Gene J. Puskar, Associated Press West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin speaks with residents about rescue operations at the Sago Mine Jan. 3, outside of Buckhannon. Click photo for larger image.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- "I'm sitting down there in the church having some coffee, and I just hear a tremendous whoop and hollering,'' Gov. Joe Manchin III recalled. "Now, I don't know if it's from grieving or from cheering. I couldn't tell; it was so thunderous and loud.''

Last week, 10 days after the disaster that killed 12 West Virginian miners, the first-term Democrat sat in his sunlit office and reflected on the lessons and costs of the events that gripped his state and the nation.

The previous evening, he had delivered his second State of the State Address on the other side of the Capitol. It, like his relatively new administration and so many of the lives of his constituents, had been transformed by the still unexplained explosion beneath the earth.

For days, Mr. Manchin had been the public face of the grim vigil, sharing the mining families' vertiginous journey from anguish to euphoria to bitterly cruel disappointment.

Mr. Manchin knows mining. He was 21 when an uncle was killed in a 1968 mine disaster in Farmington, his home town. It was a tragedy that sparked major reforms in federal mine safety regulations.

But those roots were far from his mind Jan. 2 as he left the Atlanta Hyatt Hotel heading to a lunch for the West Virginia Athletic Association. While the ex-football letterman and other West Virginia University fans were eagerly anticipating that night's Sugar Bowl, word was filtering out that something had happened in a mine in Upshur County.

Shortly after noon, the governor's communications director, Lara Ramsburg, called to relay the news that men might be trapped in the Sago Mine in Tallmansville, W.Va. Mr. Manchin summoned the state plane.

"At that time, we didn't know what we had. But I knew that whatever it was, having been through it myself in 1968 with my own family, I felt that I could be of some help to the families.''

After a two-hour flight and a quick stop for a briefing at the mine command center, Mr. Manchin headed to Sago Baptist Church, where scores of miners' family members were waiting. He said he was anxious but satisfied after being briefed about the effort to reach the trapped miners.

"When I first got there, I could see different families -- you know, 13 miners -- but as the time went on, I could only see one family. I felt a cohesiveness, a pulling together,'' a subdued Mr. Manchin said.

His wait settled in to a difficult routine. Mr. Manchin would shuttle between the rescue operations center at the mine, then he would return to the church, sometimes trying to answer families' questions, sometimes relaying the questions to officials supervising the rescue team, sometimes just talking.

"One person would say their father was doing exactly what he wanted do be doing, another person wanted to go back and finish a college degree ... you'd hear different things, and so I kept learning about the miners. After a while I felt like I know the miners from hearing their families so much.''

By mid-morning Jan. 3, an exploratory shaft had found alarmingly elevated levels of carbon monoxide in the mine.

"With that, anyone who's been around mining ... realized we were in the miracle stages,'' the governor recalled.

Grimmer news came that night with the discovery of the first body, killed, apparently, by the initial explosion. Mine officials, intent on finding the 12 still missing, hadn't yet identified that body. For one relative in the church, there was no need to.

Mine officials had conveyed the bare news of a body's discovery, "So I was down there [in the church] and everyone was just stunned. One of the 13 [families] lost a family member, but we didn't know who,'' Mr. Manchin said.

"One young lady, I'll never forget. Her name was Amber Helms. She was truly grieving and crying as hard as you'd ever see a child. And I went over to her, and I said, 'Honey, you know we still have hope; we don't have confirmation; they're not sure.'

"And she said through her tears, 'That was my Daddy. He worked there every day. That was his spot.' '' Officials later confirmed that the body indeed was that of mine fire boss Terry Helms, 50.

The wary community that filled the church was prepared for more grim news, but as the rescuers found evidence that at least some of Mr. Helms colleagues had survived the blast, their foreboding was still mixed with hope for a miracle. For a while, it seemed that one had arrived.

