Tragedy in the Ashford Coal Mine
A foreman dies in a heroic but doomed effort to rescue his colleagues trapped by an explosion of fire damp deep beneath the earth.
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.
Jack Norell, a miner, 41 years old, is trapped 4,000 feet beneath the surface of a mountain. William Dinkler, the mine foreman, aged 42, is dead, and Gail Wickstrom, a miner, is dying from burns and lacerations. Michael Murphy is also suffering from severe burns and bruises. This is the damage caused by an explosion of deadly fire damp in the new mine of the Northwestern Coal & Iron company at Ashford. Miners are working in a desperate effort to reach the entombed man, but conditions are unclear, as telegraph and telephone wires to Ashford were recently swept down by a storm. Norell, with Murphy and Wickstrom, were preparing to shoot a charge to blast coal. As the blast went off, it ignited fire damp gas, sending sheets of flame through the shaft. Murphy, though burned, managed to escape the mine. Foreman William Dinkler and Edwin Kilgallon rushed in to rescue the others; Kilgallon dragged Wickstrom to safety, but Dinkler remained to search for Norell and later died from suffocation by fire damp.
“Foreman William Dinkler remained to search for Norell and when another rescue party came back, Dinkler was dead, having suffocated with fire damp in his search.”
Mining disasters were frequent in the early 20th century as Tacoma’s industrial economy expanded aggressively, often at the expense of worker safety. The name 'fire damp' (methane) is a grim reminder of the high-risk conditions that labor unions of the era spent decades fighting to regulate.
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