Revisiting a Utah mining disaster: Decisions above ground and death below

On Aug. 6, 2007, a seismic “bounce” inside the Crandall Canyon Mine in central Utah caused a collapse that trapped six miners who had just finished their shift underground.

On Aug. 16, 2007, three rescuers died and six others were injured when another bounce inside the mine buried the men in coal and debris.

On Aug. 19, 2007, Sonny Olsen’s phone rang.

A recent law school grad, Olsen moved back to his tiny hometown of Cleveland, Utah, to raise a family, practice law, coach basketball and live a rural lifestyle. On that particular day, he had just returned from a family camping trip. They were putting away the gear. He was mowing the lawn. It was a Sunday afternoon.

The caller, Olsen’s brother-in-law, told him with urgency but no explanation to get to the Desert Edge Chapel, a Christian church in nearby Huntington. Like everyone else in town, the state, the country and much of the world actually, Olsen was following the agonizing on-again, off-again efforts to rescue the miners.

The son of a mine safety man who helped carry bodies out of the Wilberg Mine in nearby Orangeville after a devastating fire killed 27 miners and company officials in 1984, Olsen was all too familiar with that kind of tragedy. An elementary schoolmate lost her dad in Wilberg. It was the only time he saw his tough, Vietnam Marine vet, coal miner father cry.

But he didn’t know why he was being summoned to the church.

Like a character in a John Grisham novel, the young lawyer found himself thrust into an unexpected role that would change his life. Years later, he would capture those moments in a pair of book manuscripts.

Standing up for the families

The pews were full when Olsen walked into the church. Angry families of the trapped miners felt trapped themselves in a swirl of conflicting messages about the fate of their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers. For nearly two weeks, they absorbed the bluster of Bob Murray, the bombastic CEO of the mine’s owner Murray Energy, vowing to get the miners out “dead or alive.” They heard the cautious words of Richard Stickler, the acting assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health, about rescuer safety and unstable conditions.

Family members pressed hastily scrawled notes in Spanish and English into Olsen’s palm, the tone of each very different. Some were angry, made demands or were accusatory. Yet, they wanted a unified statement for a press conference that was just minutes away.

Olsen was being conscripted to deliver it. He was an attorney, after all. More importantly, he was Chuck Olsen’s boy. Chuck Olsen died 20 years earlier. Olsen called his mother for advice.

“Do what your dad would do,” she told him. “Do anything you can to get those miners out of there.”

Olsen, Pastor Carl Sitterud and Emery County Sheriff Lamar Guymon found a room to craft a statement representing the families. A short time later, Olsen faced more than two dozen cameras and microphones stretched across a folding table in an ATV store parking lot. Several dozen of the miners’ relatives gathered behind him. The wind rustled the notes out of his hand. He spoke from memory.

“The families have waited — patiently, deliberately — through every briefing and delay without lashing out. They have absorbed information, assessed risk and remained steadfast," he said in part.

“Every feasible effort must be examined and respected. Rescuer safety remains paramount. Honoring the lives of those already lost means refusing to pretend the effort is finished if it is not. No option should be dismissed prematurely. Effort and safety are not opposites — they are variables to balance transparently. This is our request: clarity. Families deserve truth and transparency about every step.”

In that instant, he became the official spokesman for some of the families. He spent the next 18 months immersed in the aftermath of the Crandall Canyon Mine collapse. He was in the room from that first press conference through the settlement of lawsuits family members filed against the mining company.

“The system labeled me. I didn’t label myself. I was just a young attorney in a small town. I just wanted to coach baseball, basketball and live the country life,” Olsen said.

“All of a sudden I’m thrust into this national spotlight, international spotlight. A year later, we’re mediating the case. So I got to watch the whole thing play out.”

Six miners — Kerry Allred, Luis Hernandez, Carlos Payan, Don Erickson, Manuel Sanchez and Brandon Phillips — died in the initial collapse. Their bodies remain entombed in the mine. Rescuers Gary Jensen, Brandon Kimber and Dale Black died in a second collapse 10 days later. Another team of rescuers retrieved the buried men.

Other than Allred, who he’d run into at the local gas station, Olsen didn’t really know any of the miners or rescuers.

