Rescue and Death

The remaining 12 miners in West Virginia have been found alive.

Just before Christmas in 1984, 24 miners in the Wilberg Mine near my home were killed by carbon monoxide when a fire started from an overheated belt drive or bearing. One of them was my neighbor. The owners of the mine, Utah Power and Light Co., ended up settling for $22 million. After seeing what happened, I have no respect for either MSHA or the union. Neither one seemed to care about the safety shortcuts that were taken by the mining company running the operation. The phones inside the mine had been allowed to go dead. There was no exit path on the side away from the fire.

A missionary from Utah has been shot and killed in Virginia. His companion was shot in the neck, but will survive. He was 21 years old, three months away from the end of his mission. My 28 year old nephew was killed in a snow mobile accident last February. I can't believe that either one just puffed out of existence. It would violate some kind of natural law, just as life itself seems to work against the Second Law of thermodynamics, that nature tends toward entropy. It would just be too senseless for something as marvelous as a human personality and intelligence to develop just to be dissolved again. We speak about infinite numbers of universes, everything coming from a big bang, quantum superpositioning, etc. Nothing seems unbelievable anymore.

Update: I learned this morning that the story about the miners being found which I heard on a local TV news show turned out to be wrong. They've been found but all were killed. I wondered when I heard that they had survived, how they'd made it for so long. Those rebreathers and safety kits are only good for hours. Unless they found a pocket of good air and walled themselves in, it would have been a miracle.
This is so sad. Coalmining communities live with dread of things like this. South Central Utah has a number of coal mines, and we know the fear and the grief. I pray for the families of those miners in West Virginia that they may receive peace and hope.