The Cherry Mine Disaster of 1909 | Episode 83

We’re going to hell! Well, not hell exactly. We’re going to rural Illinois, but for the purposes of this introduction, we are going to be spending time today in hell.
 
On today’s episode:  you’re going to learn why fourth graders make such poor employees; you’ll learn how to properly panic like a professional; and you will learn how to tell people to “get out” using nothing but a shotgun and morse code.

And if you were listening to this on Patreon… you would also learn the story of the Patron Saint who watches over people who explode; you'd learn why underground coal fires are the disaster you can tell your great, great, great, great, great grandchildren about; you would hear a quick anecdote about nicotine poisoning in the workplace and inappropriate banana usage; and you would find out who gets coal for Christmas.

This was another bad-day-at-work episodes, but it was a good one, because it happened in such a small, unassuming place, but had safety ramifications that spread around the world. This is dedicated to everyone who loves mining and mining disasters. And on that note, most people don't think about mining very often - so this is my love letter to the industry. You love mining, you ask? No, not overly, but in my opinion, our entire evolution as a society and as a species would have been impossible without men willing to climb into the earth to do the work too frightening or dangerous for the masses. On the upside, at least it pays well, and we do get the occasional story out of it. 


















Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/doomsday-history-s-most-dangerous-podcast--4866335/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
We're going to Hell, well, not Hell exactly, We're going
to rural Illinois. But for the purpose of this introduction,
we are going to be spending our time today in Hell. Hello,

(00:24):
and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we're
going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and
awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from
their oad human history and around the world. On today's episode,
you'll learn why fourth graders make such lousy employees. You'll

(00:45):
learn how to panic properly like a professional, and you
will learn how to tell people to get out using
nothing but a shotgun and Morse code. And if you
were listening on Patreon, you would learn the story of
the patron saint who watches over people who explode. You
would learn why underground coal fires are the disaster you
can tell your great great great great great great grandchildren about.

(01:07):
You would hear a quick anecdote about nicotine poisoning in
the workplace and inappropriate banana usage, and you would find
out who gets coal for Christmas. This is not the
show you play around kids, or while eating, or even
in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself
a little more historically engaged and learn something that could
potentially save your life. Our work is done. So with

(01:29):
all that said, shoot the kids out of the room,
put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin.
You know who's a big fan of the show. The
United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Hey guys, Hey Ted,
Happy birthday. Ah good group. The Bureau of Labor Statistics

(01:53):
is kind of like YELP, but for jobs. Most people
think they just keep count of unemployed people, but they
actually are there to help guide big wigs and movers
and shakers by offering up economic trend forecasts and data
like consumer price indexes or labor cost analysis, you know
that kind of thing. But they also keep data on

(02:14):
job safety, and I don't mind telling you the Survey
of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses and the Sensus of Fatal
Occupational Injuries are definitely on my poll list. The office
was started back in eighteen eighty four to collect info
about labor disputes and working conditions, because back then, flipping
through the want ads felt kind of like, well, how

(02:35):
do I want to die? You would think back then,
handling explosives would probably be the most stressful or dangerous
thing that you could choose to do to get by,
And I can only tell you that it was in
the top ten. Cutting down trees and catching fish could
be easily as deadly back then, I mean everything was.
We have this metaphorical image in our heads of workers'

(02:58):
bodies looping through the car and wheels of machines to
lubricate them with their blood. And it was never quite
that bad, but it was never really that good either.
Most everything was a little more blood thirsty back then,
and lumberjackson fishermen are still some of our most dangerous
jobs to this day. So what does the bureau think

(03:19):
about coal mining? It's a great way to make some
money while shortening your life expectancy. Back at the turn
of the last century, according to the numbers, about two
percent of the entire American workforce worked in coal mines.
I mean that is one in fifty. But the death
rate back then was three point two per thousand people.

(03:43):
And let me say this. In twenty fifteen, El Salvador
had a bit of a gang problem. They called it
one of the most dangerous countries in the world, and
it had a homicide rate of one hundred and six
per one hundred thousand people. For reference, the homicide rate
in Canada is about one point nine per one hundred
thousand citizens, and down in the US it kind of

(04:06):
fluctuates between six and eight per one hundred thousand citizens.
The death rate amongst coal miners was closer to three
hundred and twenty for every one hundred thousand people, So yeah,
kind of a big deal. It should come as no
surprise to learn that you are more likely to be
killed working in a coal mine than working at Applebee's.

(04:27):
And if you manage not to die, you still might
get to enjoy a non fatal injury or a severe
illness from your experience. So, whether you like black long
or claustrophobia, or getting conically hollowed out by a pickaxe
to the head, or being buried in a cave in
or blown up in a gas explosion, coal mining offers

(04:50):
much more than just a paycheck. And yes, the risk
of death was extremely high, but the work was extremely
necessary because coal is primarily used as fuel to generate
electric power, and just under forty percent of all the
electricity in the whole wide world comes from coal, and

(05:11):
they also use it to purify or into steel, you know,
steal kind of popular stuff and coal. It's just sitting there.
And why, Well, to answer that, we are heading back
in time about three hundred million years ago, to the
end of the Carboniferous period, and it's a little different there.

