QUECREEK, Pa. - Safe in the embrace of the families to whom they had already written final notes of love, the nine men freed yesterday morning from their flooded coal mine hungrily sought what they had missed most during the three days they were trapped underground: a beer, a chew of tobacco and the surest sign from above that one is alive for another day.

"He couldn't wait to see the sunrise ... and he wouldn't sleep until he saw it," said John Moryken, a spokesman at the hospital where Robert "Boogie" Pugh spent his first hours out of the Quecreek Mine in which he and eight co-workers were trapped for three days.

Only three of the "niners," as they're being called, remained in the hospital yesterday, and all were in remarkably good condition despite their cold and nearly fatal captivity.

As they returned to a community, and indeed to an entire nation, that was captivated by their survival and oh-so-ready to bask in their happy-ending story, details of their death-defying experience began emerging like the elements of a Hollywood movie.

The men had breached a wall to an adjacent abandoned mine during their Wednesday night shift, causing millions of gallons of water to rush toward them.

Within minutes, they were nearly swamped by a torrent traveling at an estimated 60 mph, said Pennsylvania Gov. Mark Schweiker, relaying an account by miner Dennis Hall. The water level rose so high that they had to tip their heads back to avoid drowning.

The situation seemed so desperate that the miners began planning their final minutes of life: They would die together, and they would leave behind some consolation for their loved ones.

"I didn't think I was going to see my wife and kids again," a tearful Harry "Blaine" Mayhugh said yesterday morning as he was released from a local hospital after being treated for mild hypothermia.

Huddling with his eight fellow miners to preserve body heat in the sub-60-degree air and water, the men decided to leave what Schweiker called "farewell notes" to be found with their bodies.

"They passed a pen around and took makeshift cardboard from ... boxes in the mine," said Schweiker, who visited with the nine men in their hospital rooms yesterday. "They gently placed them in a bucket and attached it to something in the mine."

Linked together

As the water coursed rapidly past, the men made another decision.

"They tied themselves together," Schweiker said, "so they would be found together."

At one point, the water was so obviously the pathway to death that the miners figured they should try to wall themselves in, Schweiker said, apparently feeling that suffocation would be preferable to drowning.

Instead, the rescue work that had begun above ground - in tandem with the men's actions below - led to their survival. Crews quickly began pumping water out of the mine. They also started drilling a 6-inch-wide hole to where the men were trapped. Compressed air was pumped down, creating an air bubble that allowed the men to continue breathing, and pressurized the atmosphere to keep water out of their space.

The compressed air was heated, helping to keep hypothermia at bay.

Even though the men spent the entire three days without food, sleep or water and were in 3 to 4 feet of water, they survived long enough for crews to drill a 30-inch-wide rescue shaft from which they were hoisted one by one early yesterday morning.

That the men emerged from the ordeal in fairly good condition is a marvel, doctors said. The three who remained hospitalized yesterday were there mainly as a precaution, they said: One has a pre-existing heart problem that doctors wanted to monitor, another developed what doctors believe is an explainable and treatable irregular heartbeat, and the third was treated in a decompression chamber because of a slight case of "the bends" from having been rapidly withdrawn from a pressurized atmosphere.

The men were doing so well just hours after their rescue that doctors went against normal practice and granted them about half of their first requests: beer and "chew."

"We usually don't allow it," Dr. Russell Dumire, a trauma surgeon who treated six of the miners, said as he stood in front of the Conemaugh Memorial Medical Center, with a prominent "no smoking" sign at its entrance. "But a couple asked for it, so we made an exception."

Area residents who had heard about the endearingly characteristic request of the miners had dropped off cans of chewing tobacco at hospitals for the men.

But no beer was permitted, at least while the men were being treated. Dumire said the miners were dehydrated from three days without food or water, and alcohol would only exacerbate the problem.

The men, who probably will never have to pick up another bar tab again, mostly remained out of the public eye yesterday. Some made brief remarks while being discharged from the hospital, some let others speak for them.

They will be forever linked together, the nine miners who survived what could have been a horrible, tragic death for which they would have been entirely blameless: Maps and surveys of the mine were erroneous, placing the abandoned mine that was the source of the flood waters hundreds of feet from where they were working.

But their bond - reminiscent of those shared by firefighters or police officers - was already there, it seems, and was key to their survival. They made decisions as a group: not to fight the water, for one, but to escape it, the miner Hall told Schweiker. Even when they were rescued, they decided on the order in which they would ascend in the rescue cage.

Randy Fogle - the one with the heart condition - went up first and looked the most weakened and most soaked when he slid out of the rescue cage. .He was welcomed by a round of cheers and whoops by the more than 100 rescuers who had been working around the clock since Wednesday.

Rescue efforts

Workers had been drilling a 30-inch-wide escape shaft that neared its destination - 240 feet below ground - late Saturday night. Then crews shut down the noisy equipment and tried to make contact with the men.

They used the tried and true method: They tapped on a pipe, in this case the 6-inch-wide tube through which the air was being pumped, and got a responding set of taps from below.

With great excitement, they dropped a communication device down the air tube and were elated when one of the men picked it up and, according to one crew member, said: "There's nine men ready to get the hell out of here. We need some chew."

At the brightly illuminated drilling site, on the grounds of a dairy farm above the area of the mine where the men were trapped, the rescue workers awaited the moment that they had worked so hard for.

They sat on hilltops, trailers, equipment, anywhere with a vantage point of the rescue shaft. Many of them crowded around the crane that was hoisting up the cage and reached out to help it pull.

As each man emerged - it took about 1 1/2 hours for the cage to shuttle down and up nine times - cheers rang out, subdued cheers that had an air of acknowledgement that this was not some football game.

That was not the case, though, in the rural firehouse nearby where family members had been sequestered, awaiting word.

"The building about fell down when they started screaming," said one of the crew members whose wife was with the families and described the scene in a telephone call.

On solid ground

The families were reunited with the men at the hospitals to which they were taken, six to the Conemaugh complex and three to facilities in the nearby town of Somerset. Despite having spent the past three days without sleep, the men got few if any winks those first hours.

"They're clutching to their families," said Moryken, at Conemaugh. "They're going to take that special time."

Meanwhile, the once-buzzing drill site was slowly returning to what it had been before: Bill and Lori Arnold's farm.

Bill Arnold had been awakened Wednesday night by his dog Pitch's barking and had run outside with a pistol and a flashlight. He was met by rescue workers, who had surmised correctly that the miners had fled to the mine's highest elevation, which was under the farm.

Crews first used Arnold's equipment to prepare for the drilling operations, which required the delivery of more specialized machinery. Drills were erected to bore the air tube and the rescue shaft, and when one of the drill bits broke, replacements had to be flown by helicopter to the farm.

The rescue cage lies empty on its side, and workers will soon begin plugging the holes. After all the struggles, some of those who led the rescue efforts were already slightly nostalgic.

"A lot of lives depended on the drilling of these holes," said David Hess, secretary of the state Department of Environmental Protection.

The miners face a return to their regular lives, but with a difference. They went down into the mine as so many of their fathers and grandfathers have always done, working-class guys who did their dangerous jobs day in and day out to little outside attention. Now they are being hailed as heroes.

Their experiences surely could be life-altering, and some - but not all - are considering getting out of mining, Schweiker said.

Pugh, for one, made note of his 31 years in the mines and is anticipating his return.

"We didn't know what to think," miner Mayhugh said of their mindset during their ordeal. "There were high points and low points every day. Emotionally I'm still ... ."

His voice trailed off.

"It's going to take time to heal."