Crews Too Late To Save 16 Who Phoned For Help
A single ray of hope given Saturday night was blasted Sunday when two rescuers brought out the body of Tom Callahan, assistant mine boss, the heroic foreman who directed the building of brattice to keep gases off. Callahan, working near an air shaft when the blast occurred, gathered 15 other workers, made way to an offset in the mine wall and put a brattice. He telephoned. "hurry, Hurry! We have erected brattice. There are 16 of us. We are alive and waiting. Hurry, we've only a little air."
For five hours after the fatal blast had rocked the mine, Thomas Callahan, assistant mine foreman, continued to telephone this message and urged the rescue workers on in their fight against deadly gases.
Two hours later a team of rescue workers broke through the brattice work. In the main entry, some 3,000 feet back, rescuers came upon pg 20
the bodies of Callahan and his men. Callahan and his companions were dead, victims of the gas which had seeped through the hurriedly erected barricade.
Apparently the deadly gases had escaped through the brattice, and they made a futile break for the outside, being overcome as they struggled toward the airshaft that had been their hope for life.
Rescuers said recovery of bodies was not their mission, because so long as there was hope for any of the entombed, they would pass any others bodies located and continue efforts to reach any who are alive.
Slender Hope for Entombed Miners
Grimly determined to hang on to the slightest hope for the 162 men still in the pit wrecekd by an explosion Saturday afternoon, rescue teams from practically every part of the state continued their search of the black pit 350 feet down in the bowels of the earth. As time wore on, the hope faded, but the rescue teams forged ahead relentlessly. Twenty-seven rescue teams took part in searching through the gas-filled chambers of the mine in eight-hour shifts.
Rescue workers, fresh from their turn in the effort to reach living men, hoped that they would find some alive. They pointed to the fact the several men had remained alive in the mine about ten hours.
Fifty-nine bodies had been recovered from the workings up to this afternoon. One man who came out of the mine alive died in a hospital, bringing the total of known dead to 60. pg 21
After finding nine bodies this morning near Butt 15, the rescuers pushed on, building air locks to carry the fresh air with them. At Butt 24, they came upon 11 bodies. Some of them mangled and burned, indicating that the force of the blast was felt in this region.
Officials of the mine refused to give up hope of finding any of those entombed alive, but the grime-covered rescue workers have just one word for inquirers - "gas."
A blast of smoke arising from the main shaft was the first outward indication of the disaster. Half of a wooden stairway used as an emergency exit was blown away and there was a burst of flame and smoke visible a few feet above the surface.
The blast came late in the afternoon, just after the day force had quit work. From the air shaft, about a mile and a half away from the main shaft, a rush of timbers, rocks and other debris came immediately after the first tremor was felt by the people living nearby. At the town of Mather few people knew that there had been an explosion until after they had been told of it. Some, however, felt and heard the blast that meant sorrow for nearlky every home in the little village.
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One ray of hope was brought to the surface from the grim depths of the wrecked mine at midnight. E.W. Naylor, head of the mine rescue team from the Consolidated Coal Company at Fairmont, declared on reaching the surface that he believed that there was a good chance of many of the entombed miners being found alive. He said that no rescue teams had as yet reached the working faces where most of the men were when the explosion came. Most of the men in the Mather mine he said had had sufficient mine rescue training to to build brattices across the rooms at the working face and thus save themselves. He and his crew had reached the center of the explosion which he declared to be highly localized. Fans had been working since Saturday night driving thousands of cubic feet of pure air into the workings and Naylor believed that this air would save the lives of some of the miners.