(05:33):
I don't think I'm gonna have to ask you to
keep your hands and feet inside the car and don't
touch anything. Once you get a chance to see the
local wildlife from three hundred million years ago, don't worry.
There's no dinosaurs running around, just giant dog sized scorpions
and spiders and eight foot long millipedes. And they've got
these ten foot long eels with two legs and no

(05:55):
arms and way too many teeth. We are here in
a strange time of giant insects, before the first trees
appeared on Earth. However, sharks are here. They've already been
cleaning the ocean's plate for one hundred million years. And
I love saying that because sharks being older than trees
is one of my all time favorite historical facts. Back then,

(06:18):
the Earth was completely blanketed by dense, tangled forests of
hundred foot tall ferns and extensive wetland ecosystems, So yeah,
there's going to be a slightly sulfuric kind of a tropical, piny,
swampy smell that you're never going to get out of
your clothes. And the carboniferous period lasted for about sixty

(06:39):
million years. They say that this was a time of
exceptional evolution and ecological complexity, where untold numbers of plant
species flourished and evolved in profusion, and I'm talking about
plants the size of houses, so yeah, it's a pretty
cool time to visit. And then everything died, and all

(07:02):
of these dead plants were gradually buried and then baked
under pressure over hundreds of millions of years until it
transformed into the coal beds that we mind today. And
the cycle repeated so many times, over so many years,
and now we find these deposits kind of buried like
raisins in Helen's potato salad. He got some close to
the surface and others are deeper underground. Just think of

(07:26):
it as combustible organic rock, which we love. And yes,
it is the most polluting of all the available fossil fuels,
but it's cheap and its abundant, and a long time
ago we basically decided to roll up our sleeves and
tie off with a rubber band and design our entire
society around it. Now, getting it is an entirely different story,

(07:50):
and heavy machinery to scrape the earth clear of everything
that used to make it esthetic or beautiful, to get
at the goods beneath the surface. We call it open
pit or strip mining, and it offers relative safety in
exchange for the permanent destruction of the landscape. But what
happens when all of that delicious surface ore or coal

(08:12):
or whatever runs out, Well, that is when miners needed
to find a way to access deeper bodies of ore,
and thus tunnels were invented. Well, sort of. Humans have
been digging tunnels into the earth to access all kinds
of stuff for thousands of years, and you won't hear
this everywhere, but it's my belief that our entire evolution

(08:32):
as a society and as a species was powered by
men who were willing to climb into the earth to
do the work too frightening or too dangerous for the masses.
And yes, it certainly is dangerous work, but at least
it pays well. And for those reasons, they call it
black gold same as oil, because they both have value
on the commercial markets, just like gold. And the thing

(08:55):
about the towns that spread up around these operations is
they can only really have so many employers to go around.
So the dominant industry like coal mining as an example,
can become completely intertwined with the whole identity of the
surrounding community, and that is how it gets its hooks
into people. There's a certain camaraderie between people who risk

(09:17):
their lives for work, and again, without a lot of
other options available, all this sense of unity and shared
experience makes it hard to leave, and so the jobs
become generational. They get passed down with pride across entire communities. Now,
down in a coal mine, there is no such thing
as nine to five or natural light, or canaries for

(09:40):
that matter. You might have heard about that at some point.
They used to bring birds down into mines because they
worry about carbon monoxide and methane. Mostly carbon monoxide because
it's odorless and colorless and will shut you off like
a light, and methane because it's flammable. It's basically that
little birds have such wee little life ungs, and they
breathe so fast that if there were dangerous gases present,

(10:04):
the canario would quickly die and give everyone else a
warning and a chance to flee. Because yes, everything in
a mine, from the coal to the gases, to the
wooden support beams to the donkeys, are all either poisonous
or flammable. You get methane from rotting veggies deep underground, Well,
it's not that simple. What happens is microorganisms anaerobically digests

(10:27):
some of the organic matter that makes up coal and
then farts out methane as a byproduct, which builds up
and is squeezed free from the pressure of the surrounding
rocks when you start poking around down there. So in
a weird way, mining is a little bit like a
big game of pull my finger, only if you smell it,
you lose. Which makes it really crazy to me that

(10:49):
miners love to smoke. I mean, yeah, they're not there
for their health, but it just seems counterintuitive that people
didn't really think about the connection between cigarettes and flammable gas.
And the thing too, is when it mixes with coal dust,
the combination with methane has the potential for explosivity. Again
not on the brochure, and the thing about explosions in

(11:12):
mines is that they stir up even more coal dust,
which can lead to even more explosions. And the canaries
were replaced with electronic detectors back in nineteen eighty six.
But we're not in nineteen eighty six. Our story takes
place November the thirteenth, nineteen oh nine. In the first
decade of the nineteen hundreds, about two thousand miners would

(11:35):
die every year across the country. In northern Illinois alone,
two or three miners would die every week. Part of
my manners, this is a lot of death. We are
getting ahead of ourselves. Today we will be spending our
time in Cherry, Illinois, a village in Bureau County, plunk
in the heart of Illinois farmland, just about two hours

(11:56):
west of Chicago. It may be small, but it's it
with similarly close knit, working class communities that share amenities
and attractions. So it's all good because it lets residents
access all of the amenities they might hope for in
a bigger town while still being able to maintain that
small town lifestyle. And Cherry has a surprisingly rich cultural background.

