I Guess the Local Fishwrap
…didn’t get the real news in time.
“We have an 11 year old son, and I couldn’t go home and tell him, ‘Daddy wasn’t coming home.'”
How horrible. Tim is all over this. I knew they’d found the first poor fellow dead as we went to bed last night and imagined a grim ending, but hoped for a far better one.
This is far worse.
UPDATE: Our ‘small town’ paper gets it’s info from way out in space and prints it early, so it’s not their bust. It seems badly handled all around.
At least two family members in the church said they received cell phone calls from a mine foreman saying the men were alive.
Officials knew of the miscommunication after about 20 minutes, Hatfield added, but didn’t talk to the families for nearly three hours because they wanted to confirm the status of the victims and prevent another round of confusion.
“Let’s put this in perspective. Who do I tell not to celebrate? I didn’t know if there were 12 or 1 (who were alive),” Hatfield said.
When Hatfield appeared before the families, he said “there had been a lack of communication, that what we were told was wrong and that only one survived,” according to John Groves, whose brother Jerry Groves was one of the trapped miners.
“There was no apology. There was no nothing. It was immediately out the door,” said Nick Helms, son of another victim, Terry Helms.
Well, hey numbnut$, if you knew after twenty minutes the info was wrong, you throw the B$ flag, howEVER painful it might be.
People | Mr. Bingley | 
January 4, 2006 8:36 am
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I heard a little about it this morning. It sounds like some “civilians” overheard cell phone conversations among the rescue workers and got the story wrong. How horrible to get people’s hopes up.
BTW, my grandma’s family left the WV coal mines for Oregon just a few years before she was born (some of her sibs were born in WV)
That is a hard, scary way to make a living. I’ve always had the greatest admiration for those folks. I sure as hell couldn’t do it ~ my genetic make-up is lacking the significant doses of intestinal fortitude required.
From what I just read, they overheard a ‘we found all twelve‘ and ignored the ‘and we’re checking for vital signs‘.
There’s no way I’d go down in those mines.
Aw, hell. I heard the late reports and went to bed happy. Pace en requiem.