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"It was like having your brights on in a fog," he said Tuesday, recalling the Aug. 6 collapse in the Crandall Canyon mine that trapped six men. "I almost turned right back around to go in there, but then I figured, better not go into a bad situation by myself."
Ward, a 24-year-old mechanic, said he was about a quarter-mile from the trapped men when he heard the thunderous collapse. The force was unlike anything he'd experienced before, the rushing air nearly pushing his pickup truck sideways, he said.
"This was like a whistling air, lots and lots gushing toward you," he said in his first detailed interview since the cave-in. "I went nose down and just heard it howl, thinking, `What the hell was that?'"
He drove toward the mine entrance, soon rendezvousing with three others. They alerted mine officials to a problem and headed back inside with rescue equipment, he said.
"I think I did everything I could," said Ward, who has three years of experience. "I just hope everybody's OK, honestly, that's all I can do."
On Wednesday, nine days later, the search for the missing men plodded forward, with mine officials hoping to break through a third bore hole that, with the help of a video camera, might finally yield some evidence of the men. Drilling started on the 1,415-foot-deep hole late Monday.
The latest hole is about 1,300 feet west of a second hole drilled late last week. Ghostly video images from that cavern showed piles of rubble, including fallen coal and abandoned equipment.
Meanwhile, frustrations mounted over the slow pace of the digging and more questions arose over whether the company had engaged in risky mining methods that may have left parts of the mine dangerously unstable.
Some mining companies consider the "retreat mining" methods used at Crandall Canyon so dangerous they will leave behind coal rather than risk the safety of their workers.
Video images taken early Tuesday showed miners working to clear a heavily damaged mine shaft. They were only a third of the way to the presumed location of the trapped miners.
A mining executive estimated the digging would take up to another week.
"It's not fast enough for me," said Bob Murray, chief of Murray Energy Corp., co-owner and operator of the Crandall Canyon mine. "It's very painful."
Miners had advanced another 50 feet in the rubble-filled tunnel by Tuesday evening but still have more than 1,200 feet to go, Murray said.
The slow pace is especially painful for Ward, who usually works with the trapped miners but was called away shortly before the collapse to fix a truck.
"We don't want to lose 15 more going after six," he said. "But there has to be a way to go faster. It's just too slow."
Around the clock, shifts of 80 miners are digging and helping to remove the rubble. Much of their time is spent shoring up walls and ceilings before a 65-ton machine can safely resume clawing away at the rubble-filled mine shaft.
"We're doing the very best we can as fast as we can," said Richard Stickler, head of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. "You couldn't get another person into that working area."
The mine may have been made more dangerous by what Murray acknowledged was decades of digging using retreat mining, a common though sometimes dangerous method in which miners yank out a mine's pillars, grabbing the last of the coal.
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 Murray said the retreat mining took place before he took over the mine a year ago. He said no retreat mining was taking place at the time of the collapse, which he insists was triggered by an earthquake.
Government seismologists say there was no earthquake and that readings on seismometers actually came from the collapse.
Mine-safety experts say two sections of the Crandall Canyon Mine that collapsed in March may have been an early warning sign. They questioned whether the company
-- and the government agency that oversees its work -- should have closed the mine then.
Instead, operators moved to another section and continued chipping away at the coal.
"Knowing all the issues, they made a conscious decision" to keep mining "because they wanted to recover that coal," said Tony Oppegard, a former top federal and state of Kentucky mine safety official who represents miners as a private attorney in Lexington, Ky.
Experts say Crandall Canyon was unstable for a combination of reasons.
The section the miners were working was being carved out in a pattern like streets on a city block, leaving pillars to hold up the ceiling. Officials at the Mine Safety and Health Administration say they had approved a plan to allow "retreat" mining there.
But experts question that decision because the area is bordered by two outer sections that had already been mined and collapsed, using a technique that leaves behind unstable rubble.
That means the last pillars were bearing much of the weight of the roughly 2,000 feet of mountain above, and as they were pulled down, the pressure on the remaining pillars would have increased.
Larry Grayson, who worked in coal mining for nine years until 1984 and is now a professor of energy and mineral engineering at Pennsylvania State University, said retreat mining is so risky that the mining company he worked for would not use it between two sections of rubble.
Murray has said that federal regulators and an outside mining engineering firm had signed off on the canyon's mining operation.
Ward, the son of a miner, said the collapse won't keep him from staying at his $28-per-hour job. But he feels guilty about one of the trapped miners, Brandon Phillips, a neighbor and childhood friend who got the job with Ward's help.
"I'll never get anybody a job ever again," he said.
Ward's bosses ordered him to take a couple of days' rest Sunday, but between puffs on a cigarette on his front porch Tuesday, he said he would rather help in rescue efforts than "sit home and dwell."
"I feel bad, feel horrible," he said. "That's why I'd rather be at work. If I can keep my mind off it, I'm fine."
[Associated Press; by Jennifer
Dobner]
Associated Press writers Chris Kahn and Alicia A. Caldwell in Huntington, Utah, and Jennifer Talhem in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or
redistributed.
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