This is an excerpt from an essay written by Pat Noel about the explosion in the Dutch Creek No. 1 Mine in Coal Basin on April 15, 1981. The full essay can be found in the late Stan K. Badett’s book “Digging in the Dark,” a copy of which was recently brought into The Sopris Sun office by Stan’s wife, Dorene Badgett.
It was a mixed crew working in the new longwell section that day. Dan Litwiller, for example, was a 19-year-old Glenwood Springs kid who’d just started in the mine — “green hats” they called the new guys — and was thinking about using the money to go to college in the fall. He probably didn’t need the job since his old man was the district judge and everybody knew the family was loaded.
On the other hand, Glen Sharp was 31, had a wife, five kids, plenty of bills and, methane gas or not, he needed that paycheck badly.
Before [John] Ayala cranked up the big radio-controlled Joy Continuous Miner, there was the usual crew chatter: women, sex, cars, weather, bosses, kids … whatever. Then they began to mine the face, shearing off the coal, loading it on the buggy, hauling it to the belt — the same things they’d done a million times before. The dull routine of it began to settle in; the familiarity of it bred a tiny contempt; and they waited for a daydream to take them through the shift.
Then something happened.
Something that sounded like … thump … thump … thump. A push. A big one. Thousands of tons of fine coal were vomiting out from the face.
The enormous amounts of released methane automatically shut off the mining machine, and Tom Vetter, a 24-year-old whose two brothers also worked in the mines, jumped up on top of the stalled machine to position the brattice curtain so that the air flow would suck the methane out of the tunnel.
Although the machine had stopped shearing the coal after the outburst, the 440-volt power cable was still feeding current to it and its lights were still on. There was a gap around the headline lens which, somehow, had escaped detection over the course of several safety inspections. It was just a little bitty gap.
Then somebody yelled out, “Turn off the power!” Somebody else shut down the feeder cable and the lights on the miner blinked out.
And in that instant, in that nano-
second blink, the tiniest spark in the world arced across that little bitty gap in the headlight lens casing and … 240,000 cubic feet of methane gas exploded in a thud which could be felt nine miles away in Redstone. In turn, the gas explosion created an enormous swirl of coal dust which ignited in a secondary explosion of blast and flame carrying thousands of feet beyond the epicenter.
Rescue crews fought fire and gas for three days trying to get to the stricken miners as wives, friends, family and the national TV media crowded around the coke ovens at the mine road entrance waiting for news. At 4 o-clock on the morning of April 18, rescue teams carried out 15 bodies, stacked them in the beds of two pickup trucks “so that they were stacked like cordwood, so heavy that the springs on the trucks sagged almost to the ground,” and drove them past the sleeping TV camera crews to the mortuary in Glenwood Springs.
For many of those living in the Valley towns of Carbondale, Redstone, Marble, El Jebel and Glenwood Springs, it was the cruelest April they had ever known. Hundreds attended memorial services and monuments were erected in city parks. For a time, the topic of coal mining and coal miners occupied center stage in the hearts and minds of Valley residents.