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Deb and I sat last night watching the sad news of the terrible tragedy at Va. Tech and felt so bad for all the families that senselessly lost their loved ones. We live in a world where we really do not know if it is our last day even if we are young people.
As we watched the T.V. , another announcement came on that a coal mining shovel and a dozer were working in Barton, Maryland yesterday when a 60 x 300 foot section of high wall collapsed and buried the big shovel and the dozer and trapping the operators inside. Tri-Star Mining is where we went on a tour with John Cook and got to climb all over several monster machines. John was very nice to us and we will never forget that day. It was awesome . This is one of many pictures we took that day with John as he made us feel like one of the family. We do not know yet if it is John in his shovel or not. There is a second shovel in the mine and they were digging their way towards each and John said it would take a few years before they would meet in the middle. If John’s shovel was not the one in the accident , he has got to be busy trying to dig out his friends on their machines. It’s just hard to believe this could happen to such large machines. If you look at the three pictures below this one you can see how the machines are located in the mine. You can see on the left side of this picture , some of the high wall section. The day we were down in the pit , Deb was very nervous that the cliffs above us could cave in. It’s hard to believe that actually did happen. They say that the area was recently saturated with heavy rains. We will continue to pray for John and his co-workers. There are three video clips of John’s big shovel and us climbing on it and you can see it is not a small machine.
