Free Republic

NEWS ALERT Sago Mine disaster survivor Randal McCloy Jr. "awakening from coma," doctor says

Families of the Sago miners, Governor Manchin, Mrs. Manchin, Senator Byrd, Senator Rockefeller, West Virginians, friends, neighbors, all who have come here today to remember those brave men who have gone on before us, who ventured into the darkness but instead showed us the light, a light that shines on all West Virginians and the nation today: It is a great honor to be here. I am accompanied by three men I grew up with, the rocket boys of Coalwood: Roy Lee Cooke, Jimmie O'Dell Carroll, and Billy Rose. My wife Linda, an Alabama girl, is here with me as...

"In the sweet bye and bye, we shall meet on that beautiful shore." I last heard that old hymn at my father's funeral and thought I had made my peace at last with the specter of death that had haunted my childhood. I thought so until Monday, Jan. 3, when a coal mine exploded in West Virginia, and in my heart. Suddenly, I was 8 years old, a third-grader in the six-room schoolhouse

BUCKHANNON, WV - A memorial service is planned for this afternoon to honor the 12 miners who lost their lives in the Sago Mine accident earlier this month. The service will be held at 2:00 pm Sunday at the Chapel on the West Virginia Wesleyan Campus in Buckhannon. The chapel doors will open at 12:30 p.m. Officials say the chapel itself can hold about 1,800 people and the city is estimating 3,000 will attend. After the chapel fills, others will be seated in the school's gym. Governor Joe Manchin and Senators Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller also plan to attend....

(KDKA/AP) MORGANTOWN Doctors today delivered some discouraging news about the sole survivor from the tragic accident at the sago mine in West Virginia. They say Randal McCloy Jr. did suffer some brain damage from his 42 hours being trapped in the Sago Mine. From brain scans, the carbon monoxide seems to have injured the cable system deep in the brain, called the white matter. KDKA’s Medical Correspondent Dr. Maria Simbra says this area connects brain cells together. The coating of these nerves has been damaged. Dr. Simbra says the nerve coating are like the outside of an electric cord. If...

PITTSBURGH — The critically injured sole survivor of the West Virginia coal mine explosion showed dramatic improvement Saturday and was stable enough that he was flown back to a hospital closer to his home, doctors said. Randal McCloy Jr. has been in a medically induced coma to allow his brain time to heal, but when the medication is eased, his eyes flicker and he bites down on his breathing tube, showing he is "awake underneath our coma," said Dr. Richard Shannon of Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. "We think that he is clinically stable," Shannon said Saturday afternoon. "He is...

"Notes left by some of the miners suggested they may have succumbed to carbon-monoxide poisoning - and died peacefully in their sleep. The father of sole survivor Randal McCloy, 26, told the Associated Press that though he has no evidence, he believes his son survived because the other miners shared the last of their oxygen with him. He believes they did so because McCloy was the youngest and has two small children."

A US coalminer left a detailed note showing that he and other trapped workers were alive at least 10 hours after an underground explosion, a family member said. The daughter of 61-year-old Jim Bennett, who was a shuttle car operator in the West Virginia mine, said the note has three or four entries, the first coming on Monday at 11.40am and the last, in words that trailed off the page, at 4.25pm, nearly 10 hours after the blast. "Each time he documented, you could tell it was getting worse," Ann Merideth told The Associated Press. "Later on down the note...

SAGO, W. Va. - It is perhaps the most heartbreaking question raised by a heartbreaking accident: Did 12 miners die deep inside the Sago Mine because instead of trying to walk to safety after an explosion, they went by the book and waited for help that took too long to arrive? They apparently had enough oxygen in their respirators to last an hour or more and no wall of debris blocked their escape, mine company officials said. They could not have known it, but less than 2,000 feet away was breathable air. Cut off from communications with the outside, surrounded...

Coal mine production reached the highest levels in history in recent years. In 2004 coal mining fatalities were near the lowest level in history with 28. Even with the recent high production, MSHA’s accident reduction efforts helped to keep the annual fatality totals nearly 50% lower in recent years compared with totals recorded in the early 1990s. 1. Clinton’s last year in office, 2000, there were 48 deaths in coal mines. In 2004, there were 28 2. The injury rate in 2000 was 6.64, in 2004 it was 5.00 3. Citations for safety violations in 2000: 58,285; Citations for violations...

