[R-G] What really happened in the mine at Crandall Canyon

[Hunter Gray]

      Disaster: One year later 
      What really happened in the mine at Crandall Canyon 
      Miners warn repeatedly of the mountain's building, pent-up fury, but the mine operator's orders are to press on, to pull out coal it is not authorized to take 
      By Mike Gorrell
      The Salt Lake Tribune
      Salt Lake Tribune 
      Article Last Updated:08/02/2008 11:49:34 PM MDT 
     
      The task of stripping the Crandall Canyon mine of its last large blocks of coal fell to four crews. 
          None was exposed to the mine's dangers more than the "D" crew, six members of which died last on Aug. 6, 2007. They logged 20 shifts in its thumping, ever-shifting passageways in the month before the walls blew in on them. 
          It was also no accident that when the mine's walls imploded again 10 days later on a valiant group of would-be rescuers, two of the fatalities were Dale Black and Brandon Kimber. They were the foremen of the "A" and "C" crews, respectively, and had logged nearly as many hours gutting what little was left of the mine deep beneath East Mountain. 
          All of these guys knew how volatile the conditions were. They had repeatedly heard the hollow rumbling sound produced by "bounces," miner lingo for the Earth's sometimes petulant manner of relieving pressures produced when a seam of coal is removed. They had seen how these bounces can cause coal to slough off tunnel walls or, worse yet, be expelled violently into voids. 
          A bounce in March that terminated efforts to mine Crandall Canyon's North Barrier pillar - one of the last two enormous coal blocks that supported the mine's roof - had occurred on Kimber's shift. Just four days earlier, another foreman had noted it was "bouncing real hard on occasion. Smacked little Carlos up aside of the haid [sic] with a pretty good chunk." 
          "Little Carlos" was Juan Carlos Payan, a 22-year-old member of the ill-fated "D" crew. He was a roof bolter. For the last eight weeks of his life, he worked alongside Jose Luis Hernandez, drilling steel bolts into the mine's roof or erecting other support props to hold it up. 
          Their crewmates included Manny Sanchez, who operated the continuous mining machine that cut the coal, and two shuttle car drivers - Kerry Allred and Don Erickson - who moved coal from Sanchez's machine to a conveyor belt that carried it three miles to the surface. Brandon Phillips had joined them July 16 as a laborer to do odd jobs. 
          All are now entombed in the mine. 
          Benny Allred was their boss. He escaped death that night only because he left work early, taking comp time for having to attend a management meeting the next morning. Even luckier was mechanic Jameson Ward. He was with the crew three minutes before the mine imploded at 2:48 a.m. on Aug. 6, but had driven off to pick up fellow mechanic Tim Harper, whose truck had broken down elsewhere in the mine. 
          
          
          Mine gave all it could: In its disaster investigation, released July 24, the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration concluded the disaster was inevitable. 
          A seriously flawed engineering plan, one that MSHA's own roof-control engineers had approved, had sent the workers into a mine destined to fail. To make matters worse, the mine's operator, a subsidiary of Murray Energy Corp., had violated the inadequate plan by mining extra coal it was not authorized to take, further weakening the internal structure. MSHA also said the company broke the law by not reporting, as required, several work-disrupting bounces, which warned that the mine had given all it could give. 
          MSHA fined Murray Energy's subsidiary $1.64 million, and its engineering consultant, Agapito Associates, Inc., $220,000. The mining company responded that MSHA's report was unfairly influenced by congressional and union figures looking for a scapegoat, and whose political pressure and threats prohibited the very engineers who knew the mine best from sharing their knowledge with MSHA investigators. 
          The company vowed to fight the allegations, buttressing its defense with the findings of an independent U.S. Labor Department probe that was scathing in its criticism of MSHA's handling of Crandall Canyon. 
          
