by federal regulators in the past year, including "unwarrantable failure" to comply with safety standards such as following an approved ventilation plan, controlling combustible materials and designating escape routes.

"It's possible that anything could be the source of the fire or the explosion, but at this point we just don't know," Don Blankenship, the head of Massey Energy Co., told CBS on Tuesday.

Methane gas occurs naturally in coal seams, and federal safety standards require proper ventilation in mine shafts to keep the volatile gas from building up. The cause of the explosion at the mine in the Appalachian Mountains is still under investigation, but officials suspect that methane caused it.

"I have done everything I know to do, and we've worked hard with the federal agencies and state agencies to make our mines safe," he added.

Blankenship told ABC that "all the safety people we have on hand, all felt this was a safe coal mine."

In 2006, the operator of another Massey Energy-owned mine in West Virginia settled a wrongful death suit over two miners killed in a fire at the Aracoma Alma No. 1 mine. The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed sum, and Massey subsidiary Aracoma Coal Co. paid $4.2 million in civil and criminal penalties.

Testimony in the case showed Blankenship suggested firing two supervisors for raising concerns about conveyer belt problems just before the belt caught fire.

At the Upper Big Branch mine, Massey has been fined nearly $400,000 in the past year for violations cited by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

The four possible survivors at the mine are trapped thousands of feet below the surface, and rescuers were forced out of the mine Monday by the high concentrations of dangerous gases.

Once the mine is ventilated, teams would need four or five hours to reach the area where officials believe the miners are about 1,000 feet beneath the surface, said Chris Adkins, chief operating officer for Massey.

MSHA administrator Kevin Stricklin said searchers would have to navigate in the darkness into debris-strewn spaces to reach the miners.

"There's so much dirt and dust and everything is so dark that it's very easy, as hard as it may seem to any of us outside in this room, to walk by a body," he said.

The death toll was the highest in a U.S. mine since 1984, when 27 people died in a fire at Emery Mining Corp.'s mine in Orangeville, Utah. If the four missing bring the total to 29, it would be the most to die in a U.S. coal mine since a 1970 explosion killed 38 at Finley Coal Co. in Hyden, Ky.