Faith, prayer motivated miners while trapped underground

When the last of the nine Pennsylvania miners who spent over three days trapped in a flooded coal mine was brought to the surface Sunday morning, July 28, Pennsylvania Governor Mark Schweiker called it a “beautiful conclusion” to the dramatic rescue effort. Mark Popernack was the final miner to ascend from the watery tomb where he and eight co-workers spent the weekend, waiting, praying, and alternately hoping for rescue and preparing to die. He came up in a metal cage through a hole that a 30-inch drill had bored deep into the rocky Pennsylvania earth to reach the men. Awaiting him were the open arms of rescuers and family members, already thanking God for His intervention.
   
For 77 hours, the nine veteran miners waited in agony 240 feet under the fresh air and daylight of rural Pennsylvania, huddled together for warmth in a tiny cavern nearly filled with cold, coal-blackened water. Over 200 feet above, rescue workers continued nonstop to free the men they weren’t even sure were still alive. The Columbus Dispatch quoted Mark Zambanini, chief of the Sipesville Fire Department, as saying that rescuers were often frustrated and impatient as they faced a barrage of obstacles and mishaps in their frantic mission. But they never lost hope, said Zambanini, noting that the rescuers and community “had our minds made up from the very beginning that we were going to get all nine out alive.” Zambanini said that determination and faith kept them at their task.
    
Agnes Zanoni, whose husband Melio left the mines in 1954 after a cave-in killed his best friend and nearly took his life, said that while her heart sank when she first heard about the trapped miners, she did the same thing that she did on Sept. 11, when Flight 93 plunged into the countryside a few miles from where the nine were trapped. “I dropped to my knees and prayed,” The Dispatch quoted her as saying.
   
The usually emotionless New York Times spent considerable space observing how family, friends, rescuers and residents of the area turned to God in the intense three-day crisis and how they gave Him credit and thanks when it was over.
   
The Times quoted Dr. Russell Dumire, who cared for six of the nine rescued miners, as saying that the rescue was “truly a miracle.” Mining experts agree, saying that history was not on the side of the nine men trapped in the dark cavern, standing in cold water and struggling to keep warm. Joseph Main, a mine safety expert, said that under the extreme circumstances the rescue was unprecedented. In most cases, he explained, miners trapped for that long in a cold and flooded environment would have been lost.
   
The drama began Thursday when miner Mark Popernack bored a hole through the mine shaft where he was working into an abandoned mine that official maps indicated was some 300 feet away. A wall of water erupted immediately, about 60 million gallons according to experts, cutting off Popernack from the rest of his crew for two hours — and leading Popernack to fear that his life was over. When the rest of the crew rescued Popernack, the nine of them made their way to a small air pocket to wait to be rescued — or drowned.
   
Cut off from escape by the rushing water, the miners hurried to the highest point in the mine. The water level receded slightly and in an area 70 feet long, 18 feet wide, and a height of between four and five feet, they waited.
   
In the small area with no ventilation, the air began to go bad, and the men feared they would suffocate. Then, miraculously, a six-inch pipe broke through the ceiling of their small prison, and began to provide them with clean, heated air to breathe and to provide some air and to provide some warmth. Somehow, the rescue crew above had correctly guessed just where the trapped miners would be.
   
But on Friday, the water began to rise in the miners’ close quarters and they reluctantly prepared to drown. They roped themselves to a machine so their bodies would be found together, and wrote goodbye notes to loved ones, enclosing the messages in a plastic lunch pail they wired to the same machine.
   
Aboveground, rescuers had begun to pump water from the flooded mine, and underground the nine were thankful for another miracle: The water level began to drop, and their hopes were revived.
   
For the next two days their spirits alternated between hope and despair as they heard the drilling of rescuers. But when the drilling stopped Friday morning, they wondered if the crew above had given them up for dead and quit. “You’d wonder why they quit, USA Today reported miner Ronald Hileman as saying. “Did they forget about us? Could they not do it?” What the trapped miners didn’t know was that the giant drill bit had broken, forcing the rescuers to fly in another and begin a new hole.
   
By late Saturday, however, the rescuers had punched through to the men, and over a phone dropped down to them the waiting and praying nation heard their prayers answered as the miners called up to the surface, “We can hear you. We’re all right.” (EP)