RESCUE AT QUECREEK.(Quecreek coal mine disaster)

Shortly after 1:30 A.M. on Thursday, July 25th, a Somerset, Pennsylvania, dairy farmer named Bill Arnold and his wife, Lori, were startled from sleep by the insistent yelping of their dog, Pitch, who had fixed on some commotion outside. Arnold stepped to the bedroom window and looked out into the dark. In the distance, he saw two pickup trucks parked at the edge of his property, and, nearby, men with flashlights, who seemed to be probing his lower pasture. Arnold quickly dressed, grabbed a .45 automatic he kept in the house, and hurried outside. One of the men, spotting the gun in his hand, shouted, "Don't shoot, Billy!" Arnold recognized the man as Sean Isgan, a local engineer who had done some survey work around the Arnold farm. Randy Musser, also an engineer, and a competitor of Isgan's, was with him. Both men seemed agitated.

Isgan explained that there had been an accident at the Quecreek coal mine, just up the state road--a sudden, terrible flood. "Nine guys are missing."

If the missing miners were alive, they were trapped somewhere underground. Their last known location was a spot in the far corner of the mine, more than a mile from the entrance, which would put them two hundred and forty feet beneath the Arnold farm. Drilling was the only way to reach them, and that was what had brought the two engineers to the Arnolds' lower pasture--each man was running a survey to pinpoint the drilling target. They explained that the drilling might disturb some of the Arnolds' property. "Take down my house, if you have to," Arnold answered. Using his cell phone, he called his wife, who was watching from the kitchen with their daughter, Roann. "I can remember standing at the window and grabbing Roann's hand and saying, 'We've got to pray,' " Lori Arnold recalls. "I remember praying for God's mercy. And making coffee. I knew it would be a long night."

Arnold climbed into his backhoe and levelled a spot in the lower pasture where the drillers could set up. By 3:15 A.M., the first rig was drilling through the topsoil and into the rock below. The drill bit was a relatively small one, six and a half inches in diameter, but it was capable of quick work, and time was everything. The rescuers' first priority was to establish communication with the trapped men, by lowering a camera or a microphone down through the hole and into the mine.

By dawn, the Arnolds' six-acre lower pasture had become a crowded, frantic emergency scene. Scores of rescue workers commanded a vast tonnage of great machines--drill rigs and excavators, compressors and cranes--that continued to arrive through the day. As miners at other mines came off their shifts, they went to the Arnolds' farm and to Quecreek to join the effort, hopeful, but with a certain measure of dread. Mine disasters rarely end happily, and at Quecreek the odds strongly indicated a dire outcome.

The missing miners had apparently breached a wall into an adjacent mine, long abandoned, loosing an inundation of water that quickly filled their own mine to the point of overflow, and beyond. So much water poured in from the breach--tens of millions of gallons--that it came spilling out the mine's entrance, and it kept coming. When a coal-company employee at the rescue scene that first night asked Randy Musser for a professional assessment of the miners' chances, Musser was grimly candid. "From an engineering viewpoint, I'd have to say that none of them are alive," Musser said. "If any of them are alive, it's a miracle.''

Approached from the east by land, Somerset County comes into view suddenly, as you emerge from a long, straight tunnel cut through Allegheny Mountain on the old Pennsylvania Turnpike. The effect is of a particularly charming mountain scene in a diorama, a rolling landscape of pleasant farms and soft glades, painted in warm tones. The place is a visual surprise, given the economic dictates of its geology. Somerset is on the eastern edge of the Appalachian coal basin, and coal has been mined in the area for a century and a half. Many of the small communities in the county, places such as Gray, Wilbur, Jenner's Crossroads, and Hooversville, originated as mining towns, some of them wholly owned--from the tidy little homes to the local bank--by the mining company that was the town's sole employer. As recently as the mid-nineteen-sixties, nearly half the people in the county had at least one family member working in the mines or in the steel mills that the coal mines fed, in nearby Johnstown and Pittsburgh. Even those who didn't work in the mines or the mills often mined coal for themselves, digging "dog mines" by the barn, or even in the cellar, for their winter fuel supply.