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No Comments [ Add Comment ]Mountain was 'destined to fail'
By PAUL FOYSALT LAKE CITY -- Within seconds in the early hours of Aug. 6, 2007, a level section of Utah's Crandall Canyon mine as large as 63 football fields collapsed, bringing down hundreds of coal pillars and trapping six men nearly half a mile underground.
A year after what officials are calling the worst U.S. mining disaster in half a century, relatives say they now know the mine company and federal regulators failed the miners and botched a rescue that killed three others 10 days later.
"The disappointment I have is knowing they'll never be able to get those boys out," said Frank Allred, the older brother of Kerry Allred, a ram-car operator and one of the trapped miners.
"I see those bodies in that black hole totally covered in coal."
At each step of the way -- for months before the disaster, and with the rescue tunneling that only made the mine more unstable -- Crandall Canyon was doomed, according to 1,400 pages of government and congressional reports.
A day of reckoning came two weeks ago with the U.S. Department of Labor scolding its Mine Safety and Health Administration for rubber-stamping a risky mining plan and launching an ill-conceived rescue effort that left nobody clearly in charge.
Earlier on the same day, the mining agency blamed a subsidiary of Ohio-based Murray Energy Corp. for digging unauthorized coal and its engineers for a series of blunders on Crandall Canyon's supposed stability.
The anniversary of the first deadly cave-in is being marked today when family members dedicate a circle of nine tombstones commissioned by mine boss Bob Murray in a serene spot of Crandall Canyon.
Another memorial, a bronze panel now being cast of the faces of the nine dead, will be dedicated in the nearby town of Huntington on Sept. 14.
In the year since the disaster, the Mine Safety and Health Administration has heightened scrutiny of deep underground mines and hired another 170 inspectors.
Utah created an Office of Mine Safety with limited authority -- "a cop without a gun," sniffed Mike Dalpiaz, a regional vice president for the United Mine Workers of America. It won't inspect mines, but will serve as a clearinghouse for complaints about mine safety.
Also in the past year, Murray Energy shut down another of its Utah mines, the West Ridge mine, because of "unexpected and unusual stress conditions." And Arch Coal Inc., Utah's largest producer, said it was bypassing $100 million of coal in the same region to avoid the kind of danger that led to the collapse at Crandall Canyon.
Families have filed lawsuits and federal prosecutors are looking at criminal charges. MSHA cited Murray Energy affiliate GenWal Resources Inc. with its highest standard of negligence. Engineers Agapito Associates Inc. of Grand Junction, Colo., was cited for "reckless disregard." Both were fined $1.8 million, the largest fines levied on a U.S. coal mining operation.
MSHA's investigative team said it could find no record of a mining disaster on the scale of Crandall Canyon in 50 years. That's a function not of the nine deaths -- a relatively low number in historical terms -- but of the mine's widespread collapse. Initially estimated at 13 acres and then 50 acres, the devastation was more recently calculated to have flattened about 69 acres inside the mine (equal to 63 football fields without the end zones). The latest estimate was made with the help of satellite radar images revealing a depression on the surface of the 10,743-foot mountain.
A borehole drilled from that location found only a half-foot of headroom inside a tunnel where the men were presumed trapped.
Other research underscored the violent and complex forces that were at work in the thunderous Aug. 6 collapse that was so powerful it registered as a 3.9 earthquake.
Douglas S. Dreger, a seismologist at the University of California at Berkeley, said his analysis strongly suggested the mountain crumbled in two stages -- first, the pillars collapsed and then giant, angled slabs of sandstone above the mine abruptly shifted. Dreger's findings, published in the weekly journal Science on July 11, came out of research to distinguish underground nuclear explosions from natural earthquakes.
Coal mining can be dangerous, but few workers quit after last summer's twin disasters. Miners pull down around $65,500 a year, double the region's average wage, according to the Utah Department of Workforce Services. They can make $20 an hour their first day on the job and collect full family health insurance benefits at no cost.
"My husband is a coal miner. My dad's a coal miner. My brother's a coal miner," said Lorinda Brown, who also has worked for coal companies. "It does carry a risk -- that's why they're paid so well."
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