The Hastings Mine Disaster

The mine at Hastings had been producing coal for Colorado Fuel & Iron since 1889. It sat in Hastings Canyon, north of the Ludlow area in the narrow country between the Raton Mesa and the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo range, in Las Animas County, in the same coalfield that had produced the strike and the massacre at Ludlow three years before. The men who worked it in 1917 were mostly the same kind of men who had worked all the CF&I mines — immigrants from Italy, from Greece, from the Slavic countries, from Mexico, with a portion of American-born miners who had come to the southern coalfield for the same reasons everyone else had: because the coal industry was paying and the alternatives were not. They worked on the morning of April 27 as they had worked every morning, descending into a mine that the company had certified as safe, and at some point between the morning's work beginning and the surface receiving any warning, the mine exploded.

One hundred and twenty-one men died. It was one of the worst mine disasters in Colorado history — second only to the Stag Canon explosion at Dawson, New Mexico in 1913, which killed 263, and comparable to the worst disasters the American coal industry had produced in the preceding decade. The country was twelve days from declaring war on Germany, and the national attention that might otherwise have focused on a mine explosion in southern Colorado was already turning toward events in Europe. Hastings was covered, extensively, in the Trinidad and Denver papers. It was less extensively covered everywhere else. Then the war news came and it was covered less still.

The Mine

CF&I designated the Hastings operation as Mine No. 2 in its Las Animas County numbering system. The mine accessed the Raton coal seam through a main entry driven into the canyon wall, with multiple working sections extending inward and downward from the main entry. By 1917, the mine had been in continuous operation for nearly three decades, which meant that the working sections extended well into the hillside, the ventilation distances were long, and the accumulation of coal dust in the interior passageways was a chronic condition that the company's inspection records noted periodically without particular alarm.

Coal dust is the hidden danger of underground coal mining. Methane gas — the "firedamp" of nineteenth-century mine literature — ignites and produces an explosion, but it is coal dust suspended in the mine air that turns a localized explosion into a catastrophic one. A shot or a spark ignites the gas; the concussion disturbs the accumulated dust from the floor and walls and roof; the suspended dust ignites and the explosion propagates outward through the mine workings at a velocity and force that no structure in a typical coal mine can contain. The effect is like a cannon barrel: what begins as a local event travels the length of every connected passage. The men farthest from the source of ignition die from the overpressure and the afterdamp — the carbon monoxide that fills the workings after the oxygen has been burned — rather than from the initial blast.

The investigation that followed the Hastings explosion concluded that a "blown-out shot" — a charge that failed to detonate properly and discharged its force backward into the mine air rather than into the coal face — ignited accumulated coal dust in the working section and triggered the chain reaction. This conclusion was broadly consistent with the sequence described in Colorado mining disaster investigations of the period. Whether it was the complete explanation is harder to establish. The mine's ventilation records, reviewed by investigators in the weeks after the explosion, showed that complaints about dust accumulation and inadequate air circulation had been filed internally at intervals over the preceding years. These complaints had been addressed with varying degrees of thoroughness. The investigation did not conclude that CF&I's maintenance of the Hastings mine was criminal or outside the range of industry practice. Industry practice in 1917 had not yet incorporated the dust suppression methods that later became standard.

April 27, 1917

The explosion occurred in the morning hours. The exact time is recorded in various accounts as between nine and ten o'clock, with some variation among sources depending on whether they are drawing from the mine's own logs — which were destroyed in the blast — or from witness accounts collected afterward. The surface workers who felt the concussion reported it as a single heavy impact, followed by a rush of black air from the mine mouth that carried dust, smoke, and debris. Men near the entry were knocked from their feet. The fan house, which drove ventilation air into the mine, was damaged.

Rescue efforts began immediately. The Colorado State Mine Inspector's office, which had a resident inspector in the Trinidad area, was notified within the hour. CF&I dispatched its own rescue team from Pueblo, where the company maintained trained mine rescue personnel and equipment. The United States Bureau of Mines, which had been expanding its mine rescue program since 1910, sent a car from its Denver station. The practical problem facing all of these teams was the same one that faces every post-explosion rescue operation in a coal mine: the mine was full of carbon monoxide, the rescue teams could not enter without breathing apparatus, the breathing apparatus of 1917 limited a rescue worker to a fixed period underground before the canister was exhausted, and the distance from the mine entry to the working sections where the men had been was, in the case of the Hastings mine, considerable.