NEW YORK As newspapers conduct damage control after early Wednesday's error, in which most wrongly reported that 12 trapped miners had been rescued in West Virginia, many editors are defending their mistake by saying they were misled by various sources, including the state's governor. Yet, even after extensive follow-up coverage today, serious questions about the sourcing, and its use, remain. "AP was reporting accurately the information that we were provided by credible sources -- family members and the governor," AP managing editor Mike Silverman has said. "The mistake was not ours, it was the authorities at the scene," Leonard Downie...

This letter released by the Toler family on Thursday was written by Martin Toler Jr., who died with 11 other miners in the Sago mine. The note was given to Martin's brother, Tom Toler, by the coroner. It reads "Tell all I see them on the other side JR I love you It wasn't bad just went to sleep." (Courtesy of the Toler Family / AP) BUCKHANNON, W. Va (Reuters) - A letter scrawled by one of the 12 miners who died after an explosion trapped them in a West Virginia coal mine offered some comfort to relatives on...

TALLMANSVILLE, W.Va. - Some of the 12 coal miners who died following an explosion left notes behind assuring family members that their final hours trapped underground were not spent in agony, a relative said Thursday.

BUCKHANNON, W. Va., Jan 5 (Reuters) - The sole survivor of a mine disaster that killed 12 men lay in a coma on Thursday as residents of the tight-knit West Virginia community struggled to understand the latest tragedy in the history of this dangerous profession. But doctors feared that Randal McCloy, the only survivor among 13 miners trapped underground for 42 hours after an explosion on Monday morning at the Sago mine in Tallmansville, could suffer some brain damage as a result of his ordeal. Though mining disasters are nothing new, this one was made more poignant by the fact...

Of course the Left blames George W. Bush for the deaths this week of a dozen coal miners. Tom Blumer at BizzyBlog cites the New York Times edit page's usual Bush-bashing innuendo: ...the Bush administration’s cramming of important posts in the Department of the Interior with biased operatives from the coal, oil and gas industry is not reassuring about general safety in the mines. Steven Griles, a mining lobbyist before being appointed deputy secretary of the interior, devoted four years to rolling back mine regulations and then went back to lobbying for the industry. Blumer then points out what the...

The heartbreaking story of the 12 miners who died in a West Virginia mine collapse on Monday, January 2, is now common knowledge. The lone survivor remains in the hospital in critical condition. But if viewers were tuned into CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees on Tuesday night, they were in for a surprise. Anderson was on the scene when he breathlessly delivered the breaking news that 12 out of 13 miners had in fact survived the accident. The chances of these men surviving for days on end without oxygen were nil, but sometimes audiences want to believe in miracles. The...

Posted on Thu, Jan. 05, 2006 Sago Mine Tragedy Editorial | Jubilation, then despair Some quotes from today's editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer: As the nation mourns with them, the mine's owner, along with state and federal officials, need to take responsibility for what went wrong. Officials from the International Coal Group must bear the anger of families who needlessly went for three hours believing a false report that their loved ones had survived. It's understandable that the air was thick with rumors and garbled information as tired rescuers toiled to find the 13 men (one survived) who were trapped...

NEW YORK In one of the most disturbing and disgraceful media performances of this type in recent years, television and newspapers carried the tragically wrong news late Tuesday and early Wednesday that 12 of 13 trapped coal miners in West Virginia had been found alive and safe. Hours later they had to reverse course, often blaming the mix-up on "miscommunication." For hours, starting just before midnight, newspaper reporters and anchors such as Rita Crosby interviewed euphoric loved ones and helped spread the news about the miracle rescue. Newspaper Web sites announced the happy news and many put it into print...

I'm send ing an angry e-mail to Fox News this morning. I've been up exactly an hour and a half and I have seen Geraldo Rivera and the families of the dead coal miners in West Virginia three times already. It is a tragedy that these poor people had been wrongly informed that their loved ones survived, only to have their balloons popped three hours later with the news that the original information was incorrect. It's simply disgusting and exploitative that Geraldo has been on three times this morning accomapanied by tape of joyous people, who we all know are...

DrudgeReport exposes them.... http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/04/national/04mine.html