(12:17):
Many of the early settlers to the area hailed from Italy, Poland, Hungary,
Austria and other European countries who were drawn there mostly
for the mining and agriculture. You might not realize that
Illinois is one of the largest coal producing states in
the entire country. There's an entire basin named after it
that stretches across Indiana and western Kentucky that contains a

(12:40):
ridiculous amount of coal. The Cherry Mine was operated by
the Saint Paul Coal Company and supplied coal for the Chicago,
Milwaukee and Saint Paul Railroad. It was opened back in
nineteen oh five, and in less than a handful of
years they were hauling three hundred thousand tons of coal
out of the ground every year, and all of this

(13:01):
with carts and donkeys. But if you find it easier
to understand using Dodge caravans with the Stowe Goes seats
folded at about fifty pounds per square foot, that would
be eighty five thousand, five hundred and thirty Dodge caravans
filled with coal a year. You're welcome. Now, how do
I describe the setup of a three level coal mine

(13:23):
that targeted three different coal veins running through the area. Okay,
imagine three parallel shafts that were dug following the veins
horizontally across the sub landscape, and all of it bisected
by two perpendicular shafts large enough to run elevators to
get everybody and everything in and out of the ground.
Cherry consisted of three veins of coal, but only two

(13:45):
of them were being actively mined at the time of
our story. About three hundred men worked on the second vein,
and another two hundred worked on the third, which was
the deepest of the three, reaching as low as three
hundred feet, which is basically deep as a thirty story
building is tall. And the mine was pretty state of
the art for the time. It had electric lighting, and

(14:07):
they'd even declared it fireproof. The vertical shafts that I
described one was for air and the other was for
the elevators. Well, not elevators so much as think of
being winched in and out of the mine in cages.
You would take a cage from the surface down to
the second level, and from there, if you were heading
down to the third level, you just had to hoof

(14:28):
it to a separate shaft and then transfer to another
cage heading south, So it was never a straight shot
there was this new emergency cage that they'd installed between
the second and the third levels, but I don't think
it had been tested or usually. I mean, it still
had the plastic on it, and everyone was pretty sure
it wasn't even attached to the hoisting equipment. Cages would

(14:48):
rattle as men and equipment made their way down into
the mines, which themselves were alive and bustling with activity.
The air was always thick, with a scent of dirt
and dust and sweat. The tunnels were cramped and supported
by these rough hewn, kind of roughly put together wooden
beams that creak ominously under the weight of the rock above.

(15:09):
And it wasn't like a sports stadium down there. The
only light available was dim, and it created these long,
shifting shadows across the jagged walls, while the sound of
pickaxe against stone and men's grunting echoed through the passageways,
while heavily laden ore carts groaned as they were hauled
along by donkeys. Above ground, the towering head frame of

(15:30):
the Tipple building would sort and load the coal into
rail cars for transport. As the shift bell rang, a
new squad of miners would replace the weary men trudging
to the surface, always blackened from head to toe in
coal dust. The primary method of removing coal here was
the room and pillar method. And here's the idea. Miners

(15:51):
would dig out a horizontal tunnel into the coal scene,
creating a kind of a room shape, and they would
leave behind a pillar of coal in the middle to
support the ceiling. And to be clear, these were not
two by fours made out of coal. The pillars could
take up more than a third of the entire room,
but since it was the only thing keeping them from
being crushed to death, they never wanted to make them smaller.

(16:13):
As the coal was removed. Over time, the mine became
a kind of a grid of rooms and pillars, connected
by miles and miles of dark tunnels. And they say,
there's nothing quite as profound like the kind of darkness
that you experienced deep in a mine. And electric lighting
had been a thing since the eighteen eighties, but today
they were on the fritz, And yeah, it happens. So

(16:36):
the men just hung lanterns and old fashioned kerosene torches
on the walls to sea. By now today, just after lunch,
a wagonful of hay was being lowered into the mine
as a slight tangent of thought. People are always requesting
circus episodes, which I did actually produce one so far,
except that one was more about drunken firefighters getting pounded

(16:58):
on by a drunken party clients. I generally just don't
like animal stories, so it pains me to tell you
that when the men leave the mines at the end
of their shifts, the donkeys that I was talking about
do not get to join them up top for any
fresh air or cigarettes. The donkeys that powered the mines
lived most of their lives underground, maybe even got a

(17:19):
spot of the black lung you get it from inhaling
coal dust. The dust blankets your airway and then your
white blood cells go to town trying to break it down,
but it doesn't really work and they fail and they
end up damaging your lung tissue. The donkeys actually had
their own stable and was built off in a dedicated
section of the mine. They even had a stableman. As

(17:40):
many as seventy donkeys live down there. Donkeys were the
kind of immigrant labor that the mine wouldn't have survived without.
And yeah they were cared for, but I mean they
live their lives in this dark, damp, dank hell and
with no sun and terrible air quality. But for fun,
they got to pull carts of ore supplies all day

(18:01):
and then slept all night, whatever the hell that meant,
because again they never saw a sunrise or a sunset.
And I am happy to report that donkeys were eventually
phased out in lieu of mechanical mine carts, but not today.
And as the hay bales to feed them were being
moved from the main shaft to the feeding area, one
of the bales either just grazed or was dripped on

(18:24):
by a hanging kerosene torch. Now, to a guy who
regularly smokes in an enclosed space filled with potentially flammable
and explosive gas and dust, seeing a small hay fire
would have been a bit of a nothing burger or
a novelty, and the miners who passed by paided no
mine miners switching off shifts didn't even think to mention

(18:46):
it once they got up top, and they were ignoring
one of the most important things about fire. It's not
subtle fires, nature's way of waving both arms over its
head and yelling, look at me. It grows and it
grows until that novelty wears off and becomes a problem.
Fire has all the discretion of a marching band at

