Tunnel Deaths
193 lives were lost during construction, leading to the nickname "The Bloody Pit." The Hoosac Tunnel was the first commercial use of nitroglycerin in the United States. Some lives were lost due to the unstable nature of nitroglycerin, but many more were lost to the even more unstable black powder, which was used before nitroglycerin was introduced. On March 20, 1865, Ned Brinkman and Billy Nash were buried when foreman Ringo Kelly accidentally set off a blast of dynamite. Kelly disappeared from view immediately after the accident, but a year later his strangled body was found buried in the tunnel at exactly the same spot where Brinkman and Nash had died.
The horrendous Central Shaft accident accident was one of the most fatal; it occurred while digging the tunnel's 1,028-foot (313 m) vertical exhaust shaft, called 'Central Shaft.' On October 17, 1867, a lighted candle in the hoist building ignited naphtha fumes which had leaked from a 'Gasometer' lamp, triggering an explosion. The hoist caught fire and collapsed into the shaft. Four men near the top of the shaft escaped, but thirteen men working 538 feet (164 m) below were trapped, killed by falling flaming naphtha and pieces of iron. The pumps were also destroyed, and the shaft began to fill with water. A worker named Mallory was lowered into the shaft by rope the next day; he was overcome by fumes and reported no survivors.
Workers assumed that nobody at the bottom survived, so no further rescue attempts were made. However, when the first workers got to the bottom several months later, they found that workers had, indeed, survived and had built a makeshift raft, but had died, suffocated by the fire.
Read more about this topic: Hoosac Tunnel
Famous quotes containing the words tunnel and/or deaths:
“It is the light
At the end of the tunnel as it might be seen
By him looking out somberly at the shower,
The picture of hope a dying man might turn away from,
Realizing that hope is something else, something concrete
You can’t have.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Death is too much for men to bear, whereas women, who are practiced in bearing the deaths of men before their own and who are also practiced in bearing life, take death almost in stride. They go to meet death—that is, they attempt suicide—twice as often as men, though men are more “successful” because they use surer weapons, like guns.”
—Roger Rosenblatt (b. 1940)