Shocking Catastrophe

Feilding Star, Volume XII, Issue 17, 26 July 1890, Page 4

Shocking Catastrophe

• _ Dtjnbas (P. A), June 16. Thiß morning at 11.30 o'clock a sudden roar shook the lowly miners' dwellings, on Hill's farm at Fayete County, near this place. In a moment the f eaif ul news spreak that the mine had exploded; A rush was made to the mouth of the pit, but ingress was impossible, as the smoke in dense Volumes was issuing forth. Fifty-two miners had gone to work this morning and were in tbe stope when the explosion occurred. Of these 52, 18 were in the left heading. Those in the left heading got out all right. The retreat of the others was cut off, and not one escape'd^ Twenty-one were married with families. The mine it seems, has been some what troubled with water, and an air shaft had been drilled from the surface to the junction of the right and left shafts, where the water seemed to be most abundant. As; the. miners, branched off from tbis point, ihey hnow an air hole had been drilled; there, but they did not know the shaft was to be broken into to-day. This shaft, by the way, being a. six inch hole, a miner named Mer win 'had been left in the right ■drift near where that branch -joined the' miners' exit, and in the course of his lab-burs broke into the perpendicular shaft. The moment this was broken into a flood of water rushed ou*fc,^ and Merwin and. a man named Xjtfridy ''stkhdmg'^hy' "yelled out for •someone to stfve ' the men in the right »hafj - >> as the_ water poured down the ihilLin ; streams,, aqd they feared they "woubl drown.,/ Young- David Hays, who-gaw the affair, leaped forward at the^all and turned down, the drift towards, his endangered comrades below. -Ju.st ; as he had passed the air shaft that, had been; broken into the rush of the waters changed into an ugly roar Tvhich+blanched the cheeks of the men. Tne.: daring young man carried an ■open burning miner's lamp in his hai, and he had hardly taken a step beyond the Toariug shaft when a spark ignited the reservoir of deadly fire-damp, and he sank a Corpse towards the man he had whom hopes to •-save and 'the men whom he had certainly" doomed.' In an instant an unquenchable fire sprang up in the tnine-foot vein just between the entrance and the right drift, for ever shutting off the 32 men imprisoned there. Poor old David Hays, the father of the mistaken hero, driven ?mad by the fate of his son, dashed iinto the sulphurous smoke and was only to fall blindly by the side of his son and to be.dragged out *an.bpur later by James Shelfin. The ifire, fanned by the air from the main (drift and from the fatal shaft, soon into an awful conflagration. I IThe miners from the left drift reached the * surface blackened and bruised, "■"but safe, and they tell a fearful story the sight beyond the blazing coal ron the right. Sounds were heard 'from the entombed men as late as ona o'cldck this afternoon. These grew 'weaker and weaker, and half an hour ilatereven the most hopeful of the vwiUing rescuers could hear nothing.