No survivors were recovered. The first bodies reached by rescue teams were men who had been near enough to the entry to have survived the initial blast but who had been killed by afterdamp before rescue arrived. The men in the inner working sections had died almost certainly in the first seconds of the explosion. Recovery operations continued for days. The final count, established as the bodies were brought to the surface and identified, was 121 dead.

The Investigation

The Colorado State Inspector of Coal Mines conducted the formal investigation, with additional participation from the U.S. Bureau of Mines. The investigation gathered testimony from survivors on the surface — mine officials, tipple workers, men who had not descended that morning for various reasons — and from the rescue teams who had entered the mine in the days following. The physical evidence available to investigators was limited by the destruction the explosion had caused: coal mine explosions tend to alter or eliminate the very evidence that would establish their specific sequence.

The blown-out-shot theory was the most technically defensible conclusion available from the evidence at hand. It required no finding of deliberate negligence. It was consistent with similar disasters at other Colorado and national mines in the preceding decade. The investigation did note, in language measured enough to avoid direct accusation, that the state of ventilation and dust control in the Hastings mine's working sections had been a subject of internal concern, and that the interval between formal inspections had been longer than recommended. These observations did not produce charges or penalties. CF&I received no criminal sanction for the Hastings disaster. The mine eventually reopened under new management after the immediate investigation period and continued to operate until the economics of the seam made further extraction unviable.

The Dead

The names of the Hastings dead were published in the Trinidad papers within days of the explosion as bodies were identified. The list reads as a census of the immigration routes that fed the southern Colorado coalfield: Italian surnames from Calabria and Sicily, Greek names from the Peloponnese and Macedonia, Slavic names from what was then Austria-Hungary and would become Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and Poland in the rearrangements that followed the war, Mexican names from families that had been in the Purgatoire valley for generations and from more recent arrivals, American names from every region of the country. The nationalities were recorded in the company's records along with the age, the years of service, and in some cases the family composition of each man. CF&I had kept detailed records on its workforce precisely because the company controlled so many aspects of its workers' lives that it needed this information for its own administrative purposes. The same record-keeping system that allowed the company to manage scrip accounts and housing assignments and school enrollment now allowed it to notify families and calculate survivor benefits under the Colorado Industrial Commission's compensation system.

The Hastings cemetery on the hillside above the old townsite holds the graves of many of the 1917 victims. The cemetery is on private land and its current public access status is uncertain; the archive has not been able to confirm whether it is regularly open to visitors. Several families of the dead have continued to seek access for memorial purposes over the decades, and the graves are in varying states of maintenance as a result of the site's unclear ownership and the passage of time since the last family who lived in the area with personal connection to the dead moved away.

Context: Three Years After Ludlow

The Hastings disaster occurred in April 1917 — three years and seven days after the Ludlow Massacre of April 20, 1914. The proximity of the dates is coincidental; the connection between the two events is not. The same corporation operated both sites. The same labor conditions that had produced the 1913–14 strike — the company town system, the inadequate safety enforcement, the distance between the company's stated policies and the actual conditions in its mines — were still in place in 1917. The Rockefeller Industrial Relations Plan, implemented at CF&I in 1915 as the company's response to the Ludlow crisis, had replaced independent union representation with a company-sponsored employee council. Whether this arrangement improved safety conditions at the Hastings mine in the years between 1915 and 1917 was a question the investigators noted but did not resolve.

The United States entered the First World War on April 6, 1917 — twenty-one days before the Hastings explosion. Coal production was immediately designated as a war priority by the Wilson administration. The political and economic pressure on coal companies to maintain output in the spring of 1917 was, by any measure, higher than it had been in any previous period of the mine's operation. The investigation did not examine whether this pressure had any bearing on decisions about production pace, inspection schedules, or dust control in the weeks before April 27. The question is in the record as a question, not as a finding.

What is in the record as a finding — the finding of the most basic kind, established by body count and published in the Trinidad newspapers over the course of a week — is that 121 men went into the Hastings mine on the morning of April 27, 1917, and none of them came back out. They are in the cemetery on the hill. The mine is sealed. The town is gone. The canyon holds their names if you can find the markers, and it will hold them for as long as the stone lasts.