Thirty-year-old tragedy memorialized
Tragedy Strikes
Thirty years ago last Thursday, was presumably just another work day for the employees of the Cargill Salt company's Belle Isle salt mine.
Perhaps the men appeared at work, drank, coffee, joked with their friends and coworkers before donning their hard hats and stepping into the lift which would transport them to another world 1,200 feet below the marshy earth bordering the Gulf of Mexico in St. Mary Parish.
Perhaps as they neared the completion of their shifts, they thought it would be just another completed night of work with just another dollar earned to support their young and growing families.
Unfortunately, that day – Tuesday, March 5, 1968 – was the day the solitary shaft, connecting workers in the world of work below to the world of family and friends above, became a tunnel of fire.
Twenty-one men died that day, marking forever the lives of their loved ones and the lives of those who attempted their rescue.
Included in the death toll of the 21 workers, were 10 men from Vermilion Parish: Minos Langlinais, Jr, 29, of Kaplan; Paul "J.C." Granger, 35, native of Erath; Wilbur "Bud" Jenkins, 25 of Abbeville; Roy Byron , 45, of Abbeville; Harris Joseph Touchet and Harry Joseph Touchet of Meaux, twin brothers who were 29 years old; Leroy Trahan, 27, of Abbeville; Dennis Romero, 33, a native of Erath; Michael Boudreaux, 21, of Abbeville; and, Chester Vice, 45, of Abbeville.
Families of six of the miners resided in Abbeville at the time.
Harris Touchet, Granger, and Trahan had married three sisters, the daughters of Mr. And Mrs. Preston Trahan of Abbeville. Boudreaux had married a niece of the twins and had just returned from duty with the armed forces during the Vietnam conflict before taking his position with the Cargill Salt company. Byron was an uncle of the twin boys. Jenkin's wife was pregnant with their third child.
Attempting Rescue
By midnight Wednesday, March 6, rescue volunteers from the Pittsburgh & Midway Coal Company's No. 9 mine at DeKoven, Ky., had responded to the call for help.
While waiting for the rescue team to arrive, local fire departments poured water from Coast Guard fire boats into the mine.
On Thursday, March 7, wearing universal gas masks, Ed Holeman of Sturgis, Ky., and Dilford Holmes of Madisonville, Ky., were the first "rescue workers" to enter the mine. Their descent marked the sixth attempt to enter the shaft. The Daily Iberian of March 8 likened their descent to "a space trip": a venture "into the deep unknown...much as astronauts venture into space."
A shaft bucket was built from a fan casing by oil field workers, and new cable wire was strung. Holeman and Holmes were lowered to the bottom to cut through the timbers that blocked the shaft. They reached the bottom, but were ordered to remain in the makeshift bucket because the water used to extinguish the fire had created scalding steam.
After many attempts, when the Kentucky rescue workers emerged from the mine at 6 a.m. Friday, March 8, they brought with them the last hope for finding anyone alive. By that time, 16 bodies had been found. Three hours later the remaining five would be located as well.
According to the coroner's report, 20 miners succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning around 6 a.m., March 6. One miner died of head injuries sustained from fallen salt and debris.
On March 12, the bodies of the miners were retrieved and brought to the surface in a bucket three at a time.
The U.S. Bureau of Mines' investigation listed three contributing factors to the disaster: 1) the absence of adequate fire prevention measures in a shaft that incorporated a great deal of flammable light timber and plywood in its structure and its facilities; 2) the inadequacy of firefighting facilities at the mine's surface and in the mine; and, 3) the lack of a separate shaft, which could have provided another way out of the mine.
As a result of the fire and the subsequent investigation, Cargill Salt established very aggressive safety programs within the salt mining industry, which at the time of the accident, was a relatively new industry.
Thirty Year Dedication
This year, on Saturday, March 14 at 2 p.m., the West St. Mary Chamber of Commerce in Franklin will mark the 30th anniversary of the Belle Isle salt mine disaster with the dedication of a monument honoring the salt miners who perished, all other Louisiana salt miners who have lost their lives in mine accidents, and the rescue teams who responded to their needs.
