Philippi, W.Va. ? In the darkness of the Sago Mine, one of 12 trapped coal miners scrawled a timeline detailing how he was alive but losing air at least 10 hours after an underground explosion, his daughter said Saturday.

“Each time he documented, you could tell it was getting worse,” Ann Merideth told The Associated Press of the note written by her father, 61-year-old shuttle car operator Jim Bennett. “Later on down the note, he said that it was getting dark. It was getting smoky. They were losing air.”

If he was lucid enough to be writing 10 hours after the blast, he could have been saved – but the rescue operation didn’t move fast enough, Merideth said.

The first rescuers didn’t go into the mine until 11 hours after the blast, a lag officials said was necessary to clear the mine of high concentrations of poisonous gases. When the miners were brought out more than 40 hours after the blast, there was only one survivor.

Monday’s explosion killed one miner immediately. Eleven others were found huddled two miles inside the mine behind a plastic curtain they had erected to keep out deadly carbon monoxide.

A helicopter crew from the West Virginia University Hospital loads Randal McCloy Jr. into a helicopter at Pittsburgh's Allegheny General Hospital. McCloy, the sole survivor of the West Virginia coal mine explosion, showed dramatic improvement Saturday and was stable enough to be flown back to his home state.

The lone survivor, 26-year-old Randal McCloy Jr., remained critically ill Saturday with possible brain damage from oxygen deprivation and carbon monoxide poisoning. However, doctors at a Pittsburgh hospital said he was showing dramatic signs of recovery, including flickering his eyes, and was well enough to be flown back to a hospital closer to his West Virginia home later Saturday.

Merideth said her father’s note, given to the family Friday by the medical examiner, has three or four entries, the first at 11:40 a.m. Monday, about five hours after the blast, and the final entry, with words getting fainter and trailing off the page, at 4:25 p.m., nearly 10 hours after the blast.

Tony Oppegard, a former federal Mine Safety and Health Administration official who has worked in mine safety for 25 years, said Bennett’s note points out the need for miners to have oxygen systems that can last longer.

And while he understands concerns by families that the rescuers didn’t move faster, Oppegard said rescues are very dangerous and have to be done with “all deliberate speed.” In 1976, 11 rescuers died when there was a second mine explosion in Letcher County, Ky.

“You don’t have a bunch of cowboys rushing in,” he said.

The first visitations for the miners also began Saturday, with their funerals scheduled today through Tuesday.