"This Is a Bad One"

At 7:30 p.m., miners in the deep galleries of Illinois' New Orient Coal Mine No. 2 froze in their tracks, stood staring and listening in the dark. Their ears felt clogged by a sudden compression of air. Wind touched their faces. Some heard a low, distant rumbling and a rattle of doors. That was all. They began to run, heading for the 535-ft. elevator shaft which was their first hope of escape.

As they converged on it, the choking breath of disaster caught them. Heat, smoke and blinding eddies of thick coal dust were 'blowing out of two long tunnels named Old Main North and New Main North. The walls and ceilings seemed to press in, and the miners clung to each other as they fumbled desperately along. They retched and gasped. In the murk, some met a pitiful few who had lived to walk, bruised and dazed, out of the areas near the blast.

Vigil in the Washhouse. Stumbling, black-faced, from the elevator to the safety of the concrete washhouse, most said only: "This is a bad one." In nearby West Frankfort (pop. 11,251), the news spread fast. In the high-school gymnasium, the loudspeaker broke urgently through the cheers of the basketball fans: "Dr. Barnett, please report to the New Orient mine." Within minutes, the gym was emptying and scores of automobiles were heading past West Frankfort's bright blaze of Christmas lights to Illinois Highway 37 and the turnoff to the mine.

As night wore on, state police set up roadblocks, and stopped cars to allow free access to ambulances, and mine-rescue crews. Visitors were turned back. But West Frankfort's terrified wives and mothers simply left the road, climbed fences, and walked across frozen fields. Some wore only nightgowns, slippers and coats. Some brought children. They walked into the cold, barren-walled washhouse, silent and white-faced. They looked up at their men's street clothes, hanging from ceiling ropes. They waited.

Checkup Below Ground. In the Southern Illinois fields, New Orient No. 2, operated by the Chicago, Wilmington & Franklin Coal Co., was known as a safe mine. It had killed men in explosions before, but relatively small accidents, in the philosophy of the miner, are inevitable. It was modern, mechanized, efficient --and huge: the biggest shaft coal mine in the world. Its twelve miles of tunnels produced record yields of bituminous coal: 15,385 tons in one eight-hour shift.

A state mine inspector had finished a seven-day checkup of the whole mine only nine days before the blast. And at 6 o'clock, an hour and a half before the explosion, it had been checked again and pronounced free of gas. The 218-man night shift, the last miners scheduled to work before Christmas, had gone underground in high spirits. But somehow, the dangerous, odorless methane gas had collected. At 7:30, its explosion turned miles of tunnel into wreckage.

Rescue crews, who went back into the smoke and dust with oxygen masks were appalled at what they found. Miles of track lay twisted and ripped from its bed. Heavy loading machines and steel pit cars were overturned. Miles of telephone and power lines were out. Worse, fire was smoldering-in the blasted entries and ventilation systems had been knocked out. At best count, 113 men had got to the surface after the explosion. Many of the 105 missing had been working at least two miles from the elevator shaft down the wrecked entries.

Bodies in the Gym. Rescuers brought only bad news to the surface: New Orient No. 2 was the worst U.S. mine disaster since the explosion at Centralia No. 5, which killed in miners in March 1947.* At week's end, 62 blanket-covered bodies had been carried out of the elevator, past weeping women, to ambulances. Barring a miracle, there would be 43 more.

The day after the explosion, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch charged that the mine management had ignored advice from two federal mine inspectors that abandoned mine workings should either be sealed or ventilated, and that the air used for ventilating them should not be distributed to the rest of the mine. Mine Superintendent John R. Foster hotly insisted that "these are [both] strictly controversial matters."

West Frankfort was not listening to the sound of argument. On Christmas Eve, 1951, it devoted itself to the dead, who waited on tarpaulin sheets on the floor of the junior high-school gymnasium, to be recognized and bidden farewell.

*The worst in U.S. history: the 1907 Monongah, W. Va. disaster. Dead: 361.

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