It was from Energy West, Rocky Mountain Power's coal-mining subsidiary. Its Deer Creek mine was adjacent to the Crandall Canyon mine, where four hours earlier a catastrophic collapse of the mine's walls had trapped a six-man crew and triggered what was to be a lengthy but futile rescue effort - one that cost the life of Black's brother, Dale.

"It was a totally different company and he [Crandall Canyon co-owner/operator Robert Murray] didn't even want them on the property, but they were the first ones to call and to get their equipment started up to the mine to go in and help," said Black of the neighbor-helping-neighbor scenario so prevalent throughout coal country's late summer disaster.

"By the time we got started on that, we got calls from Tower and West Ridge, sister mines of Crandall, and they had us start getting stuff up there [to Crandall Canyon] as fast as we could," he added.

For more than a week, Black dispatched many of Nielson Construction's flatbed semis to the mine site, loaded with mining equipment and cranes, and sent water tanker after tanker to the rigs drilling seven boreholes from the mountaintop down into tunnels where the six missing miners might have been.

"Anything they needed, we tried to get it for them," said President Wayne Nielson of the company's commitment to the rescue, an all-out effort that featured the participation of numerous local companies.

"It wasn't just us," he added. "That's one thing unique about Emery and Carbon counties. When something like this happens, it draws people close together. We're smaller communities and everyone knows [each other], and everyone takes a real personal interest in trying to help."

The cost of the rescue operation - and Nielson Construction's share of the bill - has not been disclosed. A Murray Energy spokeswoman declined to comment for this article, citing the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration's ongoing investigation of the August disaster that claimed nine men and injured six.

Still, Emery County officials were not the least bit surprised that Nielson Construction figured prominently in the effort, whether or not mine owner Murray Energy Corp. was picking up the sizable tab.

"The Nielsons are so community minded, and it's not like it was just recent. That's something they've always done," said Mike McCandless, Emery County's economic development director, citing the company's support for helping a community theater and restaurant to stay open in Huntington, not an easy task in a small rural town.

Added Emery County Commissioner Drew Sitterud: "With Wayne [Nielson], if he doesn't have it, he'll go buy it and get it for you . . . . The charitable side of Wayne - he probably doesn't want it said. He just does it for the goodness."

And as a way of saying thanks to people for their support when tragedy struck his family, a teenage son dying in a car crash. "It was the love of this community that got us through that ordeal," Nielson said.

The Nielsons have been an Emery County fixture more than a century, ever since the first ancestors arrived from Denmark in the late 1800s.

They have had a growing influence on the county's economy since the end of World War II, when Wayne's father and uncle bought a used bulldozer at an Army surplus store and "did work for farmers out here, cleaning canals and cleaning ditches, things like that."

The business expanded gradually, picking up considerably after Wayne and his brother Ralph took over in the late 1970s, then again this decade as Wayne's sons, John and Jesse, became more involved in the operation.

Over the decades, Nielson Construction established a reputation as a major regional contractor with a diversified resume of high-profile jobs and unique specialties.

It hooked up with the coal-mining industry in the early 1950s, helping to develop base facilities for the Wilberg and Deer Creek mines. It now has two-dozen trucks hauling coal from Consolidation Coal Co.'s Emery mine to a train-loading station.

The company builds earthen dams and pipelines, excavates water wells, prepares drill rig pads for the area's burgeoning oil-and-gas industry and has received an Earth Day Award from the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining for its reclamation work on closed mine sites.

It has developed an expertise in building cells that contain the garbage ECDC Environmental has brought to East Carbon. That niche work will be expanded as Nielson Construction builds cells that will become the repository for the Atlas mill tailings that EnergySolutions intends to move away from the Colorado River near Moab.

Nielson also is heavily involved in developing a pressurized irrigation system in northern Emery County, part of an effort to reduce salinity in the Colorado River.

"That's massive, about a $60 million project overall," said county economic development director McCandless. "Frankly, part of the reason it was even doable is because of their willingness to work with irrigation companies and federal agencies. That is a painful process for a contracting company to go through because the flow of money is based on the whims of government."

With two asphalt plants and five facilities that grind rock into aggregate materials, Nielson Construction also has become a major participant in Utah Department of Transportation road work in central and southern Utah. UDOT records show that Nielson Construction has received contracts for $62.1 million on 27 projects since 1995.

"They're in the class of all of the major earth-moving companies in the state," McCandless said.

Nielson said his company now has about 320 employees and more than 100 pieces of heavy equipment - a "full dirt fleet" of trucks for excavation and road construction, bulldozers, scrapers and trackhoes.

"We're set up better on this end of the state than anyone for heavy-haul stuff."

With most of those employees living in Emery and Carbon counties, Commissioner Sitterud noted, "that dollar they pay rolls over here again and again. It stays and is spent in the grocery store and gas stations, and that really helps the economy."

The diversity of resources also enabled Nielson Construction to focus considerable attention on the Crandall Canyon rescue effort without dropping any of its other projects.

Although a "little bit of juggling" was required, Nielson said, "all of our customers understood. When they knew we were helping with the rescue effort, everybody put things on hold until we could get back."

To Nielson, that good will might not have existed if his family business had not surrounded itself with good employees, people who care about the company and know that the company cares about them.

"We think of all our employees here as family," he said. "We treat each other as family and like we're all on this journey together. That's been a lot of the key to our success - the people here. It's people that make the thing run."

mikeg@sltrib.com