WASHINGTON, 5 January 2006 — In a stunning and heartbreaking turnaround, family members were told yesterday that 12 of 13 trapped US coal miners were dead — three hours after they began celebrating news that they were alive.
International Coal Group CEO Ben Hatfield apologized for the mix-up, calling it a “miscommunication” between the rescue workers and the command center.
He said there was a lot of confusion and the “situation got quickly out of control” as the first report spread. The initial communication to the command center was there were 12 survivors, he said. “But that was wrong.”
The miscommunication came when the rescuers found the miners — they apparently did not confirm that 12 were alive, but that 12 were found and that they were being checked for vital signs.
One miner was apparently killed in the blast, and the other 12 miners had donned self-breathing equipment and were found behind a makeshift barricade made of ventilation fabric, Hatfield said. Each miner had used the breathing equipment and constructed the barrier to block carbon monoxide gas.
The bodies were found near where the company had drilled an air hole early on Tuesday in an attempt to get fresh air into the pit and contact the men.
The hole was also used to check air quality in the mine, which revealed high concentrations of carbon monoxide. The odorless, colorless gas can be lethal at high doses. At lower levels, it can cause headaches, dizziness, disorientation, nausea, fatigue and brain damage.
It appeared 11 of the men had survived “for a time” before succumbing to carbon monoxide poisoning, he said. The sole survivor was in a critical condition, but showing signs of brain function, a doctor said.
The thirteen miners had been trapped 260 feet below the surface of the Sago Mine since an explosion early on Monday. The mine is located about 100 miles northeast of Charleston, West Virginia.
The survivor, identified by mining officials as 27-year-old Randal McCloy, was the youngest of the miners. He was unconscious, but moaning when he arrived at a hospital and remained in critical condition, the hospital said. Doctors said he was under sedation and on a ventilator to aid his breathing and there was no immediate sign of brain damage.
“They checked him. He don’t have no carbon monoxide in his bloodstream,” said Anna Green, who has been with McCloy since they were teenagers. They have two children, a 1-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son.
Chaos broke out in the church and a fight started when the news of the miners’ deaths was announced. About a dozen state troopers and a SWAT team were positioned along the road near the church because police were concerned about violence. Witnesses said one man had to be wrestled to the ground when he lunged at mining officials.
The mine has a history of safety infractions. Federal inspectors cited the Sago mine, located in north-central West Virginia, more than 270 times in 2005, according to federal records, a third of these were considered “significant and substantial,” according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration, MSHA.
The most serious of these citations are 16 “unwarrantable failure orders,” which are problems that an operator knows exist but fails to correct. Thirteen of these orders were issued in the past six months, federal records show.
An “unwarrantable failure,” is a designation reserved for serious safety infractions for which the operator had either already been warned, or which showed “indifference or extreme lack of cares,” said Tony Oppegard, a former senior adviser at the Labor Department’s MSHA.
“Under the Bush Administration, the citing of unwarrantable failures has gone down dramatically,” Oppegard, a top federal mine official in the Clinton Administration and a former prosecutor of mine-safely violations in Kentucky, told reporters Tuesday. “So to see a rash of unwarrantable failures under this administration is a telling sign of a mine with serious safety problems.”
Inspectors found dangerous accumulations of coal dust, which can be explosive. Other citations dealt with ventilation and firefighting equipment violations. The most recent violations included inadequate ventilation.
Since June, the mine has experienced 15 roof falls or wall collapses, with three causing injuries to miners, according to federal records. Although no miners were reported killed at the mine since at least 1995, 42 workers and contractors were injured in accidents since 2000, according to documents.
Hatfield said the mine’s “bad history” had occurred before his company took it over last year, adding that dramatic improvements had been made since then.