          'Must be pretty violent': Crandall Canyon was essentially played out early in 2006. The only significant blocks of coal left were two "barrier pillars." Roughly 440 feet wide and three-quarters of a mile long, they had been left behind to hold up the mountain above the mine after voracious longwall mining machines had removed expansive amounts of coal to the north and south. 
          As early as 1992, company engineer R. Jay Marshall had informed a state mining official that "it is not good mining practice" to excavate barrier pillars "and in fact could be dangerous." 
          But armed with new engineering reports from Agapito, Murray Energy's subsidiary went after these barrier pillars in 2006. An MSHA trainee engineer who reviewed Agapito's numbers felt it would be safe to "develop" a series of four parallel tunnels in these barriers. But he expressed doubt about the safety of "retreat mining," in which coal pillars between the tunnels are cut away by crews as they back toward the mine entrance, allowing the roof to collapse into the void they created. 
          After the company responded to the trainee engineer's conclusions with additional data, MSHA's district manager in Denver approved the plan. 
          The four crews went to work. Starting in the North Barrier pillar on Nov. 21, 2006, they rotated shifts around the clock, seven days a week, systematically carving tunnels through the seam. Production logs and internal company documents cited in MSHA's report and a Senate committee report show the advance went pretty smoothly. Tunnel walls shed some coal, but not violently, indicating the setup was fairly stable. 
          But shortly after retreat mining began on Feb. 16, 2007, conditions deteriorated. A shift foreman's report six days into "pulling pillars," as the practice is commonly known, noted that miners were "getting some hard bounces, still caving right on our ass." 
          The "D" crew was there for much of it. On March 1, a cave-in blew out two ventilation structures during its night shift and prompted a note to company safety director Jerry Taylor, saying, "This is at least the third time they have noted walls blown out by caves on the pillar section. Must be pretty violent." 
          Four days later, the crew spent eight hours putting in extra-long roof bolts after "a couple hard bounces." The next day, Payan was hit in the face. Then on the crew's March 8-9 shift, one bounce knocked the roof bolting machine out of service for 30 minutes, another dumped coal all over the continuous miner. 
          A more serious bounce on March 7, when Black's crew was in the mine, badly damaged two ventilation structures. It took 70 minutes to fix them. Although MSHA must be notified if an outburst halts production for more than hour, no notice was given. MSHA's report cites that violation as indicative of the company's failure to respond appropriately to actual mining conditions. 
          Then, as Kimber's crew completed its March 10 day shift, a magnitude 2.3 bounce severely damaged more than 700 feet of tunnels, filling some stretches up to four feet deep with coal. No one was hurt, but mine superintendent Gary Peacock concluded, "We have used all the tricks we know of to pull these pillars, and I no longer feel comfortable we can do it without unacceptable risk." 
          So the crews moved to the South Barrier pillar. Agapito engineers said that lengthening the pillars from 92 feet to 130 feet would provide extra stability, and made several other changes that seemed to work as tunnel development work proceeded from March 28 to July 15. 
          But as soon as retreat mining began, problems returned. The first intentional cave-in proved much larger than expected, knocking out ventilation structures that took three hours to repair. In the next couple of weeks, as the crews backed into an area where the mountain overhead grew higher, the floor heaved upward on a couple of occasions, making it difficult to move equipment about. 
          The "D" crew was on shift July 26 when an unplanned cave-in caused a 30-minute cleanup delay. Four days later, another in a series of bounces was severe enough to damage a torque shaft on Sanchez's continuous miner. 
          A more serious bounce occurred Aug. 3 at 4:39 a.m., as foreman Josh Fielder's "B" crew was at work. Coal was thrown into a tunnel along the entire length of a pillar. A continuous-miner operator had the lower half of his body covered with debris, but was uninjured. Roof-supporting timbers were tossed about. A gap opened between the roof and the top of the pillar. 
          Cleanup work took six hours, extending four hours into Black's shift. Yet MSHA was never notified of the shutdown, a point emphasized by the disaster investigation team, which added that Black and other miners "discussed the possibility that management would decide to pull out of the South Barrier section due to similarities between the outburst accident that morning and the [March 10] events in the North Barrier." 
          But management didn't, instructing the crew instead to shift from pulling pillars to cutting into what was left of the South Barrier pillar - in an area MSHA had declared off-limits. The "D" crew was continuing that work in the wee hours of Aug. 6 when the catastrophic collapse occurred, registering magnitude 3.9 on seismic instruments. The six men apparently died instantly. 
          Their fate was unknown to the outside world, however, prompting a vigorous rescue effort that ultimately, 10 days later, claimed the lives of MSHA inspector Gary Jensen and the two miners who intimately knew the mine's pent-up fury all too well - Brandon Kimber and Dale Black. 
          
          mikeg at sltrib.com 
          
     

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'

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In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the game trails, 
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they dance from within the very essence of our own inner being. They do this especially 
when the bright night moon shines down on the clean white snow that covers the valley 
and its surroundings.  Then it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious 
and remembering way. [Hunter Bear]