Fatal Blasting Accident at Blue Mountain
A foreman is killed in a gruesome explosion while attempting to clear a stalled dynamite charge on the railroad grade.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A force of men have lately been employed by Pold Bros., contractors, at or near Blue Mountain station, in blasting out a cut for the railroad grade. Last Friday afternoon a charge of giant powder was placed in position and the fuse ignited, but the explosion did not follow in proper time as expected, and after waiting a few minutes, a man named George Lamkins, who had charge of the work, approached the place to see what the trouble was. He commenced picking out the charge preparatory to a new priming, when the powder exploded, hurling Lamkins, together with a mass of rock and dirt, 100 feet in the air. Four other men who were standing some distance away, watching Lamkins' movements, were considerably injured by falling rocks, but none seriously. Lamkins' remains were torn and mutilated almost beyond recognition. He was buried Sunday in the Weston cemetery.
“Lamkins' remains were torn and mutilated almost beyond recognition.”
Railroad and infrastructure expansion in the 1880s was an incredibly dangerous labor environment, often involving high-risk explosives. Today, our infrastructure projects are governed by rigorous OSHA safety standards, though the human toll of dangerous manual labor remains a persistent theme in industrial work.
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