A seventh borehole entered the Crandall Canyon Mine today.
But that's where the good news ended for the families of six miners who have been trapped for more than three weeks.
By 5 p.m., families were given the "discouraging" news that the number seven hole into a supposed safe area called the "kitchen" did not reveal any signs of life.
Instead, workers discovered 7 feet of rubble from the floor up and only a 2 1/2-foot void, or space, between the top of the rubble pile and the ceiling. A camera lowered into the hole showed that it was filling up with mud and water.
"It's very discouraging to hear what happened in the kitchen," said Colin King, a Salt Lake attorney hired by the families of the trapped miners. He said family members appear to be ready to take the next step of "saying goodbye" to their loved ones.
"I think we're coming to the end of the line," King said.
Denver-based U.S. Department of Labor public affairs director Rich Kulczewski said the plan now is to go back to the fourth borehole and try to lower a $50,000 robot outfitted with a camera into the mine. There's about a 90 percent chance, he noted, that the robot won't make it all the way and that it could be lost in the effort, which is supposed to be underway tonight and into Friday morning.
That was the same news Kulczewski gave family members at a 5 p.m. briefing at the Desert Edge Christian Chapel.
"On the whole, they were pretty quiet," he said about the families' reaction. "They're strong people — they've been through so much."
At least one family member asked about going into the seventh borehole with a pump to draw out the water and mud. "We said we would look into that," Kulczewski said about his response to the idea.
"We haven't given up," he added. "But we're running out of possibilities. We wanted to get results. We might be disappointed, but we're not deterred."
No member of any of the families, however, is saying they want an eighth or ninth hole, Kulczewski said. Everyone is trying to be patient over the next 24 hours before making more requests, he said. Sometime Friday it will be known whether anything was revealed through the fourth borehole.
A cousin of trapped miner Don Erickson volunteered to sign a waiver and be sent down into a hole to do his own search, but Kulczewski nixed that idea, saying it would take two weeks to drill a 30-inch hole and that it would be too risky. "That's something we can't allow to happen," he said.
Previously, the fourth borehole revealed a view of some large boulders and timbers, but it's not known yet if that hole still reaches all the way into the mine.
E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com