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Posted: 9:26 PM- HUNTINGTON -- Rescue crews banged on a 1,415-foot-deep drill shaft repeatedly. Then, they set off explosive charges as signals, and listened.

Desperately, they hoped six miners trapped inside central Utah's Crandall Canyon Mine would respond.

The answer: silence.

For 13 days, the missing coal miners have been silent, and there has been no sign of life from them since 3 a.m. Aug. 6, when a massive cave-in 3.5 miles inside the Emery County mine cut them off. But mine officials said Saturday night that they will not give up.

"Make no mistake about it," a defiant Rob Moore, vice president of mine co-owner Murray Energy, told a briefing Saturday evening. "This continues to be a rescue effort. . . . We have experienced losses [but] we will not give up hope."

Those losses include three rescuers who died Thursday night while trying to dig through to the trapped miners from an adjacent coal seam. A second cave-in claimed their lives when a mining-induced "bump," a seismic event triggered by the pressure of the mountain over them -- imploded the walls of the tunnel they were in.

Since the second cave-in, which also injured six other rescuers, underground efforts have been suspended indefinitely. Instead, rescuers have focused on the drilling of an 8 5/8-inch diameter borehole -- the fourth borehole drilled over the past almost two weeks -- in hopes of locating the missing six.

Richard Stickler, assistant secretary of Labor over the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, said Saturday night that latest borehole punched through about 9:15 a.m. to the cavity where the miners were thought to possibly have barricaded themselves.

For a four-hour period, during which all operations at the mine were suspended to provide quiet, crews tried to contact the six -- first by beating on the shaft, and then by setting off three explosive charges.

Coal miners are trained to expect such series of blasts as a sort of rescue code, and to respond with noise of their own.

"We listened by microphone and also monitored the vibrations [in the mine] to determine if there was any sign [of life]," Stickler told reporters. "We did not detect any sign from the miners underground."

Stickler said a special video camera would be lowered into the borehole late Saturday night or early Sunday morning in hopes of seeing some evidence of life below.

But if that, too, fails to turn up the missing miners, plans are already in place for a fifth bore hole. Stickler also said MSHA has assembled a team of mine rescue experts from across the nation to study whether there is any safe way to resume and underground effort.

Since the Thursday tragedy, Robert Murray, president of Murray Energy, has not been to a news briefing. He had become a fixture at the events up until the deaths of the rescue workers -- Brandon Kimber of Price, Dale Ray Black of Huntington and Gary Jensen, an MSHA official.

Moore said his boss was spending all of his time overseeing the rescue efforts and "administering to the families of those [dead] rescue workers."

Rescue officials say that if the video camera does find life, the borehole can be used to deliver food, water and oxygen to the six - Don Erickson, Manuel Sanchez, Kerry Allred, Luis Alonso Hernandez, Brandon Phillips and Juan Carlos Payan.