Virginia Officials Begin Drilling Air Shaft to Find Missing Miners

Mine safety officials began drilling an air shaft Tuesday toward an area where eight coal miners were believed trapped, and they planned to lower a camera to search for signs of life.

Rescue workers have had no contact with the men, but relatives kept up a vigil at the mine.

“I’m one of those that still has hope,” said Michael Gentry, 17, a nephew of trapped miner Danny Ray Gentry. “The family is waiting, hoping they find the bodies. They don’t believe they’re alive.”

The effort to drill the vertical air shaft began after searchers retreated from the mine. They had detected smoke, heat and dangerous levels of explosive and suffocating methane gas about 300 feet from the chamber where the miners were working.

“We will try to look around and see what we can see. We will check for smoke or how the visibility in the mine is,” said Benny Wampler, assistant director at the Virginia Division of Mines and Minerals.

“There is the possibility that there is (healthy) atmosphere elsewhere in the mine that they could have traveled to,” Wampler said. “We never give up hope.”

The explosion early Monday blew through Southmountain Coal Co.’s No. 3 mine in rural southwestern Virginia. The blast wrecked a mine office building outside one entrance to the mine and burned the paint off several vehicles parked nearby.

A ninth miner working closer to the entrance crawled out and was hospitalized for burns.

Gov. L. Douglas Wilder was in Norton, Va., for a plant dedication, but canceled a catered lunch and donated the food to rescue workers.

The mine has had no fatalities since it opened in September, 1990. However, a federal mine official said its injury rate was nearly triple the national average.

Another reminder of the dangers of mining came Tuesday about 55 miles to the north, in southern West Virginia. Falling rock killed one coal miner and injured two others inside the Alma Ridge Inc. Mine No. 1 near Thacker, state authorities said.