Death in Main West

At 3:29 p.m. the lights blinked out in the Centralia Coal Company's Mine No. 5, near Centralia, Ill. Wiry, redheaded Earl Wilkinson had just coasted his squat, electric locomotive out of a tunnel, banged to a stop in a low cavern near the mine's elevator shaft. He stiffened, listened intently. He heard no sound. But a wind came out of the subterranean darkness and enveloped him in clouds of coal dust and coppery-smelling smoke. "God," he said aloud, "it's a bad windy* or an explosion."

He ran toward the shaft, finally saw hat lamps glowing in the choking gloom, heard men's voices. Slowly, fumblingly, the men divided up, began feeling their way back down the tunnel. When they reached the entrance to a drift called Main West they knew what had happened. Somewhere, far down Main West's four-mile bore, gas or coal dust had exploded, like powder going off in a gun barrel. And almost all of the mine's 142-man day shift was inside. Retching and staggering, some of the explorers tried to get in. One of them dropped and died before they were forced back. Finally, hardly able to walk, they made it back to the elevator, rode up the shaft, emerged dazedly into the tipple.

The Martians. The news spread fast. By late afternoon a crowd was gathering at No. 5. It was as though the cast for some vast and somber drama was assembling before curtain time. Scores of miners' wives seated themselves numbly on benches in the mine washroom. Rescue crews from towns all around the coal fields--from Belleville, Herrin, Du Quoin, Eldorado, West Frankfort--stood in their hard-toed shoes studying a map of No. 5. Near them were reporters, photographers, state troopers, Red Cross workers, and the drivers of the hearses parked outside.

Shortly after nightfall the first 30-man crew shouldered the straps of oxygen tanks, pulled on masks and walked like Martians to the big cage elevator. It began its 540-ft. descent. After that, every four hours, night & day, a new rescue crew went down. Every four hours a black-faced, exhausted gang came up and terror hung in the tipple as women studied their faces. After a while bodies came up, too, each one on a stretcher, and each covered, neatly, but not warmly, by a blanket.

The women sat quietly all day, all night; old women made gross by lives of toil, pale young women with high heels and disordered hair. They stared. Sometimes, with vague and automatic obedience, they drank coffee or ate sandwiches which were offered them. Sometimes a woman would unlock the padlocked chain on which her dead husband's street clothes had been hoisted to the washroom ceiling. She would take the clothes down, fold them, and leave. But the room stayed quiet--so quiet at times that the distant tolling of church bells, the twitter of sparrows in the rafters, could be heard with startling distinctness.

"Name the Baby Joe." Catholic nuns in black and starched white waited at rough, wooden tables, poured stiff jolts of whiskey into paper cups for the grimy, beaten rescue crews. The news from underground was always bad. They found dozens of men who had been killed by the black damp (carbon dioxide) which had rolled out of old side entries opened by the blast. But it was worse farther on. Crews working near the blast had been burned, riddled with flying coal, and squeezed by concussion until their chests caved in and their tongues protruded.

The search ended after four days, three and a half miles in Main West. Fourteen men, the last of No. 5's day shift, lay face down on the tunnel floor.They had not been killed outright. But, being miners, they had known that help would never reach them in time and each had left a note.

One man had scrawled: "It looks like the end for me. I love you honey more than life itself. You are the sweetest wife in the world. Goodbye, Honey and Dickey." Another note was addressed to two boys: "Be good boys. Please your father. O Lord help me." Some had been jotted down at intervals: "I am fine at 5:30--is in bad shape, going on and moaning. Tell-- I forgive her. Everyone going." Another read: "My dear wife: Goodbye. Name the baby Joe so you will have a Joe. Love, all. Dad."

Faint Sound. In all, 111 men had died. It was the worst mine disaster in the U.S. since 195 miners died in an explosion at Mather, Pa. in 1928. To miners and many a plain citizen it seemed like a senseless tragedy. Mine inspectors had been denouncing Centralia's No. 5 for years--one recent report had listed many dangerous violations of safety codes, but little had ever been done to correct them.

By week's end the force of the Centralia blast had disturbed both state and national politics. Critics of Illinois' Republican Governor Dwight Green tried to bring him to task for the fact that No. 5 had been allowed to run. In Washington, John L. Lewis seized thunderously on the fact that the Government was still, technically, the operator of mines. He cried that his enemy, Secretary of the Interior J. A. ("Cap") Krug, was a murderer, and called 400,000 U.S. soft-coal miners out for a week's "memorial" holiday.

The sound of all this came faintly to Centralia. Centralia was burying its dead.

* Miner's jargon for a flameless explosion.

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