up. one team will be as a fresh-air base as a backup team and one team will be going to long wall 22. [ inaudible question ] we had not found him. we know that he would have had to made it to a refuge chamber to survive, in a i guess in a perfect hoped, for whatever reason, he would be with the other three miners. there s no way with the atmospheres that we ve seen that anybody could have survived outside of that chamber. are you going to go look for him after the rescue chamber is checked out? ultimately he would be part, if there if we didn t find anybody in the rescue chamber, we re still going to be trying to find where the four miners would have been located. but we re very confident that if they didn t make it to if they didn t make it to the this refuge chamber, there s no way they could have survived. how are the families doing at this point? i d really like to ask you, can you talk about the man trip?
to the rescue refuge chamber and touching it in 96 hours. is it now a recovery operation it is not a recovery operation. we are still focused on the drill hole going in. reporter: the interesting point there, bill, listening to kevin strickland when i said, is it a recovery, not a rescue operation now and he said, no, it is not a recovery operation but for the first time, he did not add to that, this remains a rescue operation. he stepped away from using that language and i think that change in tone is very important, and very depressing, obviously for the waiting families. bill: and hope goes out to the families indeed, you think about them type and again. jonathan hunt in west virginia. martha: very busy morning on america s newsroom and president obama is gearing up for a white house nuclear summit. but one of america s most powerful allies now announced that he will not be there. why israeli prime minister netanyahu will not coming to
was the nitrogen that was forcing the air out of the long wall section. that s the good news. the not so good news was that the bore hole put in at the refuge chamber did not hit a void. it hit a solid pillar so basically that hole that was drilled from the surface does no use to us at all. and we will not be able to put a camera down in it. well, we can put a camera down in it but basically there will be nothing to see. so we had another meeting and based on the nitrogen inerting the 22 long wall area, a decision again has been made to send rescue teams underground. they re gearing up or going underground basically as we speak. and what they re going to do is again travel into the mine. instead of going up across here to the long wall face, they re
the reason the third attempt had to be halted is because they saw smoke and there was the risk that there could be a fire and maybe even another explosion in the mine so the rescue teams are frustrated but they had to come back out. they re so anxious to get to that final reef owj chamber and see if the missing miners could possibly northbound there. here s what s happening this morning. they are in the process that may be wrapping up about now of drilling a second bore hole into the mine, drilling down into the mine, then it will take an hour and a half about to try to drop a camera into the mine where they think the miners may be in that last refuge chamber. so the camera goes down, they ll take a look, they ll look to see if this chamber has been, as they call t. deployed 67 it s a big yellowo call it deployed, it s a big, yellow tent. they ll be able to tell if there s not too much smoke if it s deployed. if it has deployed, it means the miners, all four of them or some of them, co
mean, we talked earlier. if they had gotten into it, we talked 96 hours of oxygen with 15 people at we re right now at 95 hours. so we re confident that if they got in there and they were alive, that we would be able to still rescue them. we re probably somewhere in the vicinity right now, hopefully, of getting in there within three and a half to four hours to that refuge chamber. after an explosion it totally has wiped out any type of wiring or communication that we would have had with that refuge chamber. will they be able to use a vehicle to get back there? they will have to do what they ve done. they ll travel in to a certain point and go by foot.