Not a single lesson learned: The Jonesville Mine disaster of 1937

Part of a continuing weekly series on Alaska history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaska history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story.

It was Oct. 26, 1937, at the Evan Jones Coal Company’s Jonesville Mine northeast of Palmer. Just after 2 in the afternoon, a miner in the main gangway lit a match for a cigarette. Management had been lax in testing the atmosphere and severely deficient in allowing an employee to enter the mine with matches. The flame ignited a pocket of flammable air, exploding through and out of the mine, caving in the entrance.

The resulting blast was nothing like the somehow alluring balls of fire seen in movies. This was ugly, more akin to a hurricane of smoke threaded with flame. The wind sucked breaths from lungs, crumpled steel sheets, and blew the adjacent train backward; a few cars toppled off the rails. A timber was driven into the small engine that pulled loaded cars from the mine to the main track, rendering it inoperable. Yet, thankfully, a nearby stash of detonators was unharmed.

At that time, Jake Angeli was off working a chute about 350 feet from the main gangway. He told the Anchorage Daily Times, “I had just looked at my watch and found it to read 2:10 o’clock, when all at once a big shot came and seemed to pass through my head like a wave. I stood there for a few seconds and then I said to Carl Edman, who was with me, ‘Gas has exploded! I think we’d better find the trouble.’ We started out and met a big black cloud of stinking, choking smoke that nearly blinded us.”

Angeli and Edman bent over as low as they could while running out for the gangway. Near the cave-in, they found foreman Victor Raide laying on his face covered in burns and dust, with a broken leg and crushed ribs, but still alive. They dragged Raide away from the worst of the fallen timbers, then crawled through a hole in the debris deeper into the mine. They discovered one and then another now-deceased fellow miners before reversing their way back out.

Elsewhere in the mine, Hjalmer Houser and Otto Nakkola were standing together at the time of the explosion. From a shared primal urge, they ran towards a ventilation shaft, stopping as they became aware of the magnitude of the situation. They turned back, thinking they could save another miner before the fumes and smoke dissuaded them. The only people they could save were themselves, so they returned to the ventilation shaft.

The ventilation shaft was 285 feet from the gangway, at a 45-degree angle, a long distance when in shock and breathing through clouds of dust and coal. “We climbed up and up,” said Houser. “I don’t know how long it took. We were both gasping for breath. My eyes were smarting and watering. I couldn’t see. It seemed as though I couldn’t breathe any longer. I thought I was done for when I felt fresh air. I couldn’t go another inch so I just hung there where I was with my nose in the fresh air. I was there a long time. I don’t know how long.”

Once thinking became an option, his first thought was for Nakkola, who had not emerged from the shaft. Houser looked back and saw him crumpled over, 6 feet from the surface. Said Houser, “I wrapped my shirt around my eyes and nose and went back into the shaft. I put my arms around (Nakkola’s) back and said, ‘Come on, let’s try it once more.’” As hard as he tried, Houser could not budge the far heavier Nakkola. When more people arrived to help, Nakkola was dead. He was likely already gone even before Houser tried to pull him out of the shaft.

The mine’s namesake was Evan William Jones (1880-1950). Born in Wales, Jones moved to Anchorage in 1917, where he became the superintendent of the Alaska Railroad-owned coal mines at Eska and Chickaloon. The latter was soon abandoned, but the Eska Coal Mine operated through 1946, supplying the railroad with coal until it switched to diesel-powered engines. In 1920, Jones and five other Anchorage investors established the Evan Jones Coal Company, built around the Jonesville Mine.

Back in 1937, Oscar Anderson, then president of the Evan Jones Coal Company, organized a relief party from Anchorage, including four nurses and two doctors. In the rush to reach the scene, one of the doctors, Howard Romig, crashed on his way to the Anchorage depot. He abandoned the car and continued on foot to the railroad yards, where he joined the group traveling north in a Brill car.

More immediate assistance arrived from Eska, fellow miners who jumped on a railroad speeder to the scene. Though…