Reader comments
MSHA is praised for its efforts at Crandall

The role of the federal government and MSHA in their background efforts to rescue trapped miners needs to be questioned. When there is a traffic accident, when people are lost in the mountains, when Katrina devastated New Orleans (the lack of federal response was severely missed), when airplanes crash, when there is a crime committed, it is the government who has had experience in emergency response that often responds and pays for the attempt to safe lives and collect evidence, not a private business or corporation or individual. It's possible that the government would submit a bill to such private sector entities in some cases for the government's efforts. Thus MSHA instead of being praised for such a difficult balancing act, allowing the private sector along with the conflicts of interest in both honoring its commitment to human life as well as having to worry about the bottomline in terms of money and investment, needs to be severely questioned about its willingness to place human life at risk instead of taking a lead role in the saving of life. With the federal government's access to high technological search and rescue equipment, it will always be a big question mark if instead from the very beginning, the federal government had taken the lead and brought in robotic probes and sophisticated Homeland Security, classified devices to search and rescue the trapped miners what might have happened.

"...Utah mines will produce 24.5 tons of coal in 2007..."? Is this some kind of a typo or is this actually all that Utah's coal industry is worth?