Father O'Neill Landry and my grandfather Louisiana Sheriff Chester Baudoin having a discussion during the Belle Isle mine disaster.
(Courtesy of Chet Wallace)
(Note to reader: This is a segment, with minor changes, from my book about my grandfather, Louisiana Sheriff Chester Baudoin, called Two Wings and a Star: The Life and Times of Sheriff Chester Baudoin. I refer to my grandfather in the book by my nickname for him, Poppy.)
A disaster of major proportion occurred at Belle Isle, Louisiana on Tuesday March 5, 1968, at about midnight. Belle Isle is a 17-square mile island south of the small town of Calumet in St. Mary Parish right on the Gulf of Mexico. At the time of the disaster a person traveling to Belle Isle had to take a 15-mile boat ride from the Calumet boat landing and travel through bayous dotted by shallow mud lakes, past banks full of bushes and vines and around cypress knees and logs that obstructed the water. When the boat reached Belle Isle the 80-foot tower to the entrance of the Cargill Salt Mine was noticeable. Leading from the tower was a conveyor system that ran to a second building where bagged salt was loaded onto barges some 100 yards away. Miners worked at the bottom of the shaft 1,200 feet below the ground where two levels of operations were connected by an incline. The working levels extended horizontally from the shaft in rooms that were sixty feet high with solid salt pillars that supported the individual working rooms from which the salt was mined. In the salt mine a fire broke out near the top of the escape shaft and burned through the elevator cables. One of the men called up to the surface by phone yelling, “Fire in the shaft!”
A map of St. Mary Parish and where the mine was located. I was born in Morgan City in 1971. My grandfather lived at the parish seat, Franklin.)
(Courtesy of the Iberian newspaper.)
The first rescue attempt to locate the miners ran into problems when the large cage used to lower the rescue men ran into an obstruction and had to be lifted. Men called down into the shaft for signs of life but there was no answer. Then before another attempt to rescue the miners occurred, walkie-talkies with a light on it were lowered into the shaft only to be brought back up. Also, a 1,200-foot-long pipe was fed into the main shaft to pump fresh air into the far reaches of the shaft and horizontal passageways.
Poppy called in some rescue units from Kentucky that dealt especially with coal mine rescues. On Wednesday night they arrived at Belle Isle and immediately went into conference with Cargill officials and the U.S. Bureau of Mines. They discussed the situation and what was to be done.
The second rescue attempt occurred at 12:30am on Thursday morning and only brought back a realization that no signs of life were detected and no contact or exact whereabouts of the miners were known. Company officials kept reporters fifty feet back by rope and wouldn’t say anything to the media until families of the men were contacted. Relatives of the miners were waiting and praying at the Calumet boat landing.
My grandfather standing to the left of the photo with the rescuers from Kentucky. My five-year-old cousin Timothy John Baudoin stands in front of my grandfather.
(Courtesy of Chet Wallace)
The coal miner rescuers that Poppy had flown in had trouble with the rescue. In coal mines the ceiling was very low and when they went into this mine it was too much for them to handle because of the vastness of the salt mine. They were used to coal mining in small spaces. The amount of space was so big in the salt mine that trucks could be lowered down the shaft to be used.
The rescue team was supplied with orange oxygen tanks strapped to their belts holding about one hour of oxygen and they wore lightweight, fireproof garments. In this attempt, Edward Holeman, one of the rescuers from Kentucky, was hit on the head by falling debris. Because of this a protective cover was built for the cage for the next attempt. The rescue team was able to hear a diesel engine running somewhere and found eighty feet of water standing in the bottom of the main shaft. It was thought that the men could have escaped into the horizontal sub-shafts. When Holeman and another rescuer, Dilford Holmes, looked to their left and right down the horizontal sub-shafts they saw smoke and haze in one direction and a small fire in a fan in the other. They reported that it was very smoky, and that carbon monoxide was present. It took more than thirty minutes before the two rescuers reached the bottom of the shaft. Throughout the descent, the two men called out to the trapped miners through bullhorns to no avail. They observed that the concrete-lined walls of the shaft were in good condition but noted that the elevator guide beams were burned out.
It was thought by officials that the men were still alive after the fire broke out because the diesel engine heard in the rescue attempt could not have run unattended the thirty hours that had elapsed since the men were trapped at midnight on Tuesday. One of the trapped miners would have had to start it up since the fire occurred.
A drawing of the mine shaft in the local Daily Iberian newspaper.
