Posted: 1:32 PM- The search for missing people gives way now to the search for answers.
But that process of determining what went wrong at the Crandall Canyon mine and why is almost certain to be as exhausting and, at times, emotionally taxing as the heart-wrenching effort to rescue the six trapped coal miners.
Five investigative bodies already are lined up to scrutinize the disaster, which cost nine lives, injured six more miners and left at least 170 other Murray Energy Corp. employees out of work.
That there are so many probes is telling. Skepticism is rife that any of the individual inquiries is capable - or willing - to get at the truth of the matter.
The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration's formal inquiry already is under way. But MSHA's investigations frequently are criticized for being too narrow and focusing strictly on what physically triggered the disaster itself and not exploring the regulatory culture that allowed such volatile conditions to exist.
That is particularly true in a case such as this in which one of the most provocative questions is: Why did MSHA approve changes to the company's mining plan, revisions that in retrospect seem foolhardy even to people who don't know anything about mining?
Why else would U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao take the unprecedented step of appointing two retired, widely respected MSHA employees to conduct an "independent review" of agency actions before the Aug. 6 implosion of the mine's walls and through the Aug. 16 collapse that killed three would-be rescuers?
Part of the reason is that internal MSHA reviews of two fatal mine accidents in a three-week span last year in West Virginia - the explosion that killed 12 at the Sago mine Jan. 2 and a fire that left two dead at Aracoma Alma Mine No. 1 on Jan. 19 - revealed numerous shortcomings in how the agency enforced mine-safety laws.
"In West Virginia, we learned that MSHA has failed to protect coal miners from those coal operators who are more interested in mine profits than in mine safety," said Alan Karlin, a Morgantown, W.Va., attorney who represented several Sago widows after that disaster.
Chao's action clearly did not satisfy Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, one of the congressional committees poised to probe Crandall Canyon. He wondered aloud how independent those reviewers could be when they were appointed by and are answerable to the Labor Department official over MSHA.
Then again, the multiple congressional inquiries into the tragedy are susceptible to second guessing and accusations of partisan politics.
Are the Democrats really interested in ensuring that mine-safety laws and policies drafted after disasters in 1968, '76, '84 (Utah's own Wilberg fire) and 2006 are sufficient and properly enforced? Or are they merely capitalizing on Crandall Canyon to sling mud at the Bush administration?
Why are the Republicans so quick to defend the mine operators and the political appointees running the agency? Doesn't that reinforce the perception that MSHA was less concerned about worker safety than advancing the business prospects of companies that often are big contributors to GOP candidates and their causes?
State officials also have entered the fray, forming a commission to determine what, if anything, Utah can do to make mines here safer.
Meanwhile, the sidelines will be filled with the following interested parties, who will have varying degrees of impact on the overall proceeding:
-- The United Mine Workers of America, which believes Crandall Canyon epitomizes the plight of miners in an operation run by such an outspokenly anti-union owner as Murray Energy's Robert Murray, and which is eager to bolster its membership.
-- The news media, which will not be as numerous or national as during the rescue effort, but which will be there from start to finish, doing their own digging, raising questions that span the gamut from relevant to ridiculous.
-- Consultants and other private investigators retained by attorneys for the victims' survivors, the mine company and anybody else in a position to sue or be sued.
Amid all this swirling mass of information, accusation and deliberation will be the families of the dead, injured and missing miners - especially those of the six trapped miners, who still face the overriding question: Will the bodies of their loved ones ever be recovered?
Of all the investigative proceedings, MSHA's probe will receive the most long-term attention. It also has the potential to arouse the deepest emotional conflicts because it will directly address the deaths of the six trapped miners and three rescuers, and their families usually receive face-to-face updates from investigators.
The challenge is well known to Richard Gates, an MSHA district manager in Birmingham, Ala. He was put in charge of the Crandall Canyon investigation less than four months after concluding a sometimes-contentious 16-month inquiry into the Sago mine disaster.
Celeste Monforton was the liaison between the survivors of the Sago victims and the team appointed by West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin to investigate the disaster. As such, she interacted frequently with Gates. She also observed the evolution of the families' relationship with him over nearly 16 months.
Gates entered a situation, Monforton said, in which many family members felt the rescue effort had not been handled well and were upset that their offers to go into the mine and retrieve their loves ones had been denied. Similar offers were made at Crandall Canyon.
The families initially viewed Gates as detached and bureaucratic, she said, a person whose technical qualifications for conducting an investigation surpassed his people skills. Tension pervaded early meetings between investigator and families.
"When we started, there would be screaming, crying, people pummeling him with questions. These meetings were always really hard," she said. "So many things went wrong at Sago, and Richard became the face of MSHA. He wasn't on the ground during the rescue, but he became the person that was the recipient of all the hurt, anger, all of that."
But, over time, families and investigator came to understand one another better. He became more responsive to their needs, in part benefiting from the state team's insistence on keeping kin completely in the know about what was happening. They came to recognize that his task was narrowly defined - to find the cause of the explosion, not really all of the background that led to it. That other information was left to MSHA's internal review.
Monforton said she called several Sago family members after news of Gates' appointment to oversee the Crandall Canyon investigation circulated through mining circles. She was rather surprised by the general reaction: Don't they have somebody else who could do it? Why would MSHA put him through this emotionally draining situation again when he just finished one?
"You can't go through the dramatics of doing that kind of investigation, being chewed out by family members, pushed and pulled politically and not have that wear and tear on you," said Monforton, recalling that when the official Sago accident report was released May 9, "I looked at all those [MSHA] guys and they were spent."
Four months later, Gates and colleague Joseph O'Donnell will be at it again, this time in Utah, a far sight farther from their Alabama homes than Upshur County, W.Va.
Monforton said she hopes the MSHA team - and state commission - will have a family liaison.
"It's a simple golden rule: If someone calls you, call them back. If someone asks you a question and you don't have the answer, have someone call them back with an answer the next day," she said. "The families want to feel a part of it so they don't read about what's going on in the investigation in the newspaper."
MSHA seems to have learned that lesson from Sago. Throughout the Crandall Canyon rescue effort, agency officials consistently made sure the families were briefed before the news media. Leaks were infrequent.
"It can really help how your report is viewed if the families have a role to play, if they feel they're getting information," Monforton added. "In the long run, it makes whatever the findings are easier to accept."
Kevin Stricklin, the MSHA official over coal-mine safety, told the newly formed state mining commission that he expects the investigation to begin this week, although its half-dozen members already have had online access to many Crandall Canyon documents that were on file.
The team will go through duty rosters and work logs to determine which miners and company employees were well acquainted with the West Mains area, where the trapped miners were working when the walls imploded.
The four miners who escaped that night will be of particular interest, since they were the last to see the trapped six alive. So will two miners who were first on the scene of the devastation and tried to climb over massive piles of rubble toward the section until they were forced to turn back by impassible conditions and deteriorating air quality.
It is important to interview these people while their memories of events remain clear, said Stricklin, noting that investigators "have the ability and charge to bring out anybody they want throughout the entire country [to investigate this accident]."
But that does not mean MSHA investigators have carte blanche access to whomever and whatever they want - hence some of the skepticism about their ability to get at the truth.
During the Aracoma inquiry, for instance, MSHA's report noted "numerous mine management officials declined to participate in voluntary interviews. MSHA has no legal authority to require persons to participate in accident-investigation interviews."
In addition, investigators had to go to court to force the mine owner to turn over crucial mine records, some of which the owner claimed did not exist. MSHA also learned that computer data tracking the mine's air-monitoring system "was found to have been deleted."
