Utah rescue "has not gone well"

HUNTINGTON, Utah (Reuters) - Rescuers searching for trapped coal miners plan to bore a third hole into a collapsed Utah mine after another attempt to locate them with a camera failed, officials said on Sunday.

Miners burrowing out an escape route big enough for a person had to temporarily abandon their efforts twice over night as seismic "bumps" shook the new horizontal tunnel.

"Underground, it has not gone well," mine co-owner Robert Murray told a news conference. "They are the most difficult conditions that I have ever seen in my 50 years of mining."

Many milestones in the weeklong rescue operation have taken longer than expected, and rescuers have stopped making projections about when the holes being drilled into the rock would reach their goals.

Families of the six miners were shown dark sketchy images on Sunday morning from a camera lowered a second time into the mine, Huntington City Councilwoman Julie Jones told Reuters.

"You couldn't see much. Water was trickling in there. It was dark," she said. "They couldn't see any bodies."

Mine Safety and Health Administration chief Richard Stickler told the news conference that there were some signs of miners, including an unidentified miner's tool bag, a conveyor belt and reflectors.

However, the images taken about 1,800 feet, or about a third of mile, below the surface, showed no farther than about 15 feet. He said rescuers would try to look again with more light.

The miners have not been heard from since Monday, when part of the Crandall Canyon Mine near Huntington, Utah, collapsed.

The first two holes drilled into the mine have failed to produce any signs of life, although the second area where the camera penetrated had "survivable space," officials have said.

Preparations for the third bore hole will be complete late on Sunday. The drill must grind through 1,414 feet (430 metre) of earth to an area where miners may have retreated when they found no exit, or if conditions deteriorated.

"This hole is on a diagonal in the direction we think the miners would have gone if their air had gotten bad," Murray said.

The third hole will have a nearly 9-inch (23-cm) diameter, which is big enough for an exploratory camera, food and water to pass into the cavern.

Rescue workers look tired but determined as they laid out their next set of priorities. Murray strongly denied that the mine had been unsafe.

"It was a perfectly safe mining plan. We've had a once-in-a-lifetime disaster here," he said. Murray has maintained that seismic activity triggered the collapse, although a National Earthquake Information Center scientist has said preliminary evidence suggest the collapse itself caused the earth movement.

Stickler said he knew of one instance of a trapped miner lasting 11 days, and Murray told Reuters there were still plenty of ways they could survive.

"I'm very hopeful. I truly am. There are many scenarios by which they may still be alive," he said.