CLEVELAND, Utah -- Being a family business, Chute Supply has a guiding rule. If the grandkids need something, stop what you are doing, help them out, then go back to your job.

But the company-owning Griffins also do not define family simply as their immediate clan. In the close-knit communities of Emery County, family extends to everybody you have worked, played and teased with your whole life.

So when something tragic happens, such as August's Crandall Canyon mine disaster, the Griffins dropped everything they were doing -- just like most of their neighbors -- and pitched in to help however they could.

And for 1 1/2 weeks, until the underground rescue effort was terminated after three miners were killed and six injured trying to get back to six men trapped by the first collapse of the mine's walls, they never stopped.

"We had three to four trucks running [supplies] to the mine 24 hours per day," said Brink Griffin, 35. "We were never too tired. We just did it."

Nor did they think about costs incurred. Or the inevitable decline in business they would feel as mine-owning Murray Energy Corp., one of their biggest clients, was staggered by the tragedy.

"It's a licking. It's still a licking," said his father, Boyd, founder of Chute Supply. "We lost a lot of business, but how could you feel sorry for yourself when you know there are families that lost people?"

As a supplier of parts used every day in the coal mines -- including Crandall Canyon and Murray Energy's other two mines in Carbon County -- Chute Supply received one of the first requests for help early on Aug. 6.

Brink's mom, Trudi, took the call a little after 4 a.m. from Bodee Allred, safety director at Crandall Canyon. "We have a situation up here," he told her. A lot of roof-support materials were needed from the other Murray Energy mines.

Knowing little more, she got a hold of Brink, who hustled into the office, along with delivery driver Brandon Hansen, 29, also of Cleveland. Trudi then called her husband, Boyd, who hurried home from St. George, where he was comforting his dad a short while after burying his mom. Another employee, Willie Pearson, 26, of Elmo, returned from a California vacation.

As details trickled in, the full gravity of the situation became apparent.

"We knew the miners," Trudi said. "We knew the ones over safety. Bodee went to school with Brink. [Trapped miner] Kerry Allred, he's one year older than me. He's one of the ones we're really close with here in town."

With those kinds of interrelationships, nobody gave a second thought to working around the clock, to not going home for days, to catching catnaps on the office couch.

"It took a toll on all of us, just physically, from a lack of sleep," said Brink. "But we can't complain. There were guys up at the mine in the dark, underground. I know Bodee didn't leave for a couple of weeks. He never left the property up there. We had no right to complain. We just kept going."

Besides, the guys working on the rescue were not just miners, they were friends. So Boyd did not hesitate to go into B.K.'s Stop-N-Shop in Huntington and clear its shelves of chewing tobacco for the men. Or to drive to the Wal-Mart in Price and load up on pop, blankets, ice.

"Half the time [the store operators] said, 'Just take it.' They knew. I'd take $100 of stuff at a whack and they'd say, 'Go,' " Boyd recalled.

Chute's books also will never show its full contributions to the rescue effort. "We took up a lot of stuff we didn't charge them for," said Brink. "If it was something to do for the rescue effort and they gave us a [purchase order], yes. ... A lot we billed for, but a lot we didn't."

That largesse comes as no surprise to Cleveland Town Clerk Jamie Jensen, who observed, "We're so lucky to have them. I'm partial to those guys."

Never during the prolonged effort did the Chute team sense that rescue crews were losing their resolve to reach the trapped miners.

"They kept their hopes up," said delivery driver Hansen, who made maybe 20 trips to Crandall Canyon.

"I don't think any of them ever gave up. The mood was still pretty hopeful until they drug them off of there," added Ed Walls, a part-time driver who knows all too well the pain of a mine disaster. His brother, Lester, was one of 27 miners who died in the 1984 Wilberg Mine fire.

Now, months later, Chute Supply is feeling repercussions from the disaster.

With Crandall Canyon closed and big layoffs at Murray Energy's Tower and West Ridge mines, Chute's business is down, said Brink. "The Murray mines are, by far, my biggest customer [at about 20 percent of sales]. I stock whatever they need."

But he and his dad just shake off the downturn. Their financial setback is nothing compared with the loss of family members, they know, and Emery County's economy frequently fluctuates with the ups and downs of the coal industry.

Those industry vacillations made Trudi nervous a decade ago when Boyd and Brink decided to go into business together, supplying materials to the mines, the oil-and-gas industry and, to a lesser extent, the area's farms.

To build the company's office/warehouse, which was fitted immediately with a big tire swing for the grandkids to play in, "we mortgaged the house. That's when she went a little bit nervous," said Boyd.

Better known to most people in coal country as Long Ass, he was a high school basketball star in Escalante who met Trudi while both attended the College of Eastern Utah. After he completed his college hoops career at Southern Utah, the couple moved to Cleveland.

Boyd worked for a few years at the Deer Creek coal mine, where he picked up the irreverent nickname, but began spending more and more time delivering parts out of his home. Brink, meanwhile, was working for a natural gas company when, "I saw an opportunity that I could provide some of the materials they were using. A couple of good friends [in the industry] committed to go with me."

So father and son hooked up. Trudi came on board to do the books. Even if they do little of this work, the Griffins retained the Chute Supply company name Boyd selected when much of his time was spent applying a polyethylene liner to the chutes where coal trucks dump their loads at power plants.

Nowadays, their focus is on replenishing fire extinguishers depleted in mine training exercises (Murray Energy went through hundreds for a spell), safety glasses, screwdrivers, piping for irrigation systems and road culverts, knee pads, chain-link fencing, rags, emergency food supplies, pieces of chain, WD-40, paint and all kinds of gloves.

When needed, Brink's four younger sisters also pitch in, paid off in beef and ham steaks from livestock raised on the family's 60-acre alfalfa farm. And before he died last spring, Trudi's dad, Jim Ward, came by early every morning "to throw a mop around." Working so closely around family is not always easy, Brink admitted.

"Sometimes we stand in the middle of the floor screaming at each other, and then the next day we're OK. About every three months we have it out and then it's good for another three months," he said. "If we didn't have the type of relationships we have, there's no way this thing would work."

But so far, so good, Trudi added. "Our goal was never to get rich. We just want to be able to, each of us, make a good living. It makes up for it to have Brink here with us." And, Boyd interjected, "we have the grandkids a couple of days a week."