(19:09):
a funeral. Men began grabbing buckets and throwing water from
the stable on it, but once lit, hay burns fast
and intensely, and it puts out a ton of blinding smoke,
which did not help their aim. The smoke coming off
this thing had grown to the point where they were
pretty much guessing where to throw water. Still no need

(19:30):
to panic. Someone said that there was a water hose
on the third level, and so the plan became, Hey,
all we have to do is push this card into
the cage and send it down for a proper soaking, which, yeah,
is just taking your problem and making it someone else's problem,
I guess. And also it's not like there was an
intercom system back in nineteen oh nine, so no real

(19:51):
way to even warn them, I guess. The most communication
was just trying to be heard yelling over the sound
of mining, and everything was a game of broken telephone.
By the time there's a small fire up here gets
passed down the chain, people think there's rhubarb pie being
handed around upstairs, and here is the thing about our story.

(20:12):
When they were trying to send their funny little surprise downstairs,
the flaming hay got stuck in the cage, just sitting there,
burning away, with no way for the men to fix it. It
got to the point where they were doing everything they
could to simply try to push and dump the entire
wagon down the air shaft. And imagine you work on
the third level and mines kind of dark, like I said,

(20:35):
so you're minding your own business. You can kind of
hear some people freaking out a little bit above you
when the shaft begins to illuminate brighter and brighter, like
the sun was rising, only underground. And then all of
this comes into view with a mighty crash and flaming
straws of hay blowing everywhere. Thomas White and a handful

(20:57):
of miners were working way off in a remote part
Level three at the time, and there was no way
for them to know what was going on. That was
until their fellow miner, a man named Georgettie, ran by
and was all, okay, we got to go. What had
started as a kind of a funny party trick had
quickly spread to the support timbers and smoke had been

(21:17):
rapidly filling the tunnels. They didn't know what the story was,
and they didn't know what was happening, but it didn't matter,
because at that same moment men in other parts of
the mind were already suffocating to death before they could
even escape. The tunnels were as long as you could imagine,
but the tunnels themselves were only about eight feet tall,
so the smoke filling them descended quickly, and the air

(21:38):
quality was turning into trash. Men rang the bell for
Level two to send down the cages for rescue, but
they got crickets, so they just headed back to where
the air was better. A word was spreading fast, and
men across the third level were rushing to the main
shaft to try to escape. The problem was this had
all taken an hour or more for Level two to

(21:59):
waffle stop the flaming cart down the shaft, and during
that time, wind from the air shaft had been feeding
and fanning the flames until they ignited the wooden supports
on the second level. They were staring at an inferno
on all sides, above and below. And I do not
want you to believe that these men were all in
a state of panic. However, panic was on the menu.

(22:22):
And here is the thing. These cages were their best
bet for rescue, but they were slow. They would be
lucky to top five miles or eight klometers an hour.
I mean, that's just a leisurely walking pace, and that
is carrying the amount of weight that this thing was
designed for. While dozens of men were being hoisted to

(22:42):
the surface from the second level, many many more were
lost in the confusion, or trapped by flame or being
dropped by smoke inhalation and lack of oxygen. Operators and
workers on the surface saw the smoke pouring out of
the mine tunnels, and at first the managers downplayed it.
For forty five minutes, they assured people it was fine
to keep working. Management believed the mine's ventilation system was

(23:06):
fanning the flames and forcing smoke into the deepest parts
of the mine, so they reversed the fans to now
draw air out of the mines. Here's the thing, though,
it didn't matter what they did. They were moving air
from here to there, and all of it was helping
the fire grow out of control. When the fire department arrived,
the Saint Paul Mind Company officials were all hey, nobody

(23:28):
called you, and we don't want you going to the mines,
so why don't you just go kick rocks and mind
your own business. They're pretty adamant about it, and the
fire department countered that it was pretty clear that their
mind was on fire. But the management wasn't having it.
They were all, listen, if you're so worried, you can
throw some buckets of water down the air shaft happy,

(23:49):
And they were not. For all of human history up
till the inventions of hoses and buckets, fires were largely
put out with shovels, because shoveling dirt on a fire
kills a dead, and dirt is free. The only problem,
of course, is you might be throwing dirt laced with
flammable or chunks onto it, only making things worse. Residents

(24:11):
of Cherry, most with relatives below ground, arrived at the
site and volunteered to go down into the mind to
help with search and rescue. I mean they got to
send the cart back down empty anyways, right. They alternated
on trips down and packed as many miners as possible
into each return. The carts themselves were only designed to
hold about a half a dozen men, but they were

(24:33):
returning to the surface carrying at least twice that many,
while others chose to scramble up the jagged walls of
the shaft itself. There were emergency ladders to help, but
reportedly they kind of caught on fire, and maxing out
the cages like clown cars only slowed them down. And
that is why I believe that this entire task was

(24:54):
designed to test your ability to remain calm. If you've
ever waited in patient for an elevator, can you imagine
doing it in the dark in a hall filled with
choking smoke and poisonous gases both trying to kill you,
and a fire raging all around you. With that in
your head, I remind you that pressing the button repeatedly

(25:14):
does not make the elevator go faster. The Oxford Dictionary
defines patients as the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble,
or suffering without getting angry or upset. They call it
a virtue, but they should call it a mutant superpower.
Miners were forming human chains in the darkness to help

(25:35):
guide others to safety, and after the seventh cage full
of would be rescuers arrived at the bottom, a series
of bells told the operator to stop the cage while
they loaded it with survivors. It had been a hectic
but effective process, but something was off. The men below
had been signaling the cage operator above with a very simple,

(25:57):
previously agreed to series of toots or ding to drop
and raise the cage, but now the signals had gotten
kind of weird, and the cage operator was confused. He
couldn't understand what they were asking of him, and so
he hesitated before finally deciding I'm just gonna lift the cage.
It was really the only obvious course of action now.