(Courtesy of the Daily Iberian newspaper)
On Thursday March 7th just after 11am a team of three expert miners descended in a third attempt to rescue the twenty-one miners. Around noon the new rescue team had put out a fire near the bottom of the shaft and entered the side caverns in search of the twenty-one men. The fires in the shaft were still burning for thirty-six hours since the fire broke out. The three men fought the fire for some time before returning to the surface. One had to be bandaged because of a small burn that he received on his forehead. Governor John J. McKeithen flew in from Baton Rouge to obtain firsthand information on the progress being made.
Men from another rescue attempt emerged to report that only one of the ten mine vehicles and a lunchbox were found. These vehicles were jeeps that carried men to the farthest reaches of the mine. As rescue attempts continued, the carbon monoxide levels started to dissipate. As one observer put it, this was no John Wayne, go-for-broke rescue. Finally, all fires in the mine were put out as announced by Clayton Tonnemaker, the Cargill vice president. He also summed up in one chilling word the reasons for pessimism: “monoxide.”
On the next day, March 8th between 10 and 11am, sixteen bodies were found in a sixth rescue attempt by four rescuers. They were discovered far away from the main shaft. The horizontal mine sections went as far as three-quarters of a mile. One possible reason that the men were not found near the fire-raging main shaft was that they were following the safety procedure stressed to them during the routine safety sessions of the plant, which was to barricade themselves to be sealed off from poisonous gases. Reporters soon informed the public that the sixteen miners were found dead. Several people, including fellow mine workers, wept with deep emotion. In the last rescue attempt the five remaining bodies of the missing miners were found in the 80 feet of water at the bottom of the main shaft.
Issues involving the news media occurred because of the ninety news media representatives having to share use of the only two mobile phones available at the salt mine site. Southern Bell Telephone in Houma, Louisiana supplied the mobile phones. This shortage of phones caused a frenzied competition among the many news agencies covering the story. Each media person, hoping to get the latest developments to his agency first, scrambled to the telephones. In one instance an agency had a newsman at the site on walkie-talkie relaying information as it came into a fellow news agency employee that was near the mobile phone site.
The families of the victims waited by the Calumet Bridge for the news that they so desperately did not want to hear. Poppy called Father O’Neill Landry out to Belle Isle when the sixteen miners were found dead. My mother remembers Poppy telling her that the heat in the shaft was horrible and when the bodies were brought out of the shaft the smell was unbearable. People started walking away from the site in disgust. Father Landry stood there and blessed each body as they were brought from the shaft. Not once did the priest wince because of the odor. That day when Poppy went home, he burned his clothes because the smell had permeated them. My mother remembers being in a drug store during this time and police officers came in to purchase a good amount of Lysol spray to get rid of the smell.
Citizens of the parish and surrounding areas were devastated by the news of the deceased miners. Women found that they were without husbands and children found that their fathers were not coming home again. The local American Red Cross provided cots and blankets, and nurses were on hand to help. They also supplied food for the rescuers and relatives of the victims.
Harry and Harris Touchet were twin brothers who were both victims from Franklin. Other victims were from Abbeville, Jeanerette, New Iberia, and one from as far away as Mississippi. Poppy’s secretary Laura Belle Trahan had a brother who was a victim also.
As with many disasters, it takes a catastrophic event to finally get laws to be implemented and policies to change. So was the case of Belle Isle. In August of 1967, a mere eight months before the disaster, a health and safety engineer for the Dallas, Texas, sub district, U.S. Bureau of Mines, had recommended that the Cargill Salt Company Belle Isle mine take specific steps to improve safety conditions for its employees. Louisiana Commissioner of Labor Curtis C. Luttrell researched state law in his department to find no authority figure existed in the field of safety regulations in the state’s mining industry. Luttrell said that state law covered oil field workers and other workers of labor but didn’t support mine workers.
On September 12, 1967, a walk-through inspection of the Cargill Salt Mine was made by Arthur M. Evans. He spent two to three hours in the mine and later filed a memorandum suggesting fourteen different changes to the mine’s safety. Two suggestions that he made were painfully obvious after the disaster occurred. First, Evans suggested that a second shaft be built as an escape route and for ventilation. Second, he suggested a need for certain fire controls at several points underground and on the surface. But Evans’ suggestions were exactly that, suggestions, and nothing was done because it was not a force of law situation, and the Cargill Salt Company was not forced to comply. After the disaster the mine went into operation again. My mother remembers that she had a chance to see the new mine in operation by going down into the shaft but once she got to the opening, she couldn’t make herself get on the rickety elevator and go down. Eventually Cargill was closed because of another incident.
What follows are different images from the Daily Iberian newspaper of the time.
Thanks for learning!
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