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That two-inch bore hole made contact with the underground cavern in the Crandall Canyon mine where six miners were hoped to be still alive, awaiting rescue. "Nothing was detected," when a microphone was lowered into the cavity, ABC's Neal Karlinsky noted. Furthermore, reported CBS' John Blackstone, "there was not enough oxygen to support life." A grain of hope that the miners were alive was that the bore had been misdrilled and had entered an adjacent sealed-off chamber. So engineers turned to a second larger drill "giving them a better chance of staying on target," according to NBC's Jennifer London. As for trying to reach them by tunneling in, London told us that 440 feet of progress has been made in a 2,000 foot job.
CBS and ABC looked into the safety records of all the mines owned by Robert Murray. ABC's Karlinsky counted 3,300 mineworkers in his employ across five states: at one operation, the Galatia mine in Illinois, Murray's firm has racked up $2.5m in fines for safety violations in two years. CBS' Blackstone picked up on Murray's boast that until now he has had no "major accident" at any of his mines: it depends on the meaning of "major"--even before this cave-in, his workers suffered eleven deaths in twelve years. Industrywide, CBS' Nancy Cordes noted that the majority of mining deaths occur above ground, caused by overturned vehicles and malfunctioning machinery. Underground, "safety equipment that is commonplace in mines from Canada to Tanzania is rarely used in the United States."
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