 This smoke pouring from below the ground through the vent is the only indication that something isn't quite right at the Doutiki coal mine. Early this morning the fire sparked from a malfunctioning machine since then mine rescue teams have been fighting the blaze. On February 11th, 2004, we were getting ready to have a district staff meeting at the district office. And I was notified by Alan Boswell, mine superintendent, that had a mine fire, had a get-man on fire. At that time, I notified the district manager, Carl Boone, and we got everybody together and come to the mines. Guy came out of the cut-through and he was screaming and hollering and he was down on his off-force and I couldn't understand what he was saying. When I got him calmed down and got over to him, then I found out that he said he had a get-man or jeep on fire. I had mine rescue experience so I put on my apparatus and everything and I just couldn't believe when I got there the heat. This is my second fire and you're nervous. You're really nervous. First thing, you don't want to get nobody hurt and you want to get to the fire and try to get it down. But your main thing is don't get nobody hurt. Smoke was so thick that you couldn't see the hand in front of your face and it was hot and your eyes were burning. You just can't imagine the heat and the way to deteriorate the roof. And we didn't make it very far because the heat, the smoke was so hot that it felt like your skin was burning. And then it was really getting hard to breathe. There was sudden stuff floating in the air. Finally the heat got so hot that it melted the water line in. We actually fought the fire that day until we lost our water on that side. It melted our water line. They were fighting it from both sides. This is called the number six and three side. This is called the four and five side. So they had some people on both sides of the fire trying to get in to this vicinity here. And they could only get within two or three cost cuts on each side of it. Of course it was that because of the smoke and the heat. We got a foam generator started and started foaming. And we advanced up, I'm going to say 80 to 100 feet and fought the fire from there for a pretty good while. Then they lost their water on the west side. And we brought the other foam generator and knocked a hole in the bradish and put that foam generator right on the get. And we foamed for two or three hours. The way I understand it, Mark Evans had opened the door to their shaft. The returner shaft was directly in this direction. And you could stand where I'm standing and there was absolutely no smoke. Two foot out. It was like being in a barrel of a steam engine. It was just pure black smoke. To me that was one of the major things that brought everybody outside was getting those doors open. The significance of him opening that door was it changed all this air. You see here it was going straight to number four and number five units. And there were men on those units. Then when he opened these doors it reversed all splire out of there and all smoke. And everything was in a safe area. This fire occurred and rapidly got out of hand to where we couldn't fight the fire. And a determination was made later that day around 4.30 to seal the mine after all the firefighting efforts underground had fell to extinguish the fire and the gas was rising at the fan. The gas readings at the shaft were coming up and it was determined at that time that we need to evacuate the mines. We felt like that probably three to six months, maybe possibly a year, mines will be down. Right in the far you do need some kind of plan to back up if that firefighting plan doesn't work. We had some plans that we had worked on during the night. As I was driving up here I talked to Ted Norris who's our General Manager of Technical Services and we had hooked up and he had hooked up with some people that had put in the Halliburton or the remote seals. We had talked to people that had worked with the jet engine from Australia and all those people we called in contact were coming the next day. So we met with the jet engine people first. Pro is that you render the mine atmosphere very quickly but there's a lot of destruction involved with the moisture that the jet engine puts into the air. So then we talked to the Halliburton people. At that point that's when Charlie said well this guy from Emsha their expert came in. Let's go see what he has to say. The company elected that that was the method they were going to try. They thought that they could do it. They talked to the folks at Halliburton. The Halliburton folks thought they could do it. And of course we at Emsha were hopeful that it would work also. Within less than 14 hours after the fire started they'd already started drilling holes into the fire area. Within 20 hours they started putting that earth gas into the fire area. We were monitoring the CO and methane and oxygen there at the air shaft about the fan there every five minutes. Well we kept monitoring. We had three holes that were drilled from outside and they kept monitoring. And basically when we first started out we were monitoring them every 15 minutes and then we went to probably 30 minutes and then to an hour and then four hours. And then basically now what we're doing is we're making them ever ever shield. Still kind of looking at some of the readings