(26:18):
When the cage arrived and was opened, inside were the
bodies of twelve dead men, and it was clear that
no more men would be coming up this shaft and
there would be no more rescue trips. And there were
still two hundred and eighty men below ground, with no
way to know if they were alive or dead again.

(26:39):
No intercom, no radios, no hardwired communications of any kind,
just bells and whistles which are hard to blow when
you're choking and hard to ring when you're dead. All
that they knew for sure was that the fire was
very much alive and well, now what they did next
is gonna sound callous. It was getting late and they

(27:01):
decided that the best thing to do, assuming that all
two hundred naighty men were now lost, was to seal
the shafts until the morning in hopes of smothering the fire.
And I don't mean it was like the middle of
the night, and they made some emotionally exhausted decision to
cap the minds. It was described as happening in the evening.

(27:22):
Imagine you're the families, Your relative is trapped by a fire,
and the rescue squad, after spending the afternoon trying to
save them, decides to encase the building in cement and says,
we are so sorry for your loss. It didn't matter
what the management thought. Alarms were being wrong, and men
and equipment were arriving from as far as Chicago to help.

(27:43):
And the next day the openings were checked and the
fire was very much still on, so they closed them
up again. It was a real will they won't they
Schrodinger's Cat kind of a situation. And if you think
that's awful, well watch what I do here. The fire
began November thirteenth, like we said, and that was a Saturday. Well,

(28:05):
for the next five days they repeated the process of
uncapping the mine and checking for fire, and always with
the same result, and the only thing they extinguished was hope.
The fire was clearly finding enough fuel and oxygen somehow
to keep itself alive, so they were going to have
to go in there and slay the thing. They weren't

(28:25):
in a rush, of course, because those bodies weren't getting
any more dead, but they did have themselves an underground
inferno on their hands. In the last episode, I made
a point about different kinds of fires and how they
have very different needs, and I am stepping on on
a limb here and suggesting that the worst place to
fight a fire is inside a mine and the only

(28:48):
thing in less supply than hope. Were good ideas, and
it wasn't until the following Wednesday that a man wearing
improvised heavy equipment was able to enter the mine. And
there was no such thing as rescue equipment for mines
at the time, so he basically wore a diving helmet
with a separate oxygen supply. It was a pretty big

(29:08):
step and by Thursday of that week this is now
the eighteenth of November firefighters were finally able to enter
the mines to try and extinguish whatever was left of
the blaze. The next several days were spent bringing up
the dead, who were sewn into canvas and lined outside. Now,
what they didn't know, what they couldn't have known, was

(29:31):
that a week ago, when they had been sealing the mine,
Eddie and Waite and the rest of the miners that
we were talking about earlier, well, they were still alive
at the time. Obviously, no one was coming to rescue
them right away, so they built up a wall and
then sealed themselves off in their own, far off little
corner of hell. It didn't do anything to improve the

(29:53):
air quality, but it did provide some protection from the heat.
And just like the people outside, while they were trapped,
they occasionally peeked out just to confirm and yes, the
fire is still there. They were really counting on others
fighting the fire and then coming to rescue them, and
that is when they realized that they had in fact
been sealed in from the outside and left for dead.

(30:15):
And you probably never heard of black damp, and good
for you. Really, black damp is what you call the
unbreathable mixture of nitrogen and carbon dioxide and water vapor
that's left over after all of the usable oxygen is
gone in a coal fire. Well, that is what they found,
and it is a pretty bad sign. And then their

(30:38):
lanterns began to go out. Time was not on their side.
Author David Decock wrote about underground mind fires, and he
compared the heat to living on mercury and described the
atmosphere generated as being as poisonous as saturns. So the
men sealed up the last of the wall, wrote letters
to their families, struck THEMBO pose, and waited for death.

(31:03):
So you started your workday with a donut and a
pep talk and bing bang boom. Now you find yourself
rolling around on the floor having a panic attack after
barricading your way from an inferno in conference room one.
Would you know what to do? Well, it's probably not
really an inferno. It's probably just some jerk manager. But

(31:25):
it really doesn't matter, because a panic attack can be
overwhelming no matter what the cause, and it can make
you feel like you are having a full on heart attack.
You might feel pounding in your chest, or your breathing
gets all quick and shallow. Basically, you feel like you're
waiting for your grandparents and all of your dead pets
to start waving you into a comforting tunnel of white light.

(31:47):
But nope, it's not that kind of attack. I've been
meaning to make a video about this, but in the
interest of time, I'm starting out with this handy guide
to calming yourself out of a pretty frightening situation. If
you were suffering from a panic attack, it is normal
to shake, or feel lightheaded or tingly, or sweaty or dizzy,

(32:08):
or even like you want to throw up. And besides
those bodily sensations, you might also feel a completely overwhelming
sense of panic or doom. Panic attacks tend to come
on suddenly, with no warning, and then you find yourself
really in it. But let me tell you some things
that I hope that you will remember if you ever
find yourself in this situation. First things first, it's okay.

