Bluefield Daily Telegraph

Bluefield Daily Telegraph:

April 22, 1938 is the date of the mine explosion at the Keen Mountain Mine of Red Jacket Coal Corp., which claimed the lives of 45 miners. 

J. W. (Slim) Elam, the only man inside the mine who escaped death from the blast, has saved a copy of the Bluefield Telegraph, dated April 24, 1938.

The major part of the article describing the blast has been salvaged by Mr. Elam and that is what follows: 

With all of the forty-five victims of Friday's mine blast removed from the Keen Mountain operation of the Red Jacket Coal corporation, sorrowing relatives in the town of Hanger, Va., awaited today the return of the bodies of their loved ones. 

The last of the bodies was recovered from the mine at 4:30 yesterday afternoon. Upon identification the bodies were taken to Richlands and placed in improvised morgues in that town along with others recovered from the ill-fated mine early in the day.

A crew of embalmers, who had been summoned by the regular morticians of Richlands, worked diligently all day Saturday and throughout last night preparing the bodies for burial. 

The bodies will be moved into Hanger early today. No definite plans had been arranged for the burial of the victims, most of whom are natives of Hanger and immediate section of Buchanan county.

Reports circulated late yesterday to the effect that one man in the mine had escaped the horrible fate of fellow workers were branded as false by officials of the Red Jacket Company last night, who said: 

"No one who was in the mine at the time of the blast escaped."

Sweating sooty-faced members of the mine rescue squads worked in thirty-minute relays in the furnace-like atmosphere until they had explored every avenue of the big mine. Two members were overcome by bad air which had to be blown out before the final group of bodies could be removed.

For many hours the crews worked grimly, without hope of finding life among the victims trapped by the blast, but unwilling to cease their efforts until every miner had been accounted for.

State mining officials had set no definite date for the official inquest last night.

Physicians at Mattie Williams hospital, Richlands, were more hopeful yesterday for the recovery of Clarence Combs and K.W. Elams, the two men who were injured by the blast. They with Ed Harris are the only living survivors of the night crew. Harris, who was not so seriously injured, was removed to his home in Hanger.

From his hospital cot Combs offered a feeble smile and vacuous idea as to what happened. 

"I was standing near the main entry and the next thing I knew I woke up under a motor. It was terribly hot," he said. 

Among the dead are several relatives. Tom May and Lonnie May were twin brothers. There were two Ratliff brothers and a father and a son, by the name of Ratliff, listed among the victims.

This was the first major disaster to strike the newly-developed field in Buchanan county and was a nation's major disaster of 1938.

The tremendous crowd that had gathered in Hanger on the evening of the explosion dwindled fast and when the last of the victims was removed yesterday afternoon, there were only a few hundred persons in the community. 

Don Shilds, tipple employee, who was down in the tipple dropping cars when the detonation rocked the community, gave this version of the blast: 

"I just happened to be looking up in that direction just in time to see John Blevins and Coy Reed come hurtling down the hillside a half mile away."  Officials estimated that Blevins and Reed, both decapitated, were employed respectively as a motorman and brakeman and were priming their electric locomotives to take a final "man trip" into the mine.  A four-car train of similar cargo had vanished into the yawning entrance ten minutes before. It bore some forty men into the cavernous workings to begin the night shift. 

A slightly less number would have met the same fate of their predecessors except for the policy of changing shifts at slight intervals to allow the miners leaving shifts in more distant areas to reach the surface. 

While Blevins and Reed, who were to be hurled into eternity the next minute, manipulated their oil cans, the men to be carried in on the second trip made final preparations at the lamp house. 

Far below in the valley through which courses the babbling Levisa river, loiterers at store fronts witnessed the tragic spectacle from beginning to end. 

They saw a sudden gust of black, enveloping clouds spurt out of "B" entry, as if a 16 - inch gun had been discharged beyond the yawning entry.

There was a jarring roar, "unlike anything I ever heard," said one witness. It was followed almost instantly by a flash of flame from the main entry, several hundred yards around a bend in the tramroad.

There was a second awesome tremor that seemed as though the entire earth was aquiver.

Simultaneously, Don Shields, down on the tipple, and perhaps others unnamed, watched horrified as the bodies of Blevins and Reed came hurtling toward them.

The first blast, caused by an accumulation of combustible coal dust that was set off by some unknown fateful spark, occurred in what is known as the "barrier" section. It gathered explosive force as it spread with lightning swiftness to the main entry area, which accounted for the second blast.