< a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,764730,00.html">Here's a link to piece in today's Guardian which fills in a few aspects.

I think we can take it that ""What took you guys so long?" is a joke, rather than a complaint.

And here's a particularly thought-provoking quote:

Amid the celebrations, one former miner and organiser of the union "local", Joe Jashienski, said he knew the mines were not as they appeared on maps. "The last day they worked, they made this big space, as big as a ballfield, but they didn't put it on the map, because different people owned some of the coal." A senior person at the mine, which was then under different ownership, "didn't want nobody to know what he'd done because he didn't want to pay the royalty on it", Mr Jashienski claimed yesterday.

And that, it appears, was why the miners this week were nearly killed, when they broke through into the flooded section that wasn't on the map.

But the more important quote really is this one:

...the nine soon became trapped in cold water which rose, at one point, to their necks. Doctors yesterday reported that they had hugged each other to maintain their body temperatures. They were "supporting each other, literally at times," Mr Schweiker said in a television interview. If one was cold, "another two or three would literally hug him, surround him, give him their body warmth".

One society can produce miners like that, and rescue workers like that, and people like the firefighters of September 11 - and the crooked accountants and fatcat executives of companies like Enron and Anderson and so forth. And who is it gets the big money rewards and the fancy lifestyle - and most of the time, the media worship and the applause?