Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 June 1890 — THIRTY LIVES LOST. [ARTICLE]

THIRTY LIVES LOST.

An explosion of fire-damp in the Hill Farm mines, at Dunbar, Pa., on the 16th resulted in the death of thirty miners. At 7 o’clock the gang turned, in at the mines the smaller gang drifting off to the left, while the larger, some thirty-five in number, drifted to the right and descended some eight hundred feet from the surface and at least a mile from the opening. These two drifts are connected, but the connection is from the main stem, some half mile from the entrance. The mine, it seems’, had been somewhat troubled with water, find an air shaft had been drilled from the surface to the juncture of the right and left shafts, where the water seemed most abundant. As the miners branched off from this point they knew that an air-hole had been drilled there that had not yet been broken into the mine, but they did not know that the shaft was to be broken into that day, this shaft, by the way, being a six -inch hole. A miner named Kerwin had been left in the right drift near where that branch joined the mine’s exit, and in the course of his labors broke into the perpendicular shaft. The moment this was broken into a flood of water gushed out, and Kerwin and a man named Landy standing by yelled out for some one to save the men in the right drift, as the water poured down the hill in a stream, and he feared they would drown. A heavy flow of fire-damp followed the rush of waters and soon igniting, an explosion resulted with the fatal conclusion as above reported, The usual sad scenes of those awful disasters, so often recorded, were Repeated in all the details. The excitement at Dunbar, Pa., was intense on the 19th, when the report came from the patient diggers away down in the shaft where the miners are entombed, that a faint ’’pick, pick” could be heard from the inside, and the rescuers were inspired with renewed vigor and fresh courage.