Quecreek: nine men, seventy-seven hours, and a map that was wrong

SOMERSET COUNTY, Pa. — At about 9 p.m. on July 24, 2002, a continuous mining machine cut into the wall of the abandoned Saxman mine at Quecreek No. 1 and let in a reservoir of water estimated at tens of millions of gallons. Nine miners were underground.

They ran for the high ground, and the water stopped rising a few feet short of where they stood. They had one lamp between them. They wrote notes for their families on a piece of mine paper and agreed on a simple rule that has been quoted ever since: all nine of us come out, or none of us do.

The maps the crew had been working from showed the old workings further away than they were. Nobody underground could have known that. Above ground, rescuers drilled a narrow hole into the pocket to send down air, then worked a shaft wide enough to lower a cage — through 240 feet of rock, in less than two days, with the men listening to the bit come closer.

At 2:45 a.m. on July 28, seventy-seven hours after the water came in, the capsule brought the first miner to the surface. The last one came up shortly after. All nine were alive.

The rescue was a triumph of drilling, and it was a rescue that should never have been necessary. Working from someone else's abandoned map is a normal day in a coal mine, and the maps are often old, incomplete or simply wrong. What Quecreek added to the field was urgency: mine maps are a safety document, and the working behind the wall is only as reliable as the record of it.

Operators who still work near abandoned workings know the drill. Verify the map, drill ahead, keep the water in the old works where it belongs. Nine men came home in 2002 because a few hundred people did not give up on a bad night.