The owner of the coal mine in the mountains of Utah where six workers remained trapped yesterday insisted the cause of the collapse early on Monday was an earthquake and warned it could take at least three days to reach the men. As additional heavy equipment was being rushed to the mine entrance, officials conceded they still had no way of knowing whether the men were dead or alive. Desperate efforts to reach them were hampered during the early hours of yesterday after debris began to fall, threatening rescue teams. "Progress has been too slow, too slow. It will take, ladies and gentlemen, three days to get to these miners," Robert E Murray, chairman of Murray Energy, the operator of the crippled Crandall Canyon mine, said at a press conference. "At that point we will know if they are alive or dead."

Six teams of miners have been deployed in rotation to try to break through to the lost men. Mr Murray, who spoke in aggressively defensive terms about the accident, admitted that more than 30 hours later, they had moved only 310ft closer to the chamber. Even when they get to the site of the collapse they will at first only be able to drill two-inch holes to make contact with the men and provide food and air to the chamber. The men were about 3.4 miles inside the Crandall mine located in a rugged canyon some 140 miles south-east of Salt Lake City when the collapse happened and were about 1,500ft below the surface. At least another 1,750ft separated the rescue teams from the men yesterday.

For the families of the missing men, not yet formally named by the mine's operators, the delays and disappointments are only deepening the agony of their wait. Many of the miners were Hispanic and their families do not speak English. But Mr Murray said that if the men were still alive they should have enough water and clean air to survive "for weeks". Oxygen naturally leaks into coal mines. The blunt-speaking Mr Murray angrily denied reports that his mine employed so-called "retreat mining", where pillars of coal hold up the shaft of a mine but are then removed one by one so that more coal can be collected, causing intentional collapses.

The method is considered highly risky. He singled out two news organisations, including the Associated Press, for giving misleading reports about the nature of his mine. He also vigorously insisted that an earthquake had occurred in the area, measuring 4.0 on the Richter scale. Experts remained uncertain whether that was the case or if it may have been the collapse itself that caused the seismological readings. "This was an earthquake, contrary to what others might have you believe," Mr Murray said. However, a spokesman for the University of Utah, which operates seismic stations in the state, said that no earthquake had taken place. If that is the case, the force of the shaft collapse must have been very great.

As much as breaking through to the men was a challenge, so too yesterday was keeping hopes of their safe retrieval alive. "Right now I can't say if it's looking any better," one exhausted miner, Leland Lobato, said when asked of the chances. "They're doing what they can to keep everybody as fresh as possible so nobody gets tired." Meanwhile, it has emerged that federal inspectors had cited the mine 300 different times since January 2004 for various safety problems. Initially, miners had attempted to repenetrate a disused shaft that might have taken them within 55ft of the men but they were withdrawn because of safety concerns.
(By David Usborne, The Independent, 08/08/2007)