Deepwater in 1907 -- Explosion

[NW Mailing List]

Surprisingly, I have run across several articles of similar accidents in the winter time.  On Feb. 22 of this year I posted an article about a similar 1903 dynamite thawing explosion on the N&W's Big Sandy extention, and I just read of a similar 1907 dynamite thawing explosion on a railroad constuction project in Kentucky.  Also, yesterday I saw a 1907 article about a woman who was killed by a dynamite explosion in her kitchen.  Her husband had placed some dynamite in the oven to thaw and forgot to tell his wife.

When it comes to thawing dynamite in the good ol days, there are a lot of Darwin Award candidates.

Gordon Hamilton
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: NW Mailing List 
  To: NW Mailing List 
  Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 7:05 PM
  Subject: RE: Deepwater in 1907 -- Explosion


  Did I read this right?  Thawing out dynamite over a fire?  Did they have Darwin awards back then?  Where was management?  Never mind, it was a long time ago....
   
  Ed Svitil




----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    To: nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org; VirginianRailwayEnthusiasts at yahoogroups.com
    Subject: Deepwater in 1907 -- Explosion
    Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:33:04 -0400
    From: nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org


    [Reader discretion advised.  Early journalism was explicit.]

    EIGHT MEN DEAD OR MISSING AS RESULT OF DYNAMITE EXPLOSION
    ------
    ONE MAN WAS BLOWN CLEAR ACROSS RIVER
    ------
    Bloody Trunk of Another, With Both Arms and Both Legs Gone, Rolled Down Hillside to Grade.  Poor Fellow Living Nearly Two Hours.
    -----
    ONLY SMALL PIECES OF TWO BODIES FOUND
    ------
        About 12 o'clock yesterday at Curve, on the new Deepwater construction, there was an explosion of dynamite with fearful results.
        Eight men are dead or missing.  Four bodies have been found, all of them terribly mutilated.  The men were eating their dinner around a fire at which dynamite was being thawed out.  Two of the men were Italians and six of them Greeks.
        One body was blown across the river and one man was blown up the hillside quite a distance.  Both arms and both legs were blown off and the bloody trunk rolled back down the hill to the grade.  He lived in this condition nearly two hours.
        The other men whose remains have been recovered were horribly mangled, their bodies being in small pieces.  The four who are still missing, are supposed to have been blown into the river.
        The men had not been here long and the Miller Contracting Company, for whom they were at work, knew them only by their numbers.

    Bluefield Daily Telegraph
    January 27, 1907

    [Old N&W maps show "Curve" to be between Ripplemead and Pearisburg, VA.  At Curve the New River makes a bend of almost 180 degrees. The attached USGS image from MS TerraServer shows Curve in relation to Potts Valley Jct., where the N&W's Potts Valley branch leaves the main line to cross New River on a bridge.  Immediately north of the bridge the N&W crossed the Virginian at appropriately named Norcross and paralleled it until turning up Stony  Creek and on to Potts Valley.]

    Gordon Hamilton


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