(32:31):
These feelings. They will pass. Most panic attacks won't last
more than half an hour. There's no end of reasons
why these things happen, but we're not going to worry
about why it happened. We only really care that it
is happening and what to do about it. We've been
programmed to flee and fight and fear things since we
first walked upright as a species. That's pretty ingrained in us.

(32:54):
And sometimes that system is going to malfunction and make
us feel like we're in serious danger. No, we're just
hanging out at Walmart, so let's get you well enough
to head outside first. Always try to remember this will pass.
And yeah, I said that a bunch, and I will
continue to say it as many times as I have to,

(33:15):
and you should too. All things pass like the air
between your nostrils and mouth. And I haven't had a
good chance to tell you guys about controlled breathing for
a while now, but it's great and there's really no
wrong way to do it. You inhale for your nose
for I don't know, call it four seconds, and then
hold your breath for another four seconds, and then slowly

(33:36):
exhale through your mouth for the same amount of time.
If you own a smart watch, you could actually watch
your pulse slow from doing this. And let me tell
you this, if dropping trow and playing your ass like
a bongo worked, I would be telling you to do
that right now, which I don't believe it does. But
if it helps, go for it. All we want to
do is refocus your mind. Again. It's malfunctioning when these

(34:00):
things happen, so let's look at ways of resetting it
and breaking the hell out of this. When most people
are in a state of panic, they're basically in a
state of being kicked out of time. They're either stuck
in the past or they're worried about the future. And
what we need to do is anchor your ass to
the present, because in reality, it's a Wednesday afternoon and
you're just standing in the electronic section. So let's do

(34:23):
this together. I'll do it with you. It's bone simple.
First thing. Just look around right now and identify five
things that you see, chair, lamp, water bottles, bills, die cast,
Dodge caravan. Now you tell me four things that you feel,
and I mean literally warmth, the texture of my sweater,

(34:44):
the hair on my arm, the softness of my own boobs.
All we're doing is just using the simple powers of
observation to trick your brain into coming back to earth.
So tell me three things that you hear. The radio
in the background, the cat beating the dogs to death downstairs,
the police helicopter over my house. See, it's not really
hard at all. What can you smell, what can you taste?

(35:06):
And just keep reminding yourself this will pass. It's your
nervous system that's on the fritz, and there are so
many ways to trick it. A lot of professionals will
probably tell you to try positive visualization, but I'm not
a professional and I don't really see that one working
that well. What I do see is that we are
all very different people, and we will all find what

(35:27):
works for us. The thing about anchoring yourself back into
the present is it's a kind of a distraction technique,
and god, there's a trillion of those, count backwards from
one hundred. Take your wallet out of your pocket and
describe it in detail. Sit there and mentally try to
rank the cast of your least favorite TV show in
terms of ugliness myself. The last time I needed to

(35:47):
reset my brain and distract myself from worry, I literally
sat there and named all of the Avengers who joined
in the comics in order of their joining. So, yeah,
there are no wrong answers here and no test and
we are not looking for this one episode to somehow
miraculously cure you of a condition that you don't control,

(36:07):
and you didn't ask for and you don't deserve. All
we're trying to do is look for improvement because improvement
fuels hope, and hope is everything in life. But there's
physical stuff we can do too. Remember when John McClain
was making toe balls on the hotel carpet and die hard,
all he was doing was tensing and then slowly releasing

(36:28):
a muscle group. And you can do that. You can
go all the way through your body, one at a time,
from head to toe or backwards. Who cares. And that's
the thing. A lot of people who end up thinking
that they're actively dying during a panic attack are actually
just experiencing a crazy amount of tension in muscle groups
in their chest that you don't even know are there.
So another thing is just a little light physical activity.

(36:51):
Shake it off, so to speak. Walk in a circle, pace,
jog on the spot, whatever does you feel like you
can do. You just want to burn off some of
that adrenaline because it's going to be spiking. You've got
this thing in your body called your parasympathetic nervous system.
It's basically your network of nerves that relax your body
after periods of stress or danger. And you can actually

(37:11):
engage the thing on purpose. I'm not telling you to
go grab a giant snack or anything, but chewing or
swallowing like nibbling or sipping, can engage your parasympathetic nervous system.
Splashing cold water on your face or even humming can
stimulate your vagus nerve, which, without getting into the whole
biology of it, also helps calm the nervous system. And

(37:32):
I will really get into this at some point, because
there is an endless list of strategies to prevent and
calm panic attacks. And let me say this, if you
were ever unsure, if you were having a panic attack
or maybe going through something more serious, don't be weird
about it. Go ahead and seek out medical attention. There
is no embarrassment to be had in a medical setting.

(37:53):
My sister, sorry, Diane, my sister once had to be
rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendect but no,
it was just a fart. Making you feel safer is
the entire point. Let me conclude this safety segment for
now by saying, if you suffer from panic attacks and
just want to talk about it, you know, just to

(38:14):
unburden yourself to someone who does not charge three hundred
dollars an hour. It's Doomsday pod at gmail dot com.
Now where were we? Oh? Yes, watching people die? The
date was now Saturday, November the twentieth, an entire week
after the fire began. No air, no food, no hope.

