Originally published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 11, 1954
RAVENSDALE, Jan. 10.—A wife’s conviction that the answer to her prayers lies alive in an air-filled crypt 500 feet down in the Landsburg Mine today imbued rescuers with new hope of saving a miner trapped since last Wednesday.
But the day of deliverance—dead or alive—of Harry English, 39, of Black Diamond, was projected until Monday or Tuesday by rescuers confronted now with the added peril of seepage from the surface.
New plan devised
Relentless rescue work, delayed Saturday by new hazards, was pressed with added vigor today as engineers devised a new plan of burrowing into the mountain of coal and rock that holds English.
Fellow miners went down into the shaft today strangely moved by the calmly expressed conviction of Mrs. Lily English, 37, that her husband and the father of her two sons, still lives in entombment.
She said:
“I think Harry still is alive. I keep praying and the feeling he still lives never has never left me. So long as I can feel his presence, I’ll keep praying and hope will not die.”
Kin arrive
Mrs. English said her husband’s father, Edward J. English, of Tonawanda, N.Y., and his sister, Mrs. Maxwell Gately, of Lockport N.Y., arrived at her home Saturday night.
English and another miner, Roy Coutts, 25, were buried in a loading chute of the mine when tons of rock and coal suddenly caved in at 10:40 a.m. Wednesday.
Coutts, who slid to the bottom of the chute, was freed 4 hours later. He was not seriously injured.
Mine officials said they do not know where English is in the 8-foot-square chute. That fact, they explained, makes the rescue operation a much longer and more difficult task.
Leave a comment