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Show COLLIERIESlCENE OