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A documentary recounting the 1984 Wilberg Mine disaster, told through the voices of the Utah miners who risked their lives in a futile effort to save 27 colleagues trapped behind intense flames, will premiere Thursday in Castle Dale.

The hourlong film "Remember Wilberg" will be shown at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. at Emery High School in Castle Dale, within eyeshot of the hardscrabble canyon where the 27 miners died in the Dec. 19, 1984, blaze.

It also will have a special screening Monday in Denver at the annual convention of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration (SME).

When mining academician Elaine Cullen secured a $1.3 million grant from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to make the documentary, she was looking to make a training film for mine-rescue teams and new miners.

"One way you get people's attention when you're training them is to tell stories. Stories are so powerful. And this is a very powerful story," she said, figuring this approach would help miners "understand the importance of paying attention, and when things go wrong, to do what you can to save yourself, save your colleagues and get out of the mine so that something like this will never happen again."

But the more she got to know about Wilberg, and the extraordinary steps ordinary people took to rescue the trapped miners, the more she realized the story had universal appeal, even for people with no knowledge of mining.

"My goal was to tell the story of Wilberg accurately, but also honorably, to give the [would-be] rescuers some closure. I let [the miners] speak, using their words, to describe their own environment," said Cullen, a career employee with NIOSH and the former U.S. Bureau of Mines who worked for two years with Denver-based Safety Solutions International and the University of Texas at Arlington to produce the film.

She interviewed three-dozen people caught up in the disaster, caused by a piece of underground equipment with defective safety devices that caught fire after it was turned on inadvertently and ran unattended for 69 hours.

"It was totally different smoke coming out of there. It was scary smoke," said miner Forrest Adison Jr., remembering "a little boy pointing to the mountain and [saying] my dad ain't here. He's stuck in that damn mountain."

"The heat was so bad that it almost felt like the rubber on your [breathing] mask was just going to run off your face," recalled Jerry Howell, whose mine-rescue team had the horrific experience of discovering the first nine victims' bodies while crawling through a tunnel filled with smoke so dense that another miner noted "you could touch shoulders but you couldn't see [light from each other's] cap lamps."

Added miner Stewart Foster: "This newsperson asked me what the fire was like in there and I said, 'Have you ever been to hell?' "

Cullen is especially pleased she could supplement striking eyewitness accounts with realistic footage of underground mine-rescue training exercises at Utah mines operated by Bowie Resources, the state's largest producer.

"That was a big leap of faith for them to trust us and let us do that," she said.

"That was like a million-dollar gift," added Texas-Arlington film professor Mark Clive, who worked with graduate students Ryan Britton and Jean Patrick Mahoney for two years on the documentary.

"What struck me like a brick," Clive said, is the selflessness displayed by the miners. "It's no less important than the camaraderie between combat vets. They would do everything for each other and have each others' backs. They are like soldiers, going to a place they may not come back from every day."

Emery High Principal Steve Gordon said he was honored to have the film debut at his school, where many of his students don't know what happened 32 years ago.

"It will be important to let them know what happened right here in their backyard and how it affected people all around here," he said, adding that he's prepared for it to be "a tear-jerker."

With Wilberg's story of mass death, Cullen said, it's hard to avoid that emotional response. But the documentary also emphasizes how proper accident-response procedures and training can prevent future disasters.

"Almost every [government] regulation came into effect because somebody was injured or lost their lives," noted mine-rescue team member Gary Christensen.

Added Carl Pollastro, an engineer at Wilberg: "We never learned anything from production and great accomplishments. We learn from the hard things in life and get better from that."