When This West Virginia Coal Mine Exploded, 360 Workers Died. What Went Wrong?
Hyre Stalnaker was working in the carpenter shop at the coal mines of Monongah, West Virginia, when the explosion came. First he heard the blast; then he felt the tremor. Seconds later, as he rushed to the front door, he was blown backward by a force so tremendous that it shattered every window of the shop and brought auger drills and other tools crashing to the ground. It was midmorning on Friday, December 6, 1907. Stalnaker couldn’t have known it then, but he was one of the few survivors of the deadliest coal mining disaster in U.S. history.
For many of the miners working Monongah’s No. 6 and No. 8, two connected coal mines, that Friday morning had been just like any other. They walked along the bank of the West Fork River, which ran through the town, and then trudged down sloping entrances and into darkness lit only by their miner’s lamps. Monongah’s mines were some of the most productive in West Virginia, and these two in particular yielded a combined daily total of 2,500 tons of coal, according to newspaper records from 1907. Both were operated by Consolidation Coal Company, one of the largest mining conglomerates in the world.
Just before 10:30 a.m., miner J.H. Leonard was monitoring 19 mine cars as they were pulled by wire rope from the No. 6 mine. Nearly 38 tons of coal were aboard. An iron coupling pin snapped, sending all 19 cars rushing backward. Moments later, the mouth of No. 8, its sister mine, was ablaze. “[E]xplosive forces rocketed out of the mine like blasts from a cannon, the forces shredding everything in their path,” writes Davitt McAteer, a federal mine regulator during the 1990s and the author of Monongah: The Tragic Story of the 1907 Monongah Mine Disaster, a definitive history of what happened that day.
A wooden board containing the name tags for every man inside the mines was pulverized. Stalnaker’s carpenter shop was ruined. Flying debris knocked down Leonard, smashing his ankles. A 15-year-old boy, Charles Honaker, was blasted from the opening of the No. 8 mine and into the river.
Consolidation Coal Company closed all of its mines in the area that weekend and dispatched 20,000 miners for a rescue operation, but it was too late. Rescue morphed into recovery, and when all the bodies that could be found were counted, 361 coal miners were pronounced dead.
In spite of the deaths of more than 300 men, federal safety precautions weren’t legislated until 1969, following another mine explosion that claimed 78 more lives. It took another eight years for the Mine Safety and Health Administration to be formed. This federal agency enforces the provisions established by the Mine Act of 1977. The act has two key stipulations: that underground mines must conduct four safety inspections every year, and that mine rescue teams are required for all underground mines—requirements that might have saved lives at Monongah.Click here for the full pdf with photos of this tragic event.