The discovery of a mine vehicle, and footprints leading away from it, renewed "the high drama,'' Mr. Manchin said. "Where did they go; where could they be?''

Early Jan. 4, the sounds of cheering families and peeling bells drew Mr. Manchin into the main church hall and a scene of unrestrained euphoria, hugs, laughter and tears.

"There was just jubilation -- 'They're alive; they're alive; they're alive.' Now you understand, after two days, I'm part of the family. I'm not a governor sitting here. I'm caught up to the point of saying, 'The Good Lord answered our prayers. The miracle of miracles has happened.' ''

But no official word had yet come from officials up the road at the mine.

"I said [to his security officer], 'Jimmy, do we have confirmation?' he said, 'Nobody's called.' "

Making his way through the adrenaline-stoked crowd -- "I'm still hugging and kissing and everything's going on, as you can imagine'' -- Mr. Manchin and his aide headed up to the command post and an apparent ratification of the celebration he'd just left.

"Lo and behold, the mine officials, everybody sitting in the command post, it's ecstasy, everyone in the command post is grabbing and hugging one another.''

Mr. Manchin recalled a state official saying, "Governor, do you want to go down and meet the men coming out?' "

"I said, 'Absolutely,' so I go putting my mine clothes on.''

But as the small hours of Wednesday lengthened, no miners emerged, nor did any confirmation of their survival. As the increasingly uneasy vigil extended, Mr. Manchin said, "Someone asked me how I felt, and I said, 'I can't imagine how it would be to have open heart surgery without any anesthetic, but I can only tell you that it felt like someone had cut my chest open and cut my heart out and that's the pain I was going through and I can only imagine what pain the families would be going through.''

Mr. Manchin returned to the church as company officials delivered the stark slap of reality that all but one were dead.

"You had some that were so angry they wouldn't speak to anyone, especially anyone in an official capacity,'' Mr. Manchin recalled. "I understood the ones who were outraged and needed to vent, and I was there to take that.''

Nevertheless, Mr. Manchin is not ready or eager to apportion blame. He will wait until multi-layered investigations pinpoint causes.

"Was it human error, was it an act of God? I don't know. What the state and what the people want to know is, should it have been shut down? We're going to have an investigation so I can make sure I can look 13 families in the eye.''

Mr. Manchin has vowed repeatedly that the accident post-mortem will uncover every possible fact in a process as transparent as humanly possible. Paradoxically, there's one question he would be content to see go unanswered, the identity of the person responsible for the false report of a miracle.

Speculating that the person had probably been working for two or three days, that he had made a simple but devastating error in relaying information about a rescue that he was willing to risk his life for, Mr. Manchin said, before his voice trailed off, "I would hope that person's name would never ...''

The governor's reluctance to point fingers, as well as his pledge to find answers, appeared to reflect widespread sentiments in the state. West Virginia has a combative political tradition but, as officials of both parties walked away from his State of the State Address last week, there was no apparent inclination to view the mine issue through a partisan lens.

"The governor did a great job comforting the families,'' Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican congresswoman who is the daughter of one of Mr. Manchin's predecessors, Gov. Arch Moore, said afterward. Ms. Capito, who went to the disaster site herself, said she was not surprised at the relative lack of recrimination in the face of misinformation and disappointment. "There was a feeling we were all in this together.''

She said, nonetheless, that she believes the disaster should be the subject of congressional hearings in addition to the joint state-federal probe that Mr. Manchin has described.

"He was touched by it as we all were,'' said state Sen. Brooks McCabe, D-Charleston. "It's something that we all share, that runs through the governor, the Legislature, a determination to find out absolutely what went wrong.''

Mr. Manchin said he hoped the tragedy would be the catalyst for the same kinds of safety improvements that followed Farmington.

"I've been to every one of the wakes,'' Mr. Manchin said. "They have all said, 'Don't let my loved one die in vain. Now there has to be something that comes from this. Don't let another family go through what my family went through.'''