In an April 26 letter to the families of the 12 men who died at Sago, McCloy, 26, tells how the miners fought to stay alive until rescue teams could find them and how they shared their air supplies with each other to ward off deadly carbon monoxide poisoning.

When the explosion at Sago happened, mine bosses waited two hours before informing the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). It wasn’t until 11 hours later that the first rescue teams entered the mine. Meanwhile, the trapped workers inside were fighting with all the strength they had left to send signals of their location. “The explosion happened soon after the day shift arrived at the mine face on January 2, right after we got out of the man-trip,” says McCloy in his letter. The “man-trip” is a vehicle that transports workers into and out of the mine. “I do not recall whether I had started work, nor do I have any memory of the blast. I do remember that the mine filled quickly with fumes and thick smoke, and that breathing conditions were nearly unbearable,” the miner continues.

“The first thing we did was activate our rescuers, as we had been trained. At least four of the rescuers did not function. I shared my rescuer with Jerry Groves, while Junior Toler, Jesse Jones, and Tom Anderson sought help from others. There were not enough rescuers to go around.

“We then tried to return to the man-trip, yelling to communicate through the thick smoke. The air was so bad that we had to abandon our escape attempt and return to the coal rib, where we hung a curtain to try to protect ourselves.

“We attempted to signal our location to the surface by beating on the mine bolts and plates. We found a sledgehammer, and for a long time, we took turns pounding away….

“We had to take off the rescuers in order to hammer as hard as we could. This effort caused us to breathe much harder. We never heard a responsive blast or shot from the surface.”

International Coal Group, the mine’s owner, issued a statement April 27 suggesting McCloy was lying and saying it was up to the miners themselves to check the condition of their self-rescuers.

MSHA spokesman Dirk Fillpot said testing on self-rescuers recovered after the Sago explosion found that those that were activated would have functioned properly. “MSHA is looking at whether the miners received adequate training” in the use of the rescuers, he said.

But some Sago miners disagreed. Alton Wamsley, a Sago miner who was able to get out of the mine, told the media, “We can relate to [McCloy’s] letter because we ran into the same thing then, and now we are going back into that mine every day using the same equipment.” Wamsley added, “You’re standing there looking at a guy in smoke and wondering whether to give him your mask and risk dying or keep it on.”

Phil Smith, communications director of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), said miners should be able to activate a self-rescuer in a minute or less with proper training. “It looks like they’re trying to blame the miners here and that’s not the right way to go,” Smith said. “These guys were fighting for their lives and blaming them for not being able to operate the devices properly really compounds the tragedy.”

Most media did not initially publicize one important fact in McCloy’s letter—high levels of methane in the mine a few weeks before the blast. In the full text of his letter, McCloy states, “About three weeks before the explosion…Junior Toler and I found a gas pocket while drilling a bolt hole in the mine roof. Our detector confirmed the presence of methane. We immediately shut down the roof bolter, and the incident was reported up the line to our superiors.

“I noticed the following day that the gas leak had been plugged with glue normally used to secure the bolts.”

McCloy’s report of elevated gas levels in the mine was confirmed by at least two Sago bosses during their testimony at closed-door hearings by state and federal mine safety bodies following the disaster. The transcripts of those hearings were released to the Charleston Gazette-Mail after it filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get them. The newspaper has posted the transcripts at www.wvgazette.com/static/sago.

During those hearings, the bosses told investigators that methane levels rose to over 1 percent around a sealed-off area of the mine where the explosion eventually took place. Methane is explosive within a range of 5 to 15 percent. The company took no action despite the danger.

“Whatever’s behind the seals is behind the seals,” Sago foreman Carl Crumrine told investigators in his interview. “What’s in front of the seals is what I have to worry about.”

According to MSHA, 34 miners died on the job the first four months of this year, 26 in coal and eight in other mines.

Meanwhile, at MSHA-organized hearings in late April on emergency rules the federal agency imposed after Sago, company officials pushed for lifting even these minimal additional regulations. The new rules require notification of an accident within 15 minutes and impose more rigorous training standards.

“We recommend allowing flexibility for an operator” at the early stages of an accident, said Dale Byram, a manager at Jim Walter Resources Inc. in Brookwood, Alabama, at the hearing in Lakewood, Colorado, according to the April 24 Lexington-Herald Leader, a daily published in Kentucky. It can be difficult to find the appropriate MSHA official to notify, Byram argued.

UMWA official Jim Baker countered at the April 26 hearing in Lexington, Kentucky, that the new rules are needed, the April 27 Herald-Leader reported.

At a March 13 public meeting of the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington on underground rescue equipment and technology, held at the National Press Club, Dennis O’Dell, the UMWA’s administrator of occupational health and safety, described some of the related demands of the union. O’Dell said that portable radio transmitters to communicate with miners trapped underground were developed and tested as of 1995, “but now the system currently sits on a shelf somewhere collecting dust.”

This and even more technology has been approved by MSHA and “must be implemented and required by all mine operators immediately for protecting miner safety,” O’Dell said.

Very little work has been done by mine companies and the federal government to improve breathing apparatuses miners use underground in case of an accident, the UMWA official said. “Reports of the recent coal mine disaster in Mexico indicate that miners had access to at least six hours of oxygen and there were additional units available on the ground to them,” O’Dell said. “Their oxygen resources far exceed what is provided to miners in this country.”

O’Dell said underground rescue chambers are needed, with enough oxygen, water, and food to shield workers.

“Just such a chamber was successfully used and saved the lives of miners at a potash mine in western Canada,” he said, referring to an incident at Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, last year where 72 miners survived after being trapped for over 24 hours. “If the agencies in the industry are serious about giving miners the best chance for survival when all other means of escape fail, the safety chambers would be in the mine today. If you are more concerned with the cost of this unit than the cost of the human life, the miners again will be denied a safety device that could save lives.”
 
 
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