After collapse, Utah mine's fate unclear

A lone watchman guards Utah's Crandall Canyon mine, protecting what is more a tomb than a coal operation.

The shaft has been walled off with cinderblocks, and makeshift memorials and Christmas wreaths serve as reminders of the twin disasters that took place there last summer.

On Aug. 6, six miners were caught in a thunderous cave-in. Then, on Aug. 16, three men were killed in another collapse while trying to tunnel through the quivering mountain to the victims. After that, the rescue was abandoned.

Nearly five months later, the cause of the original disaster is still under investigation, and the fate of the mine — and the miners — is unresolved, officially at least.

The state refuses to declare the six miners dead without bodies.

The mine's co-owner, Ohio-based Murray Energy Corp., will not say whether it plans to reopen it. But such a move — which would require the approval of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management — appears unlikely.

The mine doesn't have much coal left, and since the accident, the company has stripped it of conveyer belts, power lines and other equipment and let shafts fill with water, said James F. Kohler, a BLM official in Utah.

"Obviously it would take a significant expense to reopen the mine," Kohler said.

Nor is it known whether the six bodies can ever be recovered.

"We are always leaving the door open," said Kevin Stricklin, who oversees coal mine safety for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

The twin disasters are under investigation by federal regulators, a state commission and various congressional committees.

Lawyers for the families of the men killed in the initial disaster contend that at the time, the company was pulling down pillars of coal supporting the ceiling.

Murray Energy chief Bob Murray has insisted that retreat mining, as the practice is called, had nothing to do with the collapse. He argued from the start that it was caused by an earthquake.

Huntington is a hardscrabble town of 2,000 where coal mining is considered an honorable profession, and it's hard to find anything that pays more.

Mayor Hilary Gordon said many residents are conflicted over the disaster: They hate federal regulation but want the mines kept safe. They worry about unsafe mining, but won't speak publicly for fear a family member will lose a job paying $50,000 or more a year.

What made the rescue attempt so poignant was that every miner knew that there was almost no chance they would find any of the trapped men alive, and that some probably would die trying.

"But they weren't going to be the ones that would ever give up hope," said Wendy Black, widow of section boss Dale "Bird" Black, who was at the forefront of the rescue effort, operating a 65-ton grinding machine that bored its way through the rubble toward the trapped miners.

According to Murray Energy, Black volunteered for the job when nobody else wanted it. Miners said it wasn't the danger of another cave-in that bothered them — it was the fear that they wouldn't be able to stop the machine before it started ripping a buried body to pieces.

Black told his wife that when it was all over, he was going to need some help.

Black, 48, never encountered any of the trapped miners, dead or alive. He took the full brunt of another cave-in that killed him and two other would-be rescuers. Flying chunks of coal snapped his neck, broke his back and crushed most of the bones of his face.

"My husband, what he did was very honorable. What he did for those families was just the way he was. He lived every day as big as he died," said his widow, who lost her father to coal mining when she was 8 and has made it clear to her only son, a teenager, that he never will work at a mine. "I'm very proud of what my husband did."

Karen Jobe Templeton, an artist chosen to cast a bronze memorial of the faces of the nine dead, has grown close to all the victims' families, trying to capture their essential personalities — a twinkle in the eye for Black.

"The grief comes in waves," said Templeton, working in a barn studio outside Helper, a nearby coal town. "You get through it today, but tomorrow may bring it again."