It's looking like people who picked up parts of cell phone conversations spread the bad information about there being twelve survivors. BBC has a timeline:
Monday 0640 (1140 GMT) - Explosion causes collapse
1800 (approx) - Rescuers sent in
Tuesday 0730 - Air quality tests said to be 'discouraging'
2100 - Families say one body found
2350 - Families say 12 miners found alive
Wednesday 0250 - Reports emerge that just one miner alive
0310 - Mine officials confirm only one survivor
Update: The above post was put up somewhat before 2 a.m. It is now about 10 a.m. The link goes to an entirely different story now, one titled "Fury over US mine 'rescue' fiasco." I can understand why people, especially family members, would be furious -- but I hope that the press, and bloggers, will try hard not to emphasize that. It sounds like it was a case of honest mistakes snowballing. There's no getting around how hurtful the misinformation wound up being, but I'm willing to bet that the folks involved in the miscommunication are never going to make a similar mistake again. I'm willing to bet that others in search and rescue are going to use this fiasco as a cautionary tale. I'm willing to bet that people are very, very sorry already and don't need people screaming at them or waving proposed punishments around to make things better. Sometimes mistakes are just that, mis-takes. Somebody heard something through a veil of hope, and heard wrong, and the rest is history. I'm of the opinion that the best thing to do now is offer condolences all around and then take a good, hard look at how things went wrong, and try to learn from it. But, in my opinion, I can't see any reason to ask for heads to roll. Let's not make a bad situation even worse. If we were dealing with hard-hearted people with withered ethical sense or cracked moral compasses it would be different. But we're not, as far as I can see. We have a bunch of people who got caught by a rumor that got too much traction. Or that's what it looks like at this point.
On a slightly different note, I notice that the BBC is now being very careful. At the bottom of one graph, it has this: Information as known at 1215 GMT Wednesday 4 January. Good for them. Some stories call for that sort of caution, and this one, tragically, has become that sort of story.
Update: Rodger Morrow nails it, I suspect, with How the press got the "Miracle at Sago" wrong.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if he's right about the misinformation coming from people listening to police scanners. Even in the newsroom where I worked, which was full of people who had been around the block a few times and/or who had worked the police beat, there were massive wild goose chases prompted by snatches of communication heard on police scanners -- and I wouldn't even know where to begin to tell you about the rumors that whip through my current hometown based upon what somebody's heard, or thought they heard, on police scanners. Our local police, I might add, are going more and more to cell phone communication. Cuts down on eavesdroppers, substantially, that does. (Via Michelle Malkin.)
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