“Families spoke to me because they needed their questions translated into language officials could hear. Officials spoke to me because they needed a human bridge back to the families waiting outside the gates. My role was not to influence outcomes, but to hold the record steady while decisions were being made,” Olsen said.

Failure isn’t a moment but a process

Olsen noticed people in the small town started looking at him sideways after seeing him on TV. Some called him an ambulance chaser. Older folks, he said, glared because they thought he was overly critical of mining and that it would hurt the community. He received a death threat two days into his unsolicited role as the families’ spokesman. The sheriff sent officers to patrol near his house.

“That was hard on my family,” Olsen said.

Still, he said, he has no regrets.

“I wanted to step up to that mike and I wanted to say things about mine operators and greed and pulling pillars and it was the ultimate form of restraint not to do so, which is the basis for my books,” Olsen said.

Over the past two years, Olsen, 51, has relived that time, producing two manuscripts titled, “Entombed” and “Bite the Bullet.” He relied on his own observations and pored through press briefings, news reports, transcripts, engineering reports, testimony and congressional hearings. He’s hoping to turn the books into a television docuseries.

One thing he learned in his research is that decisions made “far, far away” impact what happens on the ground long before anyone calls it a failure. This tragedy could have been prevented, he said.

For the Crandall Canyon families waiting above ground, he said, the crisis unfolded hour by hour without clarity, while many of the decisions shaping the outcome were already being made out of view.

“Entombed,” Olsen said, isn’t a “disaster memoir” or “disaster porn.” There are no villains and there are no heroes. Murray, the mine owner, and Stickler, the MSHA administrator, did the best they could, he said.

“The record doesn’t show a single bad decision. It shows a sequence,” he said.

Failure, he said, isn’t a moment but a process.

“The public saw a collapse. The system had been moving in that direction much longer,” he said. “By the time something becomes visible, the direction has usually already been set.”

No place to retreat

Retreat mining like that practiced in Crandall Canyon is extremely dangerous.

It is the final stage of a room-and-pillar operation where miners extract the massive columns of coal left behind to support the mine’s roof. Working backward from the deep recesses of the mine toward the entrance, crews systematically remove the pillars, intentionally allowing the ceiling to collapse.

While it maximizes the taking of coal that would otherwise be lost, it is exceptionally hazardous due to the immense geological pressure and the heightened risk of an unpredictable cave-in. A bounce or bump occurs when overstressed coal pillars suddenly fail, violently expelling coal into the mine openings.

A bounce recorded in the mine that occurred months before the collapse was not ignored but noted, Olsen said. It was monitored and conditions were watched but no operational changes were made.

“That is how many disasters begin — not with a cartoon villain, not with one obviously reckless act, and not even with a lie. They begin when a warning enters a system and is translated into language the system can live with," he wrote in a Deseret News op-ed.

The Crandall Canyon tragedy, Olsen said, is not an isolated mining accident, but a case study in how early warnings, operational pressure, institutional language and public consequence interact over time. The collapse led to federal investigations, congressional hearings and reached the president’s desk.

Comparable dynamics appear today in aviation, infrastructure and power grids, he said.

“It is a reminder that events in rural Utah can carry national consequence, that decisions made locally can escalate quickly to the highest levels of government and media, and that the systems behind those decisions matter far beyond state lines,” according to Olsen.

Systems, he said, rarely fail because they miss signals. Gaps in the system become normalized and deemed manageable, he said. “Things get normalized, people die.”

After the mine collapse

MSHA concluded in a 176-page report released in July 2008 that a bounce on Aug. 6, 2007 resulted in a magnitude 3.9 mining-related seismic event. It attributed the collapse to “inadequacies in the mine design, faulty pillar recovery methods and failure to adequately revise mining plans following coal burst accidents.”

According to the report, “Within seconds, pillars failed over a distance of approximately ½-mile, expelling coal into the mine openings. The six miners working on the section likely received fatal injuries from the ejected coal as it violently filled the entries.”

The mine’s owner had insisted that earth movement detected at the time of the collapse had caused the disaster. The report proved otherwise.

“The Aug. 6 collapse was not a ‘natural’ earthquake, but rather was caused by a flawed mine design ... a finite element analysis of the mining plan indicated a decidedly unsafe, unstable situation in the making even without pillar recovery,” according to the report.

