Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 30, 1994 TAG: 9401280102
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-15 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MCCOY LENGTH: Medium
It was the day before Good Friday, late morning on April 18, 1946, and far too early for a shift change at the Great Valley Anthracite Mine.
Residents spilled out of their small company houses and anxiously gathered at the shaft's mouth, where the rolling cloud of coal dust first signaled the explosion. There was no noise, no bang or rumble. The No. 16 level shaft was 6,000 feet long and a half-mile below the New River. That day 58 men were in the mine, working as on any other day.
But a spark had ignited a huge pocket of methane. When the gas blew, men and machinery hurled through the mine shaft like birdshot in a gun barrel.
"When the explosion came it felt like something was quivering. It was like something was slapped over your head," miner Brady Linkous said.
Ray Johnston said the blast "sounded like somebody had taken something and suddenly stuffed it in both my ears. I couldn't hear anything. Then it got as quiet as a tomb."
Both men were among the 46 who crawled and stumbled to the surface, clasping wet cloths to their mouths to avoid breathing the choking fumes.
A number of them joined rescuers and re-entered the mine to search for other survivors. Miners' wives with babies in their arms and youngsters clinging to their skirts stood vigilantly on a steep hillside and watched. Little Doug Breeden was among them.
Throughout the long afternoon, only the movement of the hoisting cable as it lowered cars into the mine gave those on the surface a clue of how the recovery work progressed.
When the cable stopped, that meant rescuers had found a body. When the cable started again - in reverse - a body was coming out.
Eventually, 11 bodies were recovered. Another man, pulled out shivering, lived only long enough to reach the hospital in Radford.
Wrapped in burlap, some of the dead were borne out of the mine one last time on coal hoppers. Carried to a nearby machine shop, the victims - all horribly burned - were identified by neighbors or relatives, who tenderly turned back the crude shrouds.
If not for Clayton Johnston, the toll would have been higher. A night or so earlier, Johnston had a premonition about the explosion.
"I told most of the other miners about my dream. But they did not feel they could miss the pay for a day's work. So they went on into the mines," he wrote.
His brother, C.R. Johnston, was one of those who perished.
The Rev. Jimmy Lee Price, 5 years old that day, recalls someone coming to their home near Long Shop and breathlessly telling his mother about the catastrophe.
Later, seeing his father in the distance, walking toward home, brought a feeling of relief Price still recalls.
"Every morning, when he'd leave for work, he'd tell us, `Boys, when I leave home in the morning and put my head underneath that mountain, I may not be coming back again.' "
Price lost two uncles in the explosion. One, John Paul Price, was working his last day in the mines. He was quitting because the work was too dangerous.
In all, the accident left a dozen widows and about 50 fatherless children.
"I had always begged and pleaded with him not to work in the mine," Mrs. Frank Price told journalists at the time. But her husband had been a miner since he was 14.
She was described as a small, thin woman by a reporter who interviewed her at the small, unpainted company cottage where she, her husband and four children lived about 100 yards from the mine.
"I don't know what I'll do now. Ain't able to get out and work and there ain't no money. Took about everything the poor man made to support his family," she said.
Two days after the explosion, on Easter, five coffins were placed in the churchyard at the Parrott Methodist Church.
The building was too small to hold all the mourners, so they pulled the benches outside and arranged them in a semicircle.
Family members sat, neighbors and kinfolk stood behind, while the minister preached the miners' funeral from the church's front steps.
The McCoy mines closed long ago.
Jimmy Lee Price videotaped several survivors on the 40th anniversary of the explosion.
"There were a lot of tears. A lot of emotion is out there yet," he said. "It's about the greatest tragedy this county's ever had."
by CNB