behind them. But the healthy seal is basically just a piece of curtain where we used the little healthy guns and shot the little nails into the rib and sprayed foam around them just to kind of give us an airtight, you know, barrier from the fire area. The holes drilled, cased, and well heads on them and the nitrogen or CO2 delivered immediately began to pump that into the mind to try to inert the atmosphere in there. And we've got it down to where they would just be tens of a percent of oxygen. Road sealing operation is an operation where they actually drill holes into the mind, series of bore holes, and they put in a concrete mixture to try and fill up the mind entry and seal it off. Once they got those underground and got them pumped and everything, then they felt good about the conditions underground to let us go back in and then build, you know, permanent seals. That's basically what you want to do is shut the oxygen off so the fire will hopefully smother itself out. We built 17 seals on the east side. We built 8 seals on the north side and 7 seals on the west side. The control room really would be comprised of the senior officials from Mind Management. There'd be senior officials from Emsha from the local district and also the senior officials from the state of Kentucky. And they would work together. Of course the company would develop a plan in conjunction with the state and the federal and when the plan was agreed upon, all the participants would sign off on the plan and then go to work. And with each little obstacle that came up, the group was able to get together, resolve the problem, and move on to get it done in such a quick fashion. Take advice. You know, that's what everybody did. Everybody sat down and took advice and listened. A lot of times that don't occur in a mind fire. Well, I think anytime you have a situation like this, it's pretty dynamic. There's a lot of different people coming together. There's different levels of knowledge. Sometimes the people who have to spend the monies are not really familiar with the process and they have to have a trust or a dependency that the advice they're getting both internally and externally is credible. And I think that's what made this work. There was an immediate recognition of the knowledge that Emsha had and our willingness to work in a cooperative effort to resolve this issue this problem can certainly have. And on the front end, we made the right decisions alone with the company and that cooperation went right on through the whole process. And what I've seen so far, they're very appreciative today and have a different respect and understanding of this agency than they did probably two months ago. We had a few disagreements, but they were professional disagreements. We did not have to go off into our corners, if you will, and have our plan and Emsha have their plan and the state have their plan. Everything was right on top of the table. Everyone was focused on the same end in mind. I've been in this business since 1975 and I never thought, I never thought that number one at Emsha had this type of technical support of this caliber and number two that I would ever see us working that close in such cooperation with Emsha. I don't remember ever being in this kind of situation where everybody acted as professionally as this group did. To my emergency response unit, which a big part of that was the gas lab that was set up right back here, the thing that I'm so proud of is we were learning and in the middle of the night on Saturday night the staff back there, we would talk to them and they would talk to us about gases and they would talk to us about helping us watch the gases. I think tech support brings a level of knowledge that's international. I'm sure I've been to a lot of different countries that there's anybody anywhere that has the knowledge base and the energy. I mean when tech support comes on the property there's an immediate energy level that's just sent out. People begin to feel that. Those things that Emsha wanted is what we wanted and I think as we worked through the process and as we went through the next week it became obvious that the decisions that we were making and the proposals that we were making we were doing in a team effort and that what we wanted was the same thing as what Emsha wanted and that was to do the same thing to do the right thing. In the last three years I think I've really shown what can be accomplished when we take the barriers down and we're willing to work across boundaries with each other to partner and to work toward a common good because we all have the same goal. We all have the very same vision. We have the very same vision you have. We have the very same vision that your families have. We have the very same vision that this company has. It's what I've been saying all along. We're going home to your families every day at the end of each and every shift in a healthy and safe condition. That's what this is all about and for a company like Alliance it's about making safety a core value in their organization's business and I think they've shown that they can do that. February 11th had a mine fire and we go in there and we do a lot of screeniest work from March the 3rd to March the 8th and seal carrying blocks, setting cribs, putting timbers up and getting the mine back to a production state and no one was injured.