Dead miner left note for family

2006-01-08 14:56

West Virginia - A coal miner left a detailed note showing that he and other trapped workers were alive at least 10 hours after an underground explosion in a West Virginia mine, a family member said on Saturday.

The daughter of 61-year-old Jim Bennett, who was a shuttle car operator in the mine, said the note has three or four entries, the first coming Monday at 11:40 and the last, in words that trailed off the page, at 16:25, nearly 10 hours after the blast.

"Each time he documented, you could tell it was getting worse," Ann Merideth told The Associated Press.

"Later on down the note he said that it was getting dark. It was getting smoky. They were losing air."

Monday's blast killed one miner immediately and 11 more who were found nearly 42 hours later huddled together behind a plastic curtain erected to keep out deadly carbon monoxide.

The lone survivor, 26-year-old Randal McCloy Jr, remains critically ill in a medically induced coma at a Pittsburgh hospital. Doctors believe he has brain damage from severe oxygen deprivation.

"I often thought about if he had written a note. Well, we got one yesterday. Bless his heart," Merideth said during an interview at a makeshift memorial to her father and two other fallen miners from this tiny coal town.

"He didn't know how much more time he had. But he wanted everybody to know to tell my mom that he loved her," she said. "And he wanted me and my brother to know that he loved us."

Merideth said the note left her with comfort, but also anger that her father could have been alive and lucid for a long enough time to be rescued.

The first rescuers didn't go into the mine until 11 hours after the blast, a lag coal company officials said was necessary to clear the mine of high concentrations of poisonous gases.

- Dow Jones