The American Spectator

From what I have heard and read, someone on a cell phone with someone inside the command post overheard in the background the report “they’ve been found.” Somehow this got turned into “they found them all alive.” From there it was spread like wildfire, everyone that had a cell phone was on it to someone else. The original cell phone conversation (one between someone inside the command post and someone outside) was not an official notification. With the decreased contact with the rest of the world outside of the crisis response, yea, taking 20 minutes to hear that a rumor is out of control is rather quick actually. More often it’s from a higher level of command that tells the command post about it.

I have heard and read that it took sometimes like 42 minutes to get the one positive survivor out of there, and then send in more teams and wait….

The wait is endless, and it also can go quickly. Forty-two minutes out to confirm, it was only one still alive and we got him, (treat the person, transport out through a cramped, narrow, low cave like passage way with obstructions, in the dark and cold, with survival gear). (Hey it’s hard enough to carry a stretcher 60 feet on level ground while someone is getting medical treatment, I know, I’ve done it.) Then something like another 40 some minutes for a second team to go in, take or try to take vitals and to get out to tell the command post. Let’s round it so the math is easier, 45 + 45 (remember 60 = 1 hour), so two and a half hours of just “waiting,” and I am sure that it was at least a few minutes from the initial word that someone was found alive. That is where the whole three hour delay came from. The initial and unconfirmed report to the final count, before telling the families was NOT that long of a delay for those of us that do this (or have done this) for a living.

I have both read and heard that state police were dispatched to the church to make person to person contact with the pastor, to have the families waiting separated from the crowd and to start telling them, “all was not good” but there were more teams with medical folks going into the mine… As someone that has had that wonderful duty herself (make face-to-face contact, to prepare people for the real news) it is hard, very hard to find the “right” person and to start the process.

p>I am the grand-daughter of a coal miner that survived a similar type of mine explosion when he was only a teen; we had other family members that mined coal for decades. I have heard the stories second and third hand from my family growing up. I extend my condolences to the families of these miners. br> — Sandra Dent /p> p> OUR SO-CALLED ALLY br> Re: J. Peter Freire’s When the War Comes Calling : /p>

Regarding Herman Obermayer’s anthology of his letters as a young GI in the World War II ETO to his family, and reviewer J. Peter Freire’s admonition that “a sense of propriety would be the best example to follow,” it should be considered that Mr. Obermayer’s work is one of the final examples of Phase II of any historical reporting. If Phase I is during or after action reports, then Phase II is the more reasoned, less tending to propaganda, later testimony of living witnesses to the events. Natural mortality is rapidly closing the door on Phase II for the events of World War II, and soon leaving us with the final phase where all historians can do is sift the parchments of the past and hope to find either previously unpublished information or more likely attempt to improve how it has all been said one or more times before.