Buckhannon, W.Va. ? A lightning strike a mile from the mouth of the Sago Mine probably sent an electrical pulse along a power line, ultimately igniting methane gas and causing the explosion that killed 12 miners, a consultant hired by the mine owner said Wednesday.

The electrical charge apparently flowed from a tree to a power line 300 feet away and into the mine, said Thomas Novak, a Virginia Tech mining professor hired by International Coal Group Inc. to investigate the blast.

Once inside, the charge traveled along a steel conveyor belt hanging from a metal mesh roof support, stopping just feet away from the sealed-off section where the blast occurred.

Though there was a gap between the roof mesh in front of the seal and the roof mesh behind it, as required by law, the resistance to electricity there was very low, Novak testified during the second day of hearings into the Jan. 2 explosion that occurred about 2 miles into the West Virginia mine.

“Lightning doesn’t have to strike something directly” to cause an explosion, Novak said, but he agreed that his preliminary findings could be characterized as a “hypothesis.”

Novak said he needs to examine more data, and ICG said it plans to hire another expert to assess the mine geology for the possibility of metal in the rock walls, roof and floor of the sealed area.

ICG announced in March that its own investigation pointed to lightning as the cause, though it could not explain the precise route the electricity took. State and federal investigators have yet to announce their findings and displayed skepticism Wednesday as they repeatedly challenged ICG to defend its theory.

The hearings were to last two days but have been extended into today.

Earlier Wednesday, a state mining inspector testified that his screams for help may have been the source of the early misinformation that 12 miners had survived the explosion.

Bill Tucker was with the rescue team that found the miners behind a curtain more than two miles inside the mine.

“I don’t recall the exact words I used, and I didn’t have a radio. I was just screaming out for help,” Tucker said. “I think I said, ‘They’re alive,’ and that may have been part of the communication error.”

Only after he started checking the miners’ conditions did he realize only one – Randal McCloy Jr. – had a pulse.

“I picked up the radio and I hollered over the radio that we only have one (alive),” Tucker said.

Hearing Chairman J. Davitt McAteer later said it would be wrong to suggest it was Tucker’s words that resulted in the miscommunication. Families believed for more than three hours that 12 miners had survived.