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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- The Crandall Canyon collapse was the most devastating U.S. mine disaster in half a century, according to the latest assessment of federal officials.
Relatives planning a memorial for the anniversary Wednesday say they now know the mine company and regulators failed the six miners entombed in the mountain and botched a rescue that killed three others 10 days later.
Within seconds in the early hours of Aug. 6, 2007, a level section of the mine as large as 63 football fields collapsed, bringing down hundreds of coal pillars and trapping the men nearly half a mile underground.
Frank Allred, the older brother of Kerry Allred, a ram-car operator and one of the trapped miners, says he's haunted by a vision of the six trapped miners in "that black hole" of a mountain, "totally covered in coal."
Crandall Canyon was doomed, according to 1,400 pages of government and congressional reports. A day of reckoning came two weeks ago with the U.S. Department of Labor scolding its Mine Safety and Health Administration for rubber-stamping a risky mining plan and launching an ill-conceived rescue effort that left nobody clearly in charge.
Earlier on the same day, the mining agency blamed a subsidiary of Ohio-based Murray Energy Corp. for digging unauthorized coal and its engineers for a series of blunders on Crandall Canyon's supposed stability.
Regulators say they know of no technology that could allow anyone to safely re-enter the mine to recover the bodies of Kerry Allred, 58; Don Erickson, 50; Luis Hernandez, 23; Carlos Payan, 22; Brandon Phillips, 24; and Manuel Sanchez, 42.
On Aug. 16, another violent cave-in killed three members of a crew boring through rubble toward the trapped men. The bodies of the rescuers -- Dale "Bird" Black, 48; Brandon Kimber, 29; and Gary Jensen, 53, an MSHA accident investigator -- were recovered. Six others were hurt.
(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
