CLEVELAND, Emery County — A long dark shadow looms across the coal mines of Emery County and haunts residents who wait for word of the coal miners trapped inside the Crandall Canyon Mine.
Wilberg.
Everyone in the small central Utah cities and towns where the vast majority of jobs are coal-related knows someone who died or was working in the Wilberg Mine when an explosion and fire killed 27 in 1984.
For the close-knit communities of Huntington, Cleveland, Orangeville and Helper, where mining is passed down generation to generation, 23 years is not long at all.
"This is too much of the same thing," Cleveland town clerk Jamie Jensen said. "We went through this 20 years ago. My dad still can't talk about it. "
Jensen's family moved to Utah after a mine in Pennsylvania closed. When her mother heard about mine jobs available in Utah, her father piled in a car with his buddies, and they drove together to Huntington.
When they arrived, they were hired on the spot.
"He called my mom and said, 'Pack 'em up,' and we moved to Utah. We pulled into Huntington on my 16th birthday."
Her father, Ron Carpenter, was supposed to be working on the shift with the victims of the Wilberg disaster. He took the day off because his doctor ordered three days' rest for pneumonia. His wife began fielding calls of consolation before the family realized what had happened.
When Carpenter walked into the mine's headquarters, a supervisor crossed his name off the list of the missing.
"It went from 28 to 27," his daughter said.
Some of his buddies remained on the list, their bodies not recovered for about a year.
"I remember going through being thankful he was alive," Jensen said, "but feeling terrible about all the funerals for his friends."
An eerily similar situation is playing out at Crandall Canyon, where Monday's collapse was termed a catastrophe by a speaker at Wednesday night's candlelight vigil.
Kyle Wilson quit working at the mine two weeks before the collapse trapped his former crew. His replacement, Brandon Phillips, is one of the missing men. Wilson would like to talk to the media about the situation, his wife, Marci said, but he simply can't.
Wilson was already crying Wednesday night when he walked into the Huntington Rodeo Grounds to participate in a candlelight vigil.
He held his wife tight. She held onto him just as hard.
Lee Cratsenburg is another Wilberg veteran. A distant cousin of Cleveland's Kerry Allred, who is trapped in Crandall Canyon, Cratsenburg was scheduled to work the graveyard shift the night of the calamity.
"I knew immediately something was wrong," she said. "You could always see the lights from the mine. We had a hellacious snowstorm but could still see the lights. It was like a beacon to ships. The lights were out, so I knew something was wrong. When I got up there they told me the mine was on fire and turned me around. "
She believes her former work as a nurse was a reason she was put on the team assigned to clean the spot where the bodies were found.
"There are a lot of coal miners in this world who never have to go through that," she said.
Cratsenburg had to deal with an old mining superstition that women underground were bad luck. That's why her son, Allan Borba, calls her "the ultimate coal miner."
"Every time I went to a bar I heard how tough my mom was."
She knows Carpenter and understands why talking about it is hard for him while Huntington, Cleveland, Orangeville and Helper fear for their sons buried in the Crandall Canyon mine.
"Old miners who've been in any kind of a situation know this is different from Wilberg because that was an explosion with a fire," Cratsenburg said, "but what this does to all the old miners is bring back the anxiety."
On nearly every corner in Huntington, signs remind people to "pray for our 6." The signs seem like expressions not for the locals, who don't need the reminder, but for the people around the world who are watching and reading and caring for the six from afar.
More than 400 people from the coal-mining communities placed their candles in the dirt track around the rodeo grounds after Wednesday night's prayer vigil. Nearly an hour later, the people were gone, but most of the candles still burned, smoke rising toward heaven like constant, pleading prayers.
E-mail: twalch@desnews.com