I'm not sure if any of you heard about the coal mine explosion that happened in West Virginia early Monday morning. 13 miners were trapped by the explosion thousands of miles underground. A rescue effort went underway and the families of the miners were crowded in a nearby church. Late Tuesday night, the families came bursting out of the church screaming and clapping. The church bells began to ring and West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin came out with the crowd. Though it was confirmed earlier today that one miner was killed from the initial explosion, reports came out late Monday that 12 of 13 remaining survivors were alive. This was against all odds because there were also confirmed reports of high levels of toxic carbon monoxide.

It turns out that the original message, which was communicated from the rescue teams below the ground to the command center at the mine was either miscommunicated or misunderstood. Somehow the information got to the families. The report was never confirmed by the Governor nor the company running the mine. 12 minutes later it was confirmed that there was a miscommunication and some confusion. However, it was not until several hours later that the company made a press conference annoucing that in fact, 11 of the 12 miners are dead and the one survivor is in critical condition and was rushed to the hospital.

I was watching the news after the Orange Bowl and saw the annoucement that 12 of the miners were alive. Then I turn on the TV a couple hours later and it's the President of this company explaining about miscommunication. I was shocked and can only imagine the anger of the families, which is also getting a lot of press because the cameras were all over the church and saw the families leaving. I was watching Anderson Cooper live on CNN and he was in the middle of a sentence and all of a sudden you hear "They're liars! Liars! You heard it from us!" So you can only imagine how pissed they are. No one really knows why this happened but I have noticed that most of the media is pretty pissed about this because they believed the initial UNCONFIRMED reports. The reason why they waited several hours to annouce the mistake is because they had to wait until they knew for sure because they did not want to make the same mistake twice. I think that is totally understandable, although it is unclear whether the families were told right away that there was confusion about the initial reports. When I was watching the president of the company's press conference he indicated that they communicated back to the families that the original message was miscommunicated or misunderstood. But people are saying that the families believed for all those hours that the miners were alive.

Family members are now as I'm typing saying that there was no communication to them that the original report was wrong for about 3 hours. I saw the celebrations on TV myself so they believed it for long enough to feel the heart breaking reversal. As far as the facts go now, I would have to say this was probably a human error at some point or maybe the communications were slightly inaudible and someone thought they heard one thing but something different was side on the other end. Who knows? But you can imagine whoever got the message that there were 12 miners alive, I guess you can imagine their excitedness against all odds and the want to tell the families. But wouldn't you exercise caution? It's hard for someone like me or anyone not in that situation to say, but I don't know. Something certainly seems off.

Here's the article on link:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/01/04/mine.e...index.html

The Boston Globe already had the headline in press when the announcement came, I think. I didn't look at my paper though this morning, so I don't know if it was corrected or still was delivered with the mistaken headline.

It is a very sad story. Apparently safety violations are just part of the industry. They would rather pay the "slap on the wrist" fines than insure the safety of their miners. That is what I heard at least in stories relating to the accident.

Yeah there's three pretty interesting stories here. The first one is that this particular mine has been cited for several violations before, even in the recent months before the explosion. Now you might say well there it is, but the interesting thing to me is that they are saying the explosion came from a sealed off mine that they were done and finished with. That's peculiar to me.
The other interesting part is how and why the miscommunication happened and why the families, the media, and a lot of America believed that 12 people had survived for upwards of 3 hours only to find out that only one guy made it out and he's in critical condition. There are two miscommunications to me here, though. The original miscommunication is understandable. CNN reports that "The rescuers were working under full-face oxygen masks -- through extreme stress and physical exhaustion -- and communicating in code over a possibly spotty connection to the operations base on the surface" and that any one of those factors or a combination of them could have led to the miscommunication that 12 were alive. That is understandable. The article reports that the command center at the mine did not learn until 12 to 20 minutes later that there was only one survivor. This is the second miscommunication. I understand that they didn't want to make the same mistake twice, but if they knew for sure that it was 1 and not 12, or even that the original message was wrong, they should have informed the families immediately and not led them to believe something they already knew to be false or in question. Not to mention the governor also knew that the communications were or could have been wrong about 15 or so minutes after the initial message.

The last interesting story is the guy who did survive. The trapped miners worked together to try to survive, was this guy just able to hold out? People were worried about the carbon monoxide levels but earlier indications from the one survivor showed that he wasn't suffering from carbon monoxide posioning. So how did the others die then?

This is truly a very sad story. All of us at work today were talking about this, and almost every customer that came in today brought up this story. Just horrible...

"This is not a usual patient," Prescott said. "That's a very important point about this. We don't know what happened, and the only person who does know ... can't talk with us in any way."

The latest news says that the one survivor is still in a coma and doctors don't know why. They are not sure how his brain will recover from the prolonged hours of lack of oxygen, which is also why his organs, while stable, are not back to full functionality. This whole story and everything about it just seems a little off to me.