For a hundred different reasons, with his current hospital stay topping the list, the timing was awful and the accident regrettable, but at least when veteran miner Brent Taylor was pinned beneath a 300-pound slab of rock last week, it can be reported that the response to his predicament was coordinated, quick and, best of all, successful.
A little good news from the mines in Utah can't hurt.
The 47-year-old Taylor, a Vernal resident with more than 20 years of mining experience, was working a gilsonite vein at the Ziegler Chemical and Mineral Corp.'s claim in Little Bonanza, a mining town about 35 miles southeast of Vernal and about 75 miles northeast of the Crandall Canyon Mine near Huntington, where six men, their fate unknown, remain trapped underground and three rescuers have died attempting to get to them.
At about 10 a.m. last Tuesday, a chunk of rock less than a foot thick and about five feet in length broke loose and fell on Taylor's shoulder, pinning him to the ground.
Unable to move, Taylor called to another miner for help. Several men rushed to the area and lifted the rock off him as an ambulance from the Ashley Regional Medical Center arrived for transport to Vernal. Total elapsed time from being pinned to being freed was estimated at 35 minutes.
It must have seemed like an eternity to Taylor, but it's a snap of the fingers compared to the two weeks the six men in Crandall Canyon have now had to endure.
"What happened was an unfortunate incident that doesn't happen often, fortunately," said Chip Ziegler, vice president of Ziegler Chemical and Mineral Corp. "We have a rescue team that is fully trained and we instituted procedures to get him out safely and to take him into Vernal.
"It wasn't radically dramatic," Ziegler said of the rescue, "nothing the movie folks would be interested in. Basically he just had a big rock fall on him. Fortunately, from what I understand he's in good condition although he's still in the intensive care unit just to make sure he's going to be OK. He has a bruised lung, and there's some fluid in there."
A hospital spokesman verified Taylor's condition, saying he is "progressing well and should fully recover."
The area where Taylor was working has been closed, according to Ziegler. "At this point it's shut down," he said. "We probably will not re-enter that area again because of what happened."
The Ziegler Corp. mines gilsonite — a natural resin used in, among other things, newspaper printing ink — from a series of veins in Uintah County that run to as deep as 1,500 feet.
Taylor's rescue would have been more difficult from a deeper location, although, ironically, the odds of such an accident happening lower would have been less.
"Because it was so close to the surface might have been why it (the rock slab) broke off," said Ziegler. "Deeper, the walls are more predictable."
"We pride ourself on our safety record," Ziegler added. "We've never had a fatality."
As folks in central Utah — and around the world — continue to hold their breath, it might be helpful to dwell on news about a Utah cave-in that started out bad and turned to good.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.