"A Look Back"

The Stories presented here are about people and events during the early days when this corner of Colorado was first settled.

Tragedy at Wadge Mine Part 1
By Chuck Mack

On the night of January 27, 1942, the steam whistle at the boiler room at the Wadge Mine in Mt. Harris, Colorado, let out a series of blasts. This was the signal that there had been an accident, or some similar disaster, at the mine. This was about 10:30 P.M. My Pop was on duty at the boiler room that night, so my older brother rushed over to find out what had happened. We lived about 100 yards from the boiler room, in one of the company shacks, so it didn't take long for him to return with the sad news that there had been an explosion inside the mine. The explosion had occurred some 45 minutes earlier. Four men who had been working in the section nearer the mouth of the mine heard the blast. They started to go investigate the portion of the mine where the blast had occurred, but upon reaching the main tunnel they saw and smelled smoke drifting from the blast area. The four men, being experienced miners, realized that there had been an explosion in the lower section of the mine. They knew they had only one chance for survival. They had to make their way to the main air intake tunnel. If the four men had not made the decision to investigate the blast, they would have been overcome by smoke and heat from it as it filtered into the section they were working. Luckily they made it to the fresh air intake and found their way to the surface, where they immediately notified the boiler room operator of the explosion so the steam whistle could let the entire town know that something had happened. A rescue squad from the Colorado-Utah Coal Co. mine, (Harris Mine,) was soon on the scene to enter the ill-fated Wadge Mine. Although hampered by smoke and lack of air, the squad was able to enter the mine far enough to learn the blast had surely killed all the miners who remained in the mine. They found broken and charred bodies of some of the miners before they were forced to retreat from that "Man Made Hell". The gas and smoke would have to be cleared from the mine and other precautionary measures taken before sending volunteer crews to bring out the bodies of the miners. It was some twelve hours later when the first of the bodies were brought out and taken to the temporary morgue that had been set up in Liberty Hall, the town movie theater. Thirty-four miners lost their lives in this terrible tragedy. The bodies were all placed on wooden slabs, where the tedious task of identifying them began. Most all the bodies were mangled and burned beyond recognition. I know this, because for some reason, I went to view the bodies. I didn't have to as none of my family had been killed, but view them I did and I can still remember the horrible sight! One of the four miners who escaped from the explosion was a real close friend of mine, Mike Atanosoff. "Fat Mike" was his nickname and the only name most people knew him by. He lived several years after the explosion although he only worked a short time afterwards. Mike had breathed enough smoke in his escape, that it affected his health. The other three men were Joe Gall, Bill Fickle and Elmer Everson. Lady Luck smiled twice on Fat Mike. He lived through two mine explosions. The first was in 1921, when the Moffat Mine at Oak Creek, Colorado, had an explosion. Fat Mike was one of the two survivors in this tragedy in which seven men lost their lives. He told me many times about his close calls in these explosions. Lady luck smiled on another miner on that eventful day also; Bill Lee was working in the mine that night, but he had left at 7:00 PM as he had to take his wife and daughter down to the depot and wait for the passenger train as they were going to Denver to keep a doctor's appointment. After seeing his wife and daughter off on the passenger train Bill decided to go home and get a bite to eat before he returned to the mine. That decision no doubt saved his life because before he returned to the mine the explosion had taken place. It was determined that the cause of the mine explosion was a heavy buildup of methane gas in one area of the mine, a blower fan was moved in to clear the gas, but what it did was move the gas into the area where the miners were working, in the process the right amount of oxygen, and methane were mixed together and formed an explosive mixture, methane is very unstable; with 22 percent mixture of oxygen, it's highly combustible, this highly combustible mixture moved into the working area that was already saturated with coal dust from the mining process, then a tiny spark, probably from a piece of the electrical mining equipment was the ignition source. The Wadge Mine explosion of 1942 was the worst in the history of Northwest Colorado. Let's all hope and pray that it stays that way! The mine explosion at Wadge could have killed a lot more miners if it had happened a little later in the shift, at the time the shifts changed inside the mine. Had the explosion taken place any later it would have caught two crews of miners in the mine and the death toll probably would have been twice as high. In the next story I’ll continue with this sad day in history and tell of some of my daydreams while walking around the old mine site.