Search is over (Utah mine) [View All]

Source: Deseret News

Search is over: 'Eagle we mourn for those we lost'
Hopes crushed: Families are upset
By Stephen Speckman and Ben Winslow
Deseret Morning News
Published: Sept. 1, 2007 12:51 a.m. MDT

HUNTINGTON — The search for six miners trapped inside a collapsed part of the Crandall Canyon Mine is over.
Federal authorities suspended the rescue effort indefinitely, leaving the miners' families devastated. There is no word of when — or even if — there will be any later effort to recover the bodies of Don Erickson, Kerry Allred, Carlos Payan, Brandon Phillips, Luis Hernandez and Manuel Sanchez.

"I think our trapped miners are going to be in there a long time," Colin King, a lawyer hired by the miners' families, said Friday. "I think this means that MSHA (the Mine Safety and Health Administration) has concluded the miners are dead."

Hopes of finding any signs of life faded when workers dropped a robot with a camera attached down one of the seven boreholes on Friday. All they found was debris, mud and water. It was the same outcome that they found Thursday, when they drilled the seventh hole 1,865 feet through a mountain into rubble.

The families are all, understandably, heartbroken.

Read more: http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695206433,00.html