(38:38):
The miners that we left in the far off corner
of the mine, possibly brain damaged from the experience, poked
out a small opening in the wall to check one
last time, and they discovered that the air outside wasn't fresh,
but it was fresh er, which could only mean that
the mine had been unsealed from the outside. Either the

(38:59):
fire was out or or they were still fighting it.
But they didn't care. Something was happening, and you can't
have hope without something. The strongest and let's call it
lease affected of the group left their chamber to go explore,
and after a few hours of stumbling through the dark,
dank air the men could not believe their eyes through

(39:21):
the smoke and the dust, emerged rescuers. I mean, don't
tell the guys that they were actually just there to
collect their corpses. No, this was a rescue. All twenty
one men were brought to the surface, well carry to
the surface alive, hope had been kicking rocks for a week,

(39:43):
and now it sprung eternal. I mean. One of the miners,
the oldest, a man named Daniel Holifick, would go on
to die several days later from his experience. However, even
just the fact that he was able to die on
the surface inspired more rescue attempts, even while firefighters were
still battling to control the burning areas of the mine,

(40:04):
which is really the kind of point of a coal
mine fire. They just do not like being told what
to do. No one else was found alive. The twenty
one who were rescued was nothing short of a minor miracle.
You see what I did there. Eleven days after the
fire began, the consensus was that the coal seam was
still burning and there was nothing they could do about it,

(40:26):
so they resealed the mine for four months until the
temperature underground finally stabilized. Three hundred men had been below
ground when the fire began, forty one had been rescued,
two hundred and fifty nine died, and the dead included
twelve rescuers. One hundred and sixty widows were made that day,

(40:49):
and four hundred children would never play catch with their fathers.
Ever again, I am quietly implying that they play catch
with hunks of coal, and speaking of two children. Four
children age ten to sixteen were among the dead. So
what the hell happened? Well, the exact cause of the

(41:11):
fire gets debated, but most people tell it the way
I did. A kerosene lamp and a hay bale got
too close. Workers tried desperately to extinguish the flames, but
the fire spread quicker than their reaction time. Six bales
of hay bird furiously spreading the fire to the rest
of the room and continued to gorge itself on the
almost unlimited fuel of the mine. Following the disaster, the

(41:33):
Illinois State Mining Board conducted an investigation, and they had
a few thoughts. Page one, paragraph one. Open flame kerosene lamps.
It was a totally common practice at the time to
use kerosene lamps in a mine, in spite of the
obvious attraction between fire and coal. They called it out anyways,
because common practices do not always make common sense, especially

(41:58):
considering the lack of events. It's one thing to risk fouling
the only source of breathable air in a confined space,
but they didn't have any good way to clear the
air once it was, and I thought cigarettes and a
mine sounded dumb. The cherry mine only had two ways
in or out, and both had become unusable as the
fire spread. There were no emergency exits because well, when

(42:23):
you get to the bottom of a mine shaft, it's
not exactly the galleria. There's no food court, there's no
shower stations, there's no refuge chambers. The general perk had
always been not dying, and management is not spending a
penny down there unless absolutely necessary, and that usually means
by law, and even at that not always. So the

(42:47):
men found themselves cut off. They were trapped and completely
unable to help themselves because they didn't have the kind
of firefighting equipment or training to save themselves. And as
long as we are picking on management, when the fire
first began, they played it off like this kind of
thing just happened all the time. But to the investigators,

(43:07):
this delay increased the death toll, intentional or not, and
that's why they call it a negligent homicide. They didn't
have a good communication system, like we said, and they
didn't have a comprehensive plan for ordering an evacuation. I
myself would have simply gone into the mind with a
bag full of shotgun shells and continuously blasted get out

(43:28):
in Morse code until everyone was safe, so that you
know what that sounds like, bang bang bang bang bang
bang bang bang bang bang bang bang. There was no
retirement age back in nineteen oh nine, so some of
these men were as old as the dirt they shoveled.

(43:49):
Others were so young that in a different setting, they'd
be fourth or fifth graders, you know, depending on where
their birthdays fell on the calendar. Back in nineteen oh nine,
the age of majority, the age where you're legally considered
an adult in America, was twenty one, which makes hiring
a ten year old, which is half the legal age
minus another year, pretty egregious. Imagine interviewing a kid no

(44:12):
taller than your desk to work in a mine. The
age of majority was dropped to eighteen when they needed
to fill those boats heading over to Europe for World
War One. Because governments are all about moving goalposts to
suit their needs and adjusting for today's age of majority.
This would have been like seeing a crew of eight
year olds working on high tension power lines. Or something,

(44:34):
and the company got spanked for it, just not very hard.
Mining regulations were pretty loose as you can imagine, and
enforcement wasn't really a thing. A Bureau County grand jury
indicted several officials at the Saint Paul Cole Company. The
mine superintendent William Fraser, the mind manager M. M. Taylor,

(44:54):
and the mind foreman John Bundy were all charged with manslaughter.
The super tenant and foreman were let off the hook
pretty quick, but the gavel loomed large over the mine
manager's head and he was convicted under this new Illinois
law that held corporate officers criminally liable for negligence when
it led to workplace deaths. So was he hung or

(45:18):
did he just die in prison? Wow? Neither. He just
had to pony up six hundred and fifty bucks to
pay a fine. Like most disasters, as a corporate head,
his only real punishment was having his time wasted in court.
And like most disasters, the Cherry Mine disaster did lead
to significant reforms in mining safety. The Illinois Mining Act

