HUNTINGTON, Utah - “This is the last hole,” Bob Murray, CEO of Murray Energy, said Wednesday evening. “If we don’t find anybody alive in that hole, there’s nowhere else that anyone … would know where to drill.”
Rescuers trying to find six miners will begin boring a sixth hole down into Utah’s Crandall Canyon mine Friday, and the search will stop if no signs of life are found, the coal mine’s co-owner said.
Bob Murray, the face of the rescue effort since the Aug. 6 cave-in, dropped from public view for a time after three men died trying to tunnel toward the miners, but he said he’s always been focused on finding the six - dead or alive.
“I will never come back to that evil mountain,” he said.
Earlier Wednesday, a fifth hole drilled down into the mine found just six inches of open space left between the roof and rubble in an 8-foot-high tunnel, said Jack Kuzar, a district manager with the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.
Kuzar said the fifth hole would be tested for oxygen, and a camera may be lowered down the shaft, although the small amount of space may limit its usefulness.
A video camera had not yet been put down the hole Wednesday night, nor had oxygen readings been measured, Kuzar said. Earlier boreholes have revealed no signs of life and little breathable air more than 1,500 feet underground, where the miners are believed to be trapped.
An effort to send rescuers through the collapsed mine tunnel to attempt an underground rescue was suspended last week, after a new cave-in killed three rescuers and injured six others.
A panel of experts brought in to examine the mine after the second collapse determined that it was too unstable to resume the underground rescue.
Both the mine owners and federal officials also ruled out trying to find the miners by lowering rescuers in a capsule through a hole drilled down into the mine, saying the dangerous maneuver wasn’t justified absent any signs of life.
The families condemned the miner owners and federal overseers for abandoning the rescue effort. Murray said workers will continue drilling bore holes toward the area the miners were working, but that hope remained very faint.
“Whatever it was, it was a natural disaster,” Murray said. “And it was seismic activity. Oh, of course, no question about it. It was a natural disaster. We’ve never seen anything like this. My miners have hundreds of years of experience, and they’ve told me to a man they’ve never seen anything like this before.”