Ten days later, coal pillar burst occurred when the pillar between two entryways failed adjacent to the rescue workers. Coal ejected from the pillar dislodged steel roof supports, steel cables and chain-link fence, which struck the rescue workers and filled the entry with four feet of debris, according to the report.

The Department of Labor also found that MSHA authorized retreat mining practices in the mine, but acted on incomplete and faulty information, and failed to fully meet its responsibility by approving the roof control plans in the mine.

In 2012, MSHA and mine operator Genwal Resources and Andalex Resources, subsidiaries of Murray Energy, agreed the company would pay a $1.1 million fine for four contributory and three flagrant violations. A year later, mining consultant Agapito Associates agreed to a $100,000 fine for a high negligence violation for its role in the mine collapse.

Civil lawsuits the miners’ families filed against the mine owner and its affiliates were settled in 2009.

Following months of negotiations, all of the parties reached an undisclosed agreement. But lawyers for the families said it exceeded the more than $20 million paid to families of 27 miners killed in the Wilberg Mine fire.

On sacred ground

Though he didn’t represent families in the litigation, Olsen was in the hotel where they were sequestered for the negotiations. He recalled being in a big room and an attorney for the mining operators walking in with a settlement offer and then walking out. Back and forth it went for days, he said.

“I’m sitting there taking notes and just observing. And (the attorney) would walk back day after day with the same sheet of notes until they came to a number. Everybody agreed on it and that was the number,” Olsen said.

Over those 18 months, Olsen became a staunch advocate for the families, heeding his mother’s advice to do whatever he could to get the miners out, famously telling reporters at one point, “We want our family members returned to us alive and, heaven forbid, dead. Don’t let them leave them in the mine.”

Sadly, that’s what happened.

Federal officials called off the search on Sept. 1, 2007, after nearly four weeks of failed attempts to reach the trapped miners. Federal regulators revealed in November of that year that Murray Energy had sealed three main passageways with concrete blocks, leaving the bodies entombed.

President George W. Bush issued a statement that day.

“The people of the central Utah mining community have inspired us all with their incredible strength and courage in the face of tremendous loss. Last night a difficult decision was made to end the search. Laura and I are deeply saddened by this tragedy and continue to pray for the families of these men,” it read in part.

Coal miners’ families found Murray’s description of Crandall Canyon as an “evil mountain” galling.

To them it was the antithesis of evil. It was their lifeblood. It’s where they camped and hiked and hunted and fished.

“It had provided life and challenge alike. It fed the economy through coal that heated homes and powered cities. It cast long shadows at dawn and dusk that spoke to endurance rather than menace. It held trails, streams, quiet places to sit,” Olsen wrote.

And now the mountain is the place where their loved ones are buried.

A trail near the entrance of the mine leads to a paved area which serves as a memorial for the nine men killed: six granite headstones for the miners whose bodies were never recovered and three granite benches for the rescuers who lost their lives trying to reach them.

“You are now entering sacred ground, dedicated to the men who died in the Crandall Canyon Mine disaster of Aug. 6, 2007, and who remain forever buried in this mountain.

“Walk with respect, reflect in grace.”

Epilogue

Olsen doesn’t live in Emery County anymore nor does he practice law. But he returns several times a year to visit family and friends, hike, fish or look for Native American artifacts. He’ll stop at the memorial on those visits. Sometimes he’ll leave a baseball or a coin or an arrowhead shard — things he said the miners liked. His biggest hope is that they are never forgotten.

Labeling the mountain “evil” as Murray did still bothers him.

“The irony of Murray’s characterization never left me: a place of layered beauty and danger reduced, in a national soundbite, to something singular and absolute,” Olsen wrote.

“What had been sealed was not just a mine, but a chapter of human aspiration and loss. Concrete blocks closed passageways. Regulations closed files. Records were bound and shelved. Hazard became history — but not distant or cold."

“The mountain remained what it had always been: a convergence of labor and risk, beauty and consequence, courage and miscalculation — enduring, unjudging and still,” Olsen continued.

“The mountain did not speak again. But the record did. What remained was not rescue or recovery, but memory — and what the living chose to do with it."