At City Hall, only two women were at work Monday, answering phones, making phone calls and handling the crisis, with country music playing in the background.

One of those women was Mayor Hilary Gordon, who, when a national media representative expressed surprise that a mayor would be answering a city phone, said, "Honey, I do whatever it takes. We're not people that stand on ceremony."

Gordon was in the middle of arranging a dinner for the family members who waited for more information in the town's senior center when she paused to talk matter-of-factly about the situation.

"Everyone gets really concerned," Gordon said. "But they do lots of training on this mine rescue stuff. They've got really, really good men up there."

Family members crowded around television sets in the community's senior center as they waited for more information about their loved ones.

Although the atmosphere was somber, family members coming and leaving from the center didn't show panic.

Guillermo Hernandez came to get information about his 23-year-old nephew, whom he hadn't heard from since his shift in the mine ended.

"I don't know, I think he's good," Hernandez said in Spanish. "I feel good, but I'm sad."

Fear is not a part of a mining community, Jones says, it can't be.

Faith and hope are the things that drive wives to support their husbands and believe that in the end, everyone will be OK.

"If you want to live in this great community, you're either in the coal mine or at the power plant, and you have to have faith that it's OK," Jones said. "We'll just do what we have to to make it work. We've been through disaster before. We pulled together then and we'll pull together again. And if it happens again, we'll pull together again."

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Contributing: Sara Israelsen

E-mail: achoate@desnews.com