Sunday, April 30, 2006
RESCUE LATEST
It may still be two days before miners Todd Russell and Brant Webb are brought to the surface; maybe less. Mining expert Amal Battacharya:
When they excavate, they’ve got to support the rock as they go along, otherwise other people will be in danger. So they are driving in a new tunnel hopefully, in somewhat, shall we say, stable rock.
And these 12 metres that they’re getting into, I don’t know again what is the situation there, but they’re getting probably to the zone of broken rock, and they’ll have to take extreme care so that other tonnes of rocks don’t come down on the other people.
By Battacharya’s estimate, those final tricky metres could be covered within 24 hours. Meanwhile, Kim Beazley is scoring political points. For shame! Have you no decency sir? Etc.
UPDATE. Naomi, one of the vertical carp over at Mark Bahnisch’s learning-to-write collective, blames company orders:
… this miracle can’t distract us from the reality of this disaster. These men were going about their daily work, under orders from a company that was pushing the geological envelope to make a buck.