Aug 8, 2007, 1:27 GMT
Washington - Rescuers will need at least one week to reach six miners trapped underground after a cave-in in a mine tunnel in the western US state of Utah, the mine's owner said Tuesday.
All attempts to reach them so far have been unsuccessful and it is still not known whether the six are dead or alive.
A fresh drilling effort to reach them Tuesday ended in failure. Robert Murray, whose company Murray Energy Corp owns the mine's operator Utah American Energy Inc, said that earthquake aftershocks 'totally shut down our rescue efforts underground.'
'We are back to square one underground,' Murray said in a televised press conference. 'There is absolutely no way that we can reach the vicinity of the trapped miners for at least one week.'
Murray had earlier said it would take three days to break through to the location of the miners, who have been trapped in the collapsed tunnel about 457 metres below ground since Monday.
But he added that if the miners survived the initial collapse, 'there is plenty of air in there for them to survive for weeks and there is water.'
Little is known of the six miners, except that three of them are Mexican nationals.
Rescuers had been drilling from several directions throughout the night and day Tuesday, but were not able to make substantial progress as dangerous conditions, including falling rock, forced teams to retreat.
'Progress has been too slow,' Murray said. 'The families are doing fine, considering the circumstances.'
He stood by early reports that the collapse had been caused by a small 4.0 earthquake and blasted scientists who insisted that the seismic tremors captured by local sensors were indications of the mine collapse.
He also lashed out at news reports that said mining methods may have been at fault for the collapse.
'This is the first major accident we have had and this was caused by an earthquake and not something that Murray Energy did,' he said. 'It was a natural disaster.'
But Harley Benz, of the National Earthquake Information Centre disagreed.
'Our signals show that it was a mine collapse and was not consistent with a naturally occurring earthquake,' he told broadcaster CNN.
Southeastern Utah has a history of past mine disasters. In 2000, two men died during an explosion at the Willow Creek mine; in 1984, a fire in the Wilberg mine killed 27; a 1924 explosion took 172 lives at the Castle Gate mine, and the Scofield mine disaster of 1900 claimed 200.
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