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Rescue capsules big enough to lift a man out of the collapsed Crandall Canyon mine have been at the mine site for more than a week. But despite federal and state pleas, mine operator Robert Murray hasn't brought in equipment to drill the necessary 30-inch hole.
Kevin Stricklin, the coal safety administrator for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, has said that federal officials and mine co-owner and operator Robert Murray have talked about drilling a 30-inch rescue hole "numerous times. . . . That's been on the table since we arrived on site."
But Monday night, Murray and MSHA director Richard Stickler said they would attempt a capsule rescue only if they find a live miner.
"I'm not optimistic they will be found alive," Murray said.
On Sunday, families of the six miners trapped underground since the Aug. 6 mine collapse called on the company and MSHA to drill a borehole large enough to lower a rescue capsule to search for the missing miners. On Monday, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. joined the chorus, asking MSHA to bring in the equipment.
At a news briefing Monday night, Stickler and Murray said that based on a consensus of mining experts they have assembled as advisers, they would attempt a capsule rescue only if they know they will find living men.
"We also believe this significant risk is unacceptable to send a miner underground [1,500 to] 1,600 feet, for the purpose of exploration," said Stickler, rebuffing the families' demands.
Two of the sausage-shaped capsules - both 21.5 inches in diameter - have been at the mine site since Aug. 11, MSHA has reported. But if used, a rescuer would have to go down the hole with the capsule in a mountain that is still moving.
The risk that yet another rescuer could die - three were killed Thursday after another in a series of "bumps" rocked the mine - is too great, said Rob Moore, the corporation's vice president. The company's lawyer said Monday a capsule rescue would be "an unsafe activity."
A mine-safety expert agreed.
Without assurance there is someone who could be rescued, it wouldn't be worth the risk to drill a 30-inch hole and send a man down to look for the trapped miners, said Bob Ferriter, director of the mine safety program at the Colorado School of Mines.
"You'd want some evidence there's life down there before you'd risk sending someone down," he said.
During the past two weeks, crews have dug four small boreholes about 1,500 feet deep from the top of the mine mountain and lowered microphones and air quality test equipment into the collapsed area searching for signs of life. A fifth borehole was being drilled Monday, with results expected by today.
Cameras have not found the missing men - Kerry Allred, Don Erickson, Luis Hernandez, Juan Carlos Payan, Brandon Phillips and Manuel Sanchez - and air analyses show oxygen concentrations too low to sustain life for long.
Though the rescue capsules technology has been available for 30 years and miners have been trained to use them, they've been deployed only once: to save nine miners caught in the 2002 Quecreek mine flood in Pennsylvania, said MSHA spokeswoman Amy Louviere.
But those miners were only about 240 feet below the surface, and the drill rig was set up on a pasture near a road, she said.
On Friday, MSHA director Stickler said if miners were found alive, crews would start drilling a hole large enough for a capsule rescue.
But later that day, Stricklin, the national coal safety administrator, said the necessary drilling machinery remained absent.
It was unknown if mine crews would have to bulldoze another road on the mountaintop should a capsule rescue go forward or how long it would take to get the equipment up the canyon. Last week, Murray suggested such an operation would take around three weeks.
Monday, Huntsman asked MSHA to be ready for a capsule rescue.
"He has asked for MSHA to be able to do that if it becomes appropriate," said spokeswoman Lisa Roskelley. "He has asked them to get that equipment here, so if it comes to that, they would be able to drill that larger borehole as quickly as possible."
Since Aug. 6, when the collapse caused a 3.9 magnitude event, only two days have passed without "bounces" or "bumps" or other significant ground shifts in the mine area, according to MSHA's Crandall Canyon update Web site.
The experts advising Murray and MSHA said it wasn't possible to accurately predict the timing or location of future ground shifts and that unstable coal pillars added to the significant uncertainty.
The Thursday collapse that killed the three tunnel rescuers - Dale Black, Brandon Kimber and Gary Jensen - and injured six more men registered as a 1.6 magnitude event.
That "bump" buried the nine men under about 5 feet of coal when steel supports on one side of the 15-foot-wide tunnel blew out after 2,000 feet of mountain overhead shifted. Federal officials on Friday suspended the tunnel rescue indefinitely.