The memorial will be the only one of its kind in North America and will be erected at the junction of U.S. Hwy. 90 and Northwest Boulevard at the St. Mary Parish Tourist Commission office.
To date, Cargill has donated $35,000 for the memorial statue and Morton Salt has contributed $5,000.
Through the efforts of this memorial, all Louisianians – and all Americans – will be touched by the memory of this tragic disaster.
This article was written by Suzanne Moore for the Abbeville Meridional Newspaper issue published March 8, 1998.Some changes have been made for this posting.
Local families remember tragedy
Women and Children Speaking
"That day when he left to go to work, he had on a sweater – gold with a v-neck . He looked down and he said, 'Oh, I've got a hole in this.' And I said, 'well, go in and change it. You've got time.' He said 'No. This will be the last time I wear it anyway,'" said Barbara Jenkins Rippon of the last moment she saw her husband alive a little over 30 years ago.
Wilbur "Bud" Jenkins was only 25 years old when he kissed his wife goodbye on the steps of their newly constructed home and headed off to work at the Cargill Salt's Belle Isle mine.
Waiving goodbye to his two sons, three-year-old Shaun and one-and-one-half year old Shannon, he probably never imagined that he would never get to see the face of his unborn daughter Tammy.
"That scene has stayed in my mind. Why did he say that? I'm sure it was just coincidence. I'm sure everybody has their stories about things that have played in their minds," she added.
As she pauses in her worday at a business which she owns in Abbeville to relive this uncomfortable story, Rippon's eyes still fill with unshed tears as she remembers the tragedy that broke the hearts of so many families in Vermilion Parsih in March of 1968.
Telling the Story of a Life
"All we knew was that he went to work every day and he came back every day. He loved his job. He had been a dairy farmer all his life, and he was finally making money. He was even saving a little bit. And then, he was dead," said Steven Vice, Sr., and his sister Beverly Theall.
They have met in the Erath workplace of their younger sister Dolly Babineaux. Babineaux and Casa Vice add their memories to the story.
None of the four siblings ever seems to complete a sentence; they fill in each other's words when one of them must yield to a passing memory or must pause to wipe an eye.
"They said they found daddy sitting down up against a rock with his hands behind his head like he was in a recliner," the siblings add about their father, Chester Vice, 45, who just two days before this last trip to work had given his daughter Casa away at her wedding. In the wedding picture, he is holding a child. "We don't have any pictures of him alone. There were always babies around him," his children explain.
Waiting for News
Though time has taken them down different paths, these, and many other families like them, have one thing in common: Their memory of March 6, 1968, when they all found out that a loved one had been trapped in the salt mine 1,200 feet below the surface of the earth in St. Mary Parish.
Many of them blame Cargill for the accident which took the lives of 21 young men, 10 of them from Vermilion Parish, six from Abbeville.
"Why did they let these men go down, if they didn't have more safety devices?" wonders Theall. "That mine had already had trouble. They knew they were supposed to have more than one shaft."
"They (Cargill) had been told a few months ago about things they needed to change. One of the things was that there was only one shaft and that they needed another one. We asked, 'why didn't you do this?' But they just didn't," said Nell Trahan, the former wife of Michael Boudreaux and, at the time, the newly widowed mother of an 11-month old son Pat Boudreaux.
If they don't blame Cargil for the accident itself, they certainly blame Cargill for their insensitive handling of the situation.
"I was waiting for my husband to come home. At 2 o'clock in the morning, I started pacing. I thought maybe there was an accident. There was about three or four of them that rode together," explained Rippon.
"Four o'clock came, still nothing. Six o'clock came, and the ladies started contacting each other: 'hey, did your husband come home.' 'No...no...no.' 'Did you hear anything?' 'No.'
"We heard it on the radio; we heard it on the television. I was getting phone calls from Illinois telling me that there was a fire in the mine, and I said, 'nobody told me,'" Rippon added.
And the callous manner of keeping the families informed while they waited for rescue workers to bring their husbands, sons, brothers and uncles out alive didn't end there.
