"We have suffered a setback," said Rob Moore, vice president of Murray Energy Corp., which owns the mine. "We have incurred an incredible loss, but this team remains focused on the task at hand — that's the rescue of the miners that have been trapped since Aug. 6. We will remain focused on that effort."

Mine owner Bob Murray was conspicuously absent from today's news conference. Moore said his boss had been in the mine since Thursday night's tragedy, rushing in during the initial collapse. However, when a heckler demanded to know where Murray was, Moore refused to say.

If the latest hole is able to detect signs of life from the six miners trapped underground, MSHA is making plans to drill a hole big enough to drop a rescue capsule inside and bring the men out through the mountain — a distance of nearly 2,000 feet.

The fourth hole was being drilled after geophones that measure vibrations picked up five minutes of "noise" on Wednesday.

Rescuers are downplaying the noise, which was detected when a drill punched a third hole into the cavern. Officials said it could have been animals, rocks falling or even thunder.

Yet they concede the noise was significant enough that they moved the fourth drill site to site of the origination of the noise. The noise registered as graphs on two geophones shortly after rescuers tried to signal the trapped miners.

"We saw spikes about every second and a half that lasts for about five or six minutes," Stickler said early Thursday.

No noise was detected on the geophones as of Thursday morning, he said.

One of the men killed — Dale Black — was desperately trying to reach his cousin, Kerry Allred, one of the trapped miners missing for 12 consecutive days.

"I've got a lot of respect for the love that he had for his family," lifelong friend, Kent Wilson, said today of Black.

"He was very passionate about getting in to save those miners. He only got two days off since they were trapped, and he went off and worked one of them," Wilson said.

He said Black had two children: a 17-year-old son and a grown daughter who lives in Tooele.

Azure Davis, a cousin to Dale Black, was one of a dozen people who attended a midnight vigil just down the street from Castleview Hospital in Price.

"It's really hard," she said. "My dad is crushed."

Despite the anguish that has lasted nearly two weeks of not knowing the fate of Allred and the other five and the fresh pain from Thursday's events, Azure Davis said the search should go on. Others were torn.

While finding the six would bring closure, Sonya Graff, another woman at the vigil, said the latest tragedy is as if "the earth is almost telling you you ain't going to get them."