Operations to Cease At Caved-In Utah Mine

Contrite Owner Says He Didn't Know Risks

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 22 -- The Utah coal mine where three rescuers were killed and six men remained trapped will cease operations when the flagging effort to locate the missing is finally called off, mine operator Robert E. Murray said Wednesday. The statement by the combative chief executive of Murray Energy reversed earlier company statements that held the possibility of continued mining in a mountain that is coming to be regarded as a tomb.

In a lengthy telephone interview after several days away from the public eye, Murray both accepted personal responsibility "for what I've done to these miners and these families" and said he was unaware of key details about the risks of mining in the area of the huge Aug. 6 cave-in.

Despite statements by a company vice president over the weekend, Murray said he made the decision to shutter the entire Crandall Canyon mine last Friday, the morning after helping to pull dead and injured rescuers from the shaft that exploded onto them as they burrowed through the earlier collapse.

"I told Mr. Richard Stickler the next morning, 'I'm submitting to you a plan to seal this mine. This mountain is alive,' " Murray said, referring to the head of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, which is part of the Labor Department.

Murray, 67, was by turns unapologetic and remorseful in the interview. He said he was under a doctor's care for a day and a half after helping to carry the dead and injured from Thursday's catastrophic cave-in.

"I will see their faces and the blood for the rest of my life," he said from the mine office outside Huntington, Utah. "It has nothing to do with me. It's them, they're the heroes."

Murray added that the magnitude of the cave-in that buried the rescuers persuaded him that, despite his initial statements that the much larger Aug. 6 collapse had been survivable, the missing six miners were certainly doomed. Company engineers, he said told him the earlier collapse was 10,000 times as powerful.

"I saw the devastation in there, and I told the families privately that there was no way their loved ones could have survived the shock 10,000 times stronger than what we saw Thursday night, as we recovered the heroes," Murray said. "They didn't like to hear it. I tried to say it with as much compassion as I can. I don't think I was very good at it at all."

The families condemned the miner owners and federal overseers for abandoning the rescue effort. Murray said workers will continue drilling bore holes toward the area the miners were working, but that hope remained very faint.

Murray insisted that there was "no inkling" of trouble in the mine before the Aug. 6 collapse.

Yet an April 18 letter from Agapito Associates, the consulting engineers hired by Murray's company states plainly that a "large bump" or disturbance prompted mine operators to "abandon" work in the north area of the mine in March. Work then shifted to the south, where miners were removing coal from a "barrier" when the collapse occurred.

"I have no knowledge of it, no recollection," Murray said. "I depended on our people there. In fact they told me in the last two months things were better than they've ever been."

He said, however, that the mountain over the Crandall mine was known for its failure to "settle" over the years of mining, harboring immense pressures that only now are being released.

"The mountain still hasn't corrected itself," he said. "It's still moving."

So immense was the release of energy Aug. 6 that Murray defended repeating initial incorrect reports that blamed the cave-in on earthquake.

"Whatever it was, it was a natural disaster," Murray said. "And it was seismic activity. Oh, of course, no question about it. It was a natural disaster. We've never seen anything like this. My miners have hundreds of years of experience, and they've told me to a man they've never seen anything like this before."

But, he added, "that doesn't relieve me of my direct responsibility for these miners and their families. MSHA and our people used all the knowledge available to mankind and yet six miners are trapped, and nine more are either killed or injured, and I'm responsible for that."