the most innovative full- size sedan in america: the taurus sho, from ford. drive one. time to check our top stories. armed with a revamped nuclear strategy, president obama heads to prague later today to sign a new arms control treaty with russia. it calls for both countries to reduce nuclear arsenals by a third. the president will host a nuclear summit next week in washington. shuttle discovery was able to dock at the international space station this morning despite a faulty antenna knocking out raid. it was the first time four women are at the space center at once. discovery should return in about two weeks. in montcoal, west virginia, they ve now broken through a refuge chamber more than 1,000
i don t know what would go through my mind if i was trapped in a situation like that. if i started out and i saw that there had been an explosion and i was crossing over debris, we had to get these miners, i guess, the opportunity to go somewhere else if they did not feel they could make it out of the mine, and they could have made it to that refuge chamber. as ron mentioned, that s our hope. and i mean, that s what we got left to go after right now. we know they didn t come out, so the next option would be for them to go to that refuge chamber. just to be clear, you re talking about six out of nine, so we re talking about maybe three unaccounted for miners right now. what about the fourth, which i know you think is in a different place but is there debris in front of where you expect that minor to be, you characterize the obstacles to getting to the area you want to check on there? we have investigated that area one time previously. that would be considered the
individuals unaccounted for a chance that they might have gotten to a refuge chamber. we can t say it didn t work yet. but indications are that the majority of the miners did not have the opportunity to utilize some of the better things that were put into the miner act in 2006. we did the congressman made a good point. there was definitely a quicker response. this occurred at:00 p.m. and this occurred by 3:00 p.m. and by 3:00 in the morning we accounted for 18 of the 22 missing miners. if we look at the response times in the past it basically would not add up to what we saw yesterday. so that is definitely a positive that we have seen in the miner act of 2006.
and i also don t know, maybe some of your other guests have told you whether or not there are rescue chambers, or refuge chambers available in the mine. if they are in place, the company would know precisely where they are for each shift, and they could they have to be located within 1,000 feet of the shift, of the face, under federal law. so hopefully they would be able to say, if some of these workers survived the explosion, they re in the refuge chamber and here s where it s located. which obviously would make the mine rescue teams work a whole lot easier. tony oppegard an expert in these matters, thank you very much for your time, sir. appreciate it. thank you. we will of course continue to monitor these rescue efforts at the upper big branch mine in montcoal, west virginia. what we know now is seven workers are thought to have been
scsrs and that s an area of scsr storage area, or self-rescuers that minorrers would go to if an accident were to occur and there is evidence that scsrs were taken from that area. and that gives us hope that the miners had survived the initial blast, made their way to grab an additional scsr and hopefully again, this is just hopeful that they would make their way to a refuge chamber, to an area where the air s clean enough for them to breathe and for the rescuers to save them. how many were taken? i don t know the number. i don t know the number of scsrs that were there, but it was easily seen that there were scsrs that were removed from the storage area. you say that it may vary, it may be as small as 5, as many as