Owner: Rescue to Take 3 Days, Quake Caused Collapse

Aug. 7, 2007 — -- Even if they're still alive, the six miners trapped 1,500 feet below ground wouldn't have heard the boss, but he was intent on making sure everyone else did.

An earthquake caused the coal mine to collapse, it will take at least three days to reach the miners and when rescue workers do, there's no guarantee the workers are dead or alive, mine owner Robert Murray said during an at times rambling press conference in which he also accused some in the news media of getting the story wrong.

"If they're dead, the shock of the earthquake, the concussion killed them, and they died instantly, that's the one scenario," Murray said, repeatedly defending the safety record of his mine operation and saluting the American coal industry.

"The other scenario is that they're very much alive and we're going to rescue them," Murray said. "The Lord has already decided whether they're alive or dead."

Murray also insisted today that an earthquake early Monday morning had triggered the cave-in at the Crandall Canyon Mine, 140 miles south of Salt Lake City -- a point that is still very much in dispute.

Walter Arabasz, the head of the University of Utah's federal seismograph stations, told The Associated Press Monday that the wavelengths in the seismography readings showed a connection between the earthquake and the collapse but suggested the pattern was "consistent with the idea that the mine collapse caused the earthquake."

The U.S. Geological Survey, citing the measurements taken by the university, stated on its Web site that more information would be needed before a causul determination could be made.

"Seismologists have not yet determined how the earthquake of August 6 might be related to the occurrence of a collapse at the nearby Crandall Canyon coal mine that, as of midday August 6, had left six miners unaccounted for," according to the federal government's summary of the seismic event.

Since the mid-1990s, at least a half-dozen other mine collapses have caused similar seismic waves, including a 1995 cave-in southwestern Wyoming that caused readings as high as a magnitude of 5.4.

Murray, however, pointed to the same seismography readouts as evidence that the earthquake preceded the collapse: They show that the epicenter of the earthquake was some 5,000 feet away from where the miners were and occurred an hour earlier than the collapse was reported, taking place over multiple minutes rather than the short jolts that a cave-in would create on a readout.

"This was an earthquake," Murray said. "It had nothing to do with our mining activity."