New hope for US miners after noise pattern heard in mine

Aug 16, 2007, 3:07 GMT

Washington - Ten days after a collapse trapped six miners in Utah, the coal mine owner Wednesday said a regular noise pattern had been heard from deep inside the mine, possibly a signal from survivors.

But Robert Murray cautioned against getting hopes up too high, although he is convinced that from a technical standpoint, the six miners should still be alive.

The noise was heard after a third listening and video cable hole was drilled into the mine at a new location. Work on the hole took three days.

The sounds were in a pattern of five minutes long and each sound was a second and a half apart, he said in broadcast remarks.

Mine officials warned however that the sound could also be echoing surface noise, or rock shifts from within the mountain.

The video showed an empty, undisturbed cavern, with no cave ins, giving further hope to Murray that the miners would be found alive.

A fourth hole would be started on Thursday to reach yet another mine cavern where officials believe they may have fled.

Rescue teams - made up of 134 miners - continue digging through a collapsed tunnel toward the trapped miners, who are believed to have been 6.5 kilometres from the entrance to the vast mine at the time of Monday's accident near Huntington, Utah, in the Rocky Mountains.

Progress in that effort remained frustratingly slow, with concerns about low oxygen in the air.

For each hole drilled, new roads have had to be built to move the drilling equipment.

Murray insists that an earthquake was the cause of the mine collapse on August 6, but geologists believe that their seismological equipment picked up the massive collapse of the tunnel itself, which was then registered as ground motion.