HUNTINGTON, UTAH — The deaths of three rescuers caught in an explosive coal blowout while digging toward a team of trapped miners left this mining region torn Friday over how to proceed as federal officials suspended their disastrous underground search.
Shaken by setbacks in the rescue effort and then by the catastrophic "seismic bump" that caused the tragedy Thursday night, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. urged the rescue team to "send no one else into that mine until they can guarantee their safety."
Federal officials said they had braced the underground rescue tunnel as strongly as possible against cave-ins caused by subterranean jolts. During a news conference near the Crandall Canyon Mine, federal Mine Safety and Health Administration Director Richard E. Stickler said officials would reassess the rescue attempt before renewing the search for six miners trapped in coal dust and darkness since Aug. 6.
Officials with the mine said they were determined to press on. "We will move forward with that effort," said Rob Moore, vice president of Murray Energy Corp., which owns the mine.
But anguished relatives of victims wondered aloud whether it was time to abandon the search, especially because there had been no indication the trapped miners were still alive. "I had two brother-in-laws in the mine last night," said Shellee Allred, a member of an extended family whose miner sons were caught in both cave-ins. "So many people putting their lives at risk with no proof of life."
In Huntington, many residents have held out hope through 12 days of raised and dashed expectations. Searchers have drilled three holes into East Mountain, as far as 1,300 feet through its sandstone and limestone layers. But the drilling attempts, aimed at finding the trapped men and providing food and water until they could be dug out, found only uninhabited coal seams. A fourth bore hole is now underway from the peak.
On Friday night, nearly a day after a federal mining official and two local searchers were killed and six rescuers were injured in the collapse, local spirits were crushed.
Jeremiah Jackson, 31, who works at another of the area's mountainside mines, spoke tersely, voice quavering, while he shopped for plastic piping at a Huntington co-op.
"I've got people I know who're underground, trapped, and I'd like to get them out," he said, eyes hidden by a clamped-down baseball cap. "But on the other hand, I don't want anyone else to get hurt."