(45:41):
of nineteen eleven was passed just two years later, which
improved safety regulations like having proper safety equipment and better
ventilation and mandatory fire drills, and believe it or not,
the prohibition of open flames in minds. And the thing was,
there were safety standards back then, going back even further
than this disaster. It's just that the Cherry mine, like

(46:04):
a lot of mines, operated with what they called minimal compliance.
The choice to use flammable construction materials in a flammable
place clearly prioritized money over safety, and that's a pretty
common factor in a lot of industrial accidents. Anytime we
started an episode saying make sure you have your hard
hat and your visitor badge visible, you should already be

(46:26):
side eyeing. The management cost cutting at the expense of
safety devastated the small town of Cherry. Entire households were
overcome with grief. The public outcry over the disaster was
immediate and widespread. Newspapers from across the country and even
internationally picked up the story. The tragedy also led to

(46:48):
the creation of the Illinois Workmen's Compensation Act of nineteen eleven,
which provided financial support to injured workers and the families
of those killed in industrial accidents. But the tendros of
this disaster spread even further than that, much further newspapers
began picking up on the story, which led to nationwide

(47:08):
discussions about labor rights and workplace safety. This disaster in
this tiny little town was at the heart of future
reforms across all kinds of industries, including the creation of
the United Mine Workers Union and the Illinois Workmen's Compensation Act,
which in spirit makes a company liable even if they
show contributory negligence. Human blood may not literally power the

(47:33):
machines of production following the Industrial Revolution, but it is
in the ink of safety standards. Remember when I said
the company got spanked, Well, the Saint Paul Mining Company
was fined six hundred and thirty dollars for violating child
labor loss, which is about twenty thousand today. They were
also ordered to pay the families of the dead reportedly

(47:55):
eighteen hundred dollars each or about sixty two thousand, which
pissed the public off so much they doubled it through
private donations, and in the end they managed to raise
and distribute over four hundred thousand dollars, which is about
fourteen million today. Over the years, coal, while it fell
out of favor. It's cheap and it's abundant, but it's dirty,

(48:19):
and the coal lobby is not nearly as good as
the oil lobby. As time went on, technology replaced humans,
and today the number of people mining for coal in
the US has dropped from two percent of the total
workforce down to just over forty thousand people across the country.
The town of Cherry was never the same. There is

(48:41):
a small plaque on the north side of town that
briefly describes the disaster, and on the south side is
the Cherry Miners Cemetery. Memorials and markers come in every
size and shape. The names and languages are all different,
but the one thing that they share in common they
all have the same days of death, November thirteenth, nineteen

(49:03):
oh nine. This was a catastrophe that took advantage of
human error and systemic and managerial negligence, all to lead
to the worst possible outcome. And today, the Cherry Mind
disaster of nineteen oh nine remains the worst coal mine
fire in US history. It's also the third worst in

(49:29):
North American history, the third worst. Well, I don't know,
sounds like future episodes to me, so let me ask,
what's the worst that you ever got hurt at work?
And I don't mean emotionally. When I was a teenager,
I worked at a printing press and one day I
got the little Bernie part off the end of a
cigarette in my eye, and I was told to go
use the eyewash station to rinse it out. You ever

(49:52):
use one of those before, It's really simple. You just
place your face into the wash station bowl, hold your
eyes open, step on the activator, and whoosh, a stream
of water gently washes over your eyes tenderly, removing any
debris or if, much like the fire hose connections from
our last episode, they were never connected to the municipal
water supply, what you get is twenty years worth of

(50:15):
lint and dust and actual dead spider bodies blown directly
into your unblinking eyes. If you actually want to see
a video of my cheeriest workplace injury and you have
a very strong stomach, just pop over to my Patreon,
which is a nice segue. And as long as you
are there, why not consider becoming a supporter. It would

(50:36):
really help fulfill my dream of doing this full time.
And if you and a few thousand of your friends
could help spaa buck or two, you would really be
helping keeping the show and frankly me going before I
tell you about Patreon. If you're into it but aren't
looking for a whole relationship, you can just visit buy
me a coffee dot com slash Doomsday to make a
one time donation. And I really appreciate all you people

(50:58):
who keep popping up to do that thing. Thank you
so so much. I think any episodes a little early,
with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material
in each new episode is worth it and if you agree,
you can find out more at patreon dot com slash
Funeral Kazoo quick but heartfelt shout out too, Katie Eron's
Deirdre Appel, Sarah Eckrich, Megan McDonald, David Moorehead Doctor Sam

(51:23):
the Doomfork, t Ray, Daniel Riviera and again Magical Night
of the Roundtable, Sir Lancelot for supporting me on Patreon.
You can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram or
Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire me an email to
Doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be
found wherever you found this one, and while you're there,
please leave a review and tell your friends. I always

(51:46):
thank my Patreon listeners. New and old for their support
and encouragement. But if you could spare the money, I
ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic.
Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers
offering assistants around the world to aid in the aftermath
of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes
the only team to get critical interventions to people in

(52:06):
life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over
three point six million people across seventy seven different countries.
You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic dot ca.
On the next episode, I get a surprising number of
requests for circus episodes, and I'm always I don't like
episodes where children or animals get hurt. Well, great news,

(52:30):
I have a circus episode for you where no children
or animals are killed at all, just eighty six full
grown adults. It's the ham and Circus train disaster of
nineteen eighteen. We'll talk soon. Safety GoGG goes off and
thanks for listening.