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John Bartlow Martin / The Blast in Centralia No. 5: A Mine Disaster No One Stopped
Already the crowd had gathered. Cars clogged the short, black rock road from the highway to the mine, cars bearing curious spectators and relatives and friends of the men entombed. State troopers and deputy sheriffs and the prosecuting attorney came, and officials from the company, the Federal Bureau of Mines, the Illinois
Department of Mines and Minerals. Ambulances ar- rived, and doctors and nurses and Red Cross workers and soldiers with stretchers from Scott Field. Mine res- cue teams came, and a federal rescue unit, experts bur- dened with masks and oxygen tanks and other awkward paraphernalia of disaster. . . .
One hundred and eleven men were killed in that explosion. Killed needlessly, for almost everybody concerned had known for months, even years, that the mine was dangerous. Yet nobody had done any- thing effective about it. Why not? Let us examine the background of the explosion. Let us study the mine and the miners, Joe Bryant and Bill Rowekamp and some others, and also the numerous people who might have saved the miners’ lives but did not. The miners had appealed in various directions for help but got none, not from their state government nor their federal government nor their employer nor their own union. (In threading the maze of official- dom we must bear in mind four agencies in author- ity: The State of Illinois, the United States
Government, the Centralia Coal Company, and the
United Mine Workers of America, that is, the UMWA of John L. Lewis.) Let us seek to fix responsibility for the disaster. . . .
The Centralia Mine No. 5 was opened two miles south of Centralia in 1907. Because of its age, its maze of underground workings is extensive, covering per- haps six square miles, but it is regarded as a medium- small mine since it

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