Crandall Canyon Mine's owners appear to have known their operation was unsafe and did nothing about it.

325 federal safety citations were issued on the Crandall Canyon Mine located northwest of Huntington, Utah, in which Louis Alonso Hernandez, Manuel Sanchez, Kerry Allred, Brandon Phillips, Don Erickson, and Carlos Payan have been trapped for almost two weeks.

Just last month, the mine was cited for lacking a second escape passage – in the area that collapsed on the six trapped miners.

The fines for the violations totaled $6,000 and appear to not have been paid nor had the problems cited been fixed. The mine is non-union.

A company memo circulated in March and leaked to the Salt Lake City Tribune this week noted structural problems in the area that collapsed.

'It wasn't an act of God. It was an act of man,' said Richard Trumka, the Vice President of the AFL-CIO and a former head of the United Mine Workers of America.

Speaking of the lack of federal regulatory enforcement, Trumka told reporters that, despite the best efforts of federal mine inspectors themselves, 'MSHA, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, has become basically a cadaver under George Bush.'

The Crandall Canyon mine used a method of mining called 'pillar' or 'retreat' mining considered by experts to be the most dangerous technique in the industry.

CNN reported that safety experts questioned the retreat mining process at Crandall Canyon, and appeared surprised that it had been approved by the federal mining safety agency.

Interviewed Thursday (Aug. 16) on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, Dennis O'Dell, director of health and safety for the United Mine Workers of America, linked the mining process to the collapse.

'When you look at the area where they were pillar mining or retreat mining, you look at that and see that this was going to happen,' O'Dell said.

In addition to stronger enforcement of safety regulations, O'Dell called for better emergency medical training and tracking equipment to help locate trapped miners better.

'There are tracking devices used in other countries, and we can use those today,' he stated. 'The biggest problem is nobody talks about it.'

Over the past 30 years, O'Dell pointed out, if mine operators had taken health and safety as seriously as they should have, 'we wouldn't be in the situation we are today... It's frustrating. And I hope that people finally realize that it's time for us to get off of dead center and do something. Miners deserve better.'

A second collapse on Thursday killed three rescue workers and injured six others.

Millionaire Robert Murray, co-owner of the mine, refused to accept responsibility that the mining methods instituted at his mine or the apparent scofflaw approach to federal regulations his company took may have caused the disaster. Instead he shifted blame to natural causes.