“The Pennsylvania Miners’ Story”

Sunday at 9 p.m. on WABC/Ch. 7

½

DON’T watch “The Pennsylvania Miners’ Story” if you’re claustrophobic.

Much of ABC’s made-for-TV re-creation of last summer’s dramatic rescue of nine trapped coal miners in Somerset County, Pa., takes place down in a flooded mine whose cramped confines are bound to make a claustrophobe break out in hives.

It’s wet, dark and the ceiling is too low for the miners to stand upright during their 77-hour ordeal.

That’s how long it took for engineers to bring special heavy drilling equipment to the site and bore a hole wide enough to drop a rescue basket down to the miners, who were raised one-at-a-time to the surface.

The entire nation followed the story and rejoiced when all nine were rescued without serious injury – a drama that inevitably had to be made into a TV movie and packaged into a new book out this month, co-written by the miners with the help of a ghostwriter.

For a quickie TV movie, ABC’s rendition of the story is surprisingly rich in authentic details, particularly in the casting of beefy working-class types who look the part of Pennsylvania miners. (Among others, viewers will recognize John Ratzenberger – Cliff from “Cheers” – in a non-comedic role that’s refreshing for him.)

Makeup technicians have covered the miners in just the right layer of realistic grime and the scenes of the miners at work seem so real that they look as if they could have been shot in an actual coal mine.

The movie’s best scenes are near the beginning, when a piece of mining machinery accidentally pushes through the wall of an old shaft that was filled with millions of gallons of water, and at the end, when the miners are pulled up from their hole.

In between, though, we wait – along with the miners and their families.

And while the waiting was unquestionably dramatic in real life, the time between the flood and the rescue makes for a tedious hour smack in the middle of Sunday night’s movie.

That, of course, is the pitfall of TV movies, which have a way of turning extraordinary events into merely ordinary ones.