UECREEK, Pa., Sunday, July 28 — Rescue workers broke through a coal-mine wall to nine trapped miners and found them all alive and well and aching to be rescued after three days of fighting for survival in a pocket of air in their flooded mine.
By 2:45 a.m. today, all the miners had been pulled out.
A wave of exultation swept out from the floodlit rescue scene in a farm field here as the first words resounded up from below with the news that all the missing miners had survived their ordeal 244 feet down in the 50-degree cold of the flood waters.
"All nine are alive — an incredible development," Gov. Mark Schweiker announced to cheers at 11:37 on Saturday night.
"They are eager to come up," the governor noted, beaming at being able to declare the success of a frantic and complicated three-day digging operation to sink an escape shaft and to pump compressed air down to hold back the waters and feed the miners oxygen.
"We believe that all nine are in pretty good shape," the governor said as rescuers looked ahead to several more hours of work to retrieve the men one by one in a rescue capsule.
The first miner was reported up and out within two hours of the news of the mine breakthrough. The miner, Randy Fogle, 43, had complained of chest pains and so was sent up first. He was quickly followed by a second miner, Harry B. Mayhugh, and then Mr. Mayhugh's father-in-law, Thomas Foy, with officials saying the rescue capsule generally made a round trip of 15 minutes.
Rescue officials said that one of the first comments from below was "We've been waiting for you."
People were weeping and cheering at village roadsides and television sets at the news that the disastrous flood deep underground had left no fatalities among the harried night crew that disappeared on Wednesday deep in the Quecreek mine.
The survivors' good health caused rescue officials to drop more elaborate plans and head directly to the two- to three-hour business of clearing the rescue shaft and escape basket to get the men up.
The first words of survival came soon after the mine ceiling was breached by the rescue drill. First, rescuers heard lively tapping on the pipe from below.
Then a communication device was lowered through a six-inch air pipe and actual words of greeting and thanks were heard from survivors below.
Cheers broke across the rescue scene.
Within minutes, the governor rushed off to indulge what he called "the never to be forgotten pleasure of leaving the drill site and spending time with the families."
The families of the trapped men had waited for word of the miners' fate in a nearby volunteer fire department hall, praying and cheering one another in the long wait for the rescue to succeed. The governor delivered the answer to their prayers.
The desperate rescue operation reached the miners after assorted mechanical setbacks and a long, excruciating period of silence from below since Thursday when the noise of rescue operations rendered fruitless any attempt at hearing tapped signals from the men.
"We have the right circumstances," Mr. Schweiker declared as rescue engineers poised to breach the mine ceiling on Saturday night. "We're there."
Critical to the engineers' success, the water level was finally lowered below the 244-foot level where the nine miners had been crouching in a four-foot-high coal seam since their mine was flooded.
Lowering the level minimized the risk of an explosive upward surge of water and air when the mine chamber was breached. It made the passage of the rescue capsule less risky, too.
"The families are eager," Governor Schweiker said as the rescue shaft neared the trapped men. "They have awaited this — what one called `crunch time.' "
With the men alive and well, rescuers sped up the final step of retrieving them, cutting an originally estimated hourlong round-trip by the capsule to 15 minutes. Each emerging miner, gleaming wet and grimy, was ordered by medical workers to lie down on a stretcher, even if he felt like dancing.
Once the rescue shaft was secure, workers had planned to send a load of food, water and medical supplies below and take some readings of the environment. But the health of the men and their eagerness to ascend had rescuers putting the capsule to far faster use as Mr. Fogle emerged.
Of all the critical turnings in the rescue operation's success, David Hess, the state secretary of environmental protection, singled out as a "one in a million shot" the sinking of a 6-inch air pipe to the mine to find the trapped men. The placement of the pipe was a matter of informed guesswork by mining engineers poring over maps, he said.
"Those guys could have been anywhere down there," said Mr. Hess.
The engineers picked a spot with a rising incline near the dig where the night crew had been working and when the drill broke through the miners' tapped a signal that all nine were alive and hoping for rescue.
Medical teams were waiting to deal with the medical problems that the survivors might face. Chief among them were hypothermia from the cold below, and the bends, the marine divers' blood disorder. But with the announcement of healthy survivors, officials scaled back their fears that the men might have been severely injured by the ordeal.
The other miners are Ronald Hileman; John Phillippi; Robert Pugh, 50; Mark Popernack, 41; John Unger, 52; and Dennis Hall, 49, Johnstown.
The underground trial of the miners began on Wednesday when their coal drilling machine unexpectedly broke open the abandoned mine, which had been thought to be remote enough from the Quecreek mine to pose no danger. Ground water runoff that had accumulated for decades in the older, higher mine broke into the Quecreek mine, and the men scrambled to find an air pocket.
The fleeing miners had time to radio a warning to a separate party of nine miners who managed to reach the surface despite rushing waters that knocked them off their tractors.
These survivors quickly plunged into the work at the rescue site and offered comfort and prayers at the Sipesville Volunteer Fire Department. There, more than 100 loved ones of the missing miners have been sequestered to hear hourly updates on the rescue operation's intermittent progress. They also received an e-mail message of encouragement from some of the families of the victims aboard United Flight 93, which crashed on Sept. 11 in Shanksville, 10 miles from here.
When the air pipe reached the trapped miners early Thursday, they offered a lively response, tapping on the drill nine times in the traditional miners' code enumerating survivors below. By Thursday afternoon no more taps could be heard amid the noise of the rescue work.
Anxiety about the men's fate was compounded after the drill bit snapped in the main rescue shaft on Friday morning, causing an 18-hour delay.
The flood that trapped the men was a reminder that after a century of mining, the state is honeycombed with abandoned shafts.
"I worked that old mine in the 50's," said Joe Jashienski, an 89-year-old retired union organizer who watched the rescue efforts from his house here on Schoolhouse Road. "And I remember the last day when it closed they had us working overtime to mine one last big stretch, digging out an extra-huge hole, a hell of a chamber that I'll bet never was put on anyone's maps."
Mr. Jashienski said this final excavation "left an underground room the size of a ball field" that only old-timers like himself knew was down there.
"I told one of the miners I know working in the new mine to be on the lookout for that old ball field," Mr. Jashienski said, convinced it contributed to the flooding of the year-old Quecreek mine.
The authorities said that the precise cause of the flood would be investigated. Safety regulations require 200 feet of solid rock to surround newly excavated mines, but officials noted that older mine maps often proved inexact.
"I don't know if my friend is down there and I don't want to inquire," said Mr. Jashienski, as fretful about mining in his retirement as he was in his younger days below Quecreek.