As I am sure most of you know by now, there were about a dozen miners trapped thousands of feet under the earth in West Viriginia. Only one person survived for the 40 hours it took to find the miners, mostly because of the life-threatening levels of Carbon Monoxicide that made it slow going for the resuers. At about midnight, the families of the miners (and their friends and neighbors who were with them) in the church across the street from the mine got word that everyone was alive, despite all the bad news that they had been hearing all day.
Bells rang out, and jubulant people streamed forth proclaiming a miracle. For 3 hours-- 180 minutes-- no one from the company bothered to tell the families or the media that this rumor they heard was tragically dead wrong. It is one thing to keep hope alive, it is quite another to let happy lies go uncorrected. The company could have told the families that they didn't know yet, that it was too soon to tell. Instead they let them rejoice until 3 AM and then broke the devastating news.
I don't know if a law was broken, other than the dozens of safety violations that went unenforced under Bush's OSHA, but what this company did to the relatives of its former employees was immoral. They can say it was a "miscommunication," they can trot out the governor to offer up a bogus explaniation, but the fact remains that they didn't correct the rumor when they had 3 hours to do so.
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