By PAUL FOY
The Associated Press

HUNTINGTON, Utah - Efforts to reach six coal miners trapped more than 1,500 feet underground will take at least three days, and rescuers weren’t even sure the men had survived the cave-in, one of the mine’s owners said Tuesday.

Crews worked through the night in shifts, with teams coming and going along the road leading to the Crandall Canyon mine in a forested canyon.

“The Lord has already decided whether they’re alive or dead,” said Robert E. Murray, chairman of Murray Energy Corp. of Cleveland, a part owner of the Crandall Canyon mine. “But it’s up to Bob Murray and my management to get access to them as quickly as we can.”

If all goes well, it will still take three days to reach the chamber where the miners are believed to be, he said. Even then, rescuers will have only a 2-inch hole into the chamber through which to communicate with the miners and provide them food or air, he said.

Little was known about the six miners. Only one has been identified, but Mexico’s consul in Salt Lake City, Salvador Jimenez, said three of the men are Mexican citizens.

Jimenez said he did not know any details about the men, including whether they are U.S. residents, their ages or hometowns.

Crews moved only 310 feet closer to the miners in the first 30 hours after the cave-in, Murray said.

Attempts were halted overnight after a “bump” in which coal was dislodged from the mine’s ribs, said Al Davis, an official with the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

By PAUL FOY
Associated Press

HUNTINGTON, Utah - Six miners were trapped in a coal mine Monday by a cave-in so powerful that authorities initially thought it was small earthquake.

Hours after the cave-in, searchers had been unable to contact the miners and could not be sure whether they were dead or alive. If they survived, a mine executive said, they could have enough air and water to last several days.

“We’re going to get them,” said Robert E. Murray, chairman of Murray Energy Corp. of Cleveland, a contractor that works at the mine. “There is nothing on my mind right now except getting those miners out.”

Murray believes the miners have plenty of air because oxygen naturally leaks into the mine. The mine also is stocked with drinking water.

By Peter Smith

MINNEAPOLIS — The thing about Minnesota is it was built by people who did the job right. Serious people. People who knew they did not want to be screwing around outside repairing things when it was a true 40 below, not just a 40 below wind chill. Wind chill factors are for wimps.

By rights, the state motto, “The Star of the North,” should really be, “Maintenance.” You can’t drive a mile in any direction without running into some form of highway repair or expansion.

So in the wake of the 35 W bridge collapse yesterday, in the 95 degree heat of August, a subliminal thought is beginning to take shape in the communal Minnesota psyche: This isn’t supposed to happen here.

After the collapse, many things went extremely right. The emergency services worked in true blue Minnesota fashion. Transportation and communication ran smoothly, if not flawlessly — the result of a lot of hard work and careful planning. People hurried to the site and pitched in. The people who built Minnesota would have been proud.

But long before the collapse — in 2005, in fact, the bridge had been rated “structurally deficient” in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Bridge Inventory database. Although the structurally deficient bridge has been inspected twice since then, fixing it does not appear to have been a political priority.

Money is tight. There are differences of opinion as to how to fund projects like repairing infrastructure. The Republicans and Republican governor Tim Pawlenty have vowed no new taxes and want to find creative ways to fund things. The Democrats advocate a more direct, pay as you go approach. There has been gridlock at the capitol for years.

read more HERE

By SHARON COHEN and BRIAN BAKST

MINNEAPOLIS - Minnesota officials were warned as early as 1990 that the bridge that plummeted into the Mississippi River was “structurally deficient,” yet they relied on a strategy of patchwork fixes and stepped-up inspections.

“We thought we had done all we could,” state bridge engineer Dan Dorgan told reporters not far from the mangled remains of the span. “Obviously something went terribly wrong.”

Questions about the cause of the collapse and whether it could have been prevented arose Thursday as authorities shifted from rescue efforts to a grim recovery, searching for bodies that may be hidden beneath the river’s swirling currents.

The official death count from Wednesday’s rush-hour collapse stood at four, with another 79 injuries. But police said the death count would surely grow because bodies had been spotted in the water and as many as 30 people were still reported missing.

In 1990, the federal government gave the I-35W bridge a rating of “structurally deficient,” citing significant corrosion in its bearings. That made it one of 77,000 bridges in that category nationwide, 1,160 in Minnesota alone.

The designation means some portions of the bridge needed to be scheduled for repair or replacement, and it was on a schedule for inspection every two years.

During the 1990s, later inspections found fatigue cracks and corrosion in the steel around the bridge’s joints. Those problems were repaired. Starting in 1993, the state said, the bridge was inspected annually instead of every other year.

read more HERE