Salt Lake City (AP) - University of Utah geology professors have come up with a low-tech solution for finding trapped miners deep underground: the sledgehammer.
Professors Gerard Schuster and Sherif Hanafy say miners would use the sledge hammers to bang on iron plates placed at regular intervals inside a mine.
They say a string of listening devices on the surface could tell which iron plate is ringing, and that could lead rescuers to the location of trapped miners.
The professors wrote about the solution in the society of exploration geophysicists journal “The Leading Edge.”
Their idea was inspired by the Crandall Canyon disaster of 2007, a cave-in that left six miners entombed inside a mountain. Their bodies were never found or recovered.
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