Praying for Miracles
When the families gathered at the Calumet warehouse staffed by the Red Cross and began the six day wait for their family members to be pulled to the surface, the families tell of Cargill's "false hope."
"They said they sent down a candle or something like that and that it stayed lit, so the men had plenty of oxygen in there. They said everything was good. We had hope and all that time it wasn't true," described Theall.
"We were all so hopeful. We kept hearing, 'They're going to be all right. They were trained. They will go to the back of the mine. They will be fine,'" said Rippon.
"Then, when the news came it was just like 'we found them and they're dead,'" she added.
"The man stood at the door and said, 'I have bad news. I will only say it once. I won't repeat it. We found 16 bodies,' and he turned right around and walked back out," Laura Bell Loignon said in her description of the moment when the waiting almost ended. Loignon lost her twin brothers Harry and Harris Touchet, 29, her son-in-law Boudreaux, 21, and her uncle Roy Byron, 45.
Some continued to hope that the remaining five would be found alive. For others, all their hope died in those short four sentences spoken by the man silhouetted within the door-frame of the Red Cross shelter.
"We just kind of all fell apart," said Trahan.
"You still kind of had that hope in the back of your mind. I guess you knew there was no way they could be alive. But, you still had that doubt that maybe there is a possibility...maybe they found a way," Trahan added.
"When she heard the news, she went up to her daddy. She said, 'Daddy, what am I going to do?' He said, 'Don't worry about it. We will take care of it.' That's the first thing she did," said Loignon.
Boudreaux had just come home in December from serving in the army in Germany. He only got to see three months of his son's life.
Learning to Live Again
The tragedy was extremely difficult for the young mothers to handle. Some felt there was little community support.
"Today it would bring people together, but then it was a different world. I think today the community would be more supportive. Back then people were more to themselves. I'm sure they felt our sorrow and possibly they prayed, but it wasn't like it is today when you hear of something like this happening," said Rippon.
About the other women who lost husbands, Rippon said: "We remained friends, but we never talked about this. That's an odd thing. All these women – it's strange that we never talked. We were just living in different worlds. We did the best we could. Our families helped us."
"My mom and dad moved in with me because I didn't care. I didn't care whether the boys ate or not. I couldn't eat and I couldn't do anything. I was crying all the time," she added.
Similarly, Trahan built a house on her parents' property. They helped her raise Pat until she remarried.
The deaths were difficult for the children being raised without fathers also.
"Instead of happy thoughts, there are all these sad and gruesome things. You don't talk about this to your children and then, as they grow older, they resent the fact that you didn't tell them. 'I couldn't tell you this. It's not something that I would want you to remember,' I say to myself. Maybe I was wrong because they should have known. I almost felt guilty. They were denied being able to know him. It was hard for me to explain that because of all the pain," said Rippon.
Rippon explained that her daughter Tammy had the most questions because she had never seen her father. "When she would have arguments with me or her step-father, she would go to the cemetery to the mausoleum where her father was buried. She would put notes to him under the lid of the place that is left for me."
Closing a Chapter
Many of the families feel there was no closure because they were not allowed to see the bodies of those killed. And the thing they remember most vividly of the funeral services was the smell of the mine and the bodies permeating the churches, their clothing, the flags which draped the caskets, the plastic bags returned to them with their loved ones' wallets, rings, pocket knives.
"It was just horrible, unbearable. They had to be buried as soon as they came in. They came in with the bodies that morning and they were buried that afternoon. The flower shops still say that was the worse day in Abbeville's history," said Trahan.
All of them hope the dedication of the monument in Franklin, long overdue in their minds, will help them find some kind of closure.
"I don't know what I'm expecting. I may be expecting something magical to happen, but I think it will be good for my kids to know that he left his mark on the world...not only him but all the others," said Rippon.
"Their being recognized, remembered, it will kind of close a chapter. They didn't lose their lives for nothing. They are remembered," agreed Trahan.
This article was written by Suzanne Moore for the Abbeville Meridional Newspaper issue published March 15, 1998. Some changes have been made for this posting.
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