Colorado tour guide was person who died in accident at Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine
The person who died in an accident on Thursday inside Colorado's Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine was a 46-year-old tour guide. Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell identified him on Friday as Patrick Weier.
Weier lived in Victor and left behind a 7-year-old son.
"I'm pretty drained," said Ruth Weier, Patrick's mother. He was one of eight children. "He was a great guy," his mother said. She was buoyed by the support of people paying her son tribute.
"I had no idea how many friends he had," Ruth told CBS News Colorado.
Weier had moved to Colorado from the Chicago area, where 10 years ago he often donned a costume of a mascot-like character he and his brother named "Billy Cub." He showed up outside Chicago Cubs baseball games. Fans loved the character.
The accident that caused Weier's death happened 500 feet underground on an elevator in one of the mine's shafts. Four others were also injured, and the group on Weier's tour were brought up to the surface afterwards. Mental health and emergency response teams met them there.
Another group of tour visitors was further underground at the time, and they were temporarily trapped due to concern about the elevator's safety. After about 6 hours they were brought up to the surface following inspections of the mine shaft elevator system.
The people who were hurt had what were described as minor injuries.
Two of the eleven on the elevator at the time of the accident were children.
"It was very traumatic. I know that. They saw some bad things," Sheriff Mikesell said.
Federal investigators have joined the investigation into what went wrong along with the Teller County Sheriff's Office.
"Currently we don't know what happened at 500 feet to cause this. That's something we're working through," Mikesell said.
"I don't know that that was a stopping location. I'm very certain (the elevator) was on its descent when this occurred and then it was brought back up from there."
Mikesell said there was some sort of mechanical issue with the doors.
"We know that the elevator dropped a little bit. We know the doors were mangled," he said.
"Anytime you're dealing with heavy machinery and 1,000 foot level. Up to 500 level in a mine, there could be accidents. And this was a tragic accident."
The sheriff said the work to determine the cause of the crash by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Mine Safety and Health Administration will likely take a while "because there's a lot of information they're dealing with trying to put things together so that they never have another mine accident."
"They do a very good job of identifying and really picking apart what could have occurred," Mikesell said.
The U.S. Department of Labor released a statement about the tragedy, saying they are "saddened by this event and our thoughts are with all affected." They went on to write: "The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) carries out the provisions of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977 (Mine Act) as amended by the Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response (MINER) Act of 2006. The agency's mandate from Congress is to protect the safety and health of the nation's miners. MSHA has jurisdiction over Active, Intermittent, Non-producing, and Temporarily idled mines. The agency does not have jurisdiction over abandoned mines. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has initiated an investigation. While OSHA does not discuss the details of an ongoing inspection, we will share our findings once the investigation is completed."
"As a tour guide, you feel responsible for the rest of your people. Even as a hoistman, as soon as you grab that handle you feel responsible for the people on that.," said William Snare, who used to work at the mine in the same capacity as Weier.
Snare said he was never worried about the safety of the elevator, which is commonly referred to by miners as a skip. He said at the Mollie Kathleen they would inspect the integrity of the skip daily.
"Morning safety inspections every day. We'd go down, run a gas meter down … If it was unsafe we wouldn't do it," Snare explained.
The shaft has wood guides on either side of the elevator and what are called, "dogs" that are activated by springs if the cable breaks. The dogs spring out and dig into the wood rails stopping the elevator's descent. But the cable did not break in the accident.
The Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine in Cripple Creek is not an active gold mine but it lies in a historic mining district and it is about half a mile away from an active mine. Tours of the mine have been going on for approximately 60 years and the operation has been run during that time by a Colorado family.
There hadn't been any sort of accident at the mine for 40 years, the sheriff said.
Trapped group spent six hours underground with limited information
The tour group that was trapped in the mine for 6 hours after the accident wasn't aware that there had been a death in the mine closer to the surface. The sheriff said emergency responders at the ground level were able to communicate with that group's tour guide, but only told the guide that there was an elevator malfunction.
"We made the ultimate decision not to tell them what was occurring at the 500 foot (level) and at the surface," Mikesell said "We knew that we couldn't get anybody down to them. We knew that we couldn't help them if there was a medical emergency."
Following hours of inspections, the elevator was lowered down first at 6 p.m. without any people on it. Then the mine owner and some rescuers rode the elevator back down the shaft to the group.
The people who were underground were brought back up to the surface in groups of four.
The tour was then brought to a building where the sheriff and other community leaders briefed them on what happened.
"We explained to them that someone had died on the trip up prior to them, that this was a major incident, it wasn't just that the elevator was broken," Mikesell said.
Mental health teams from the county also met with that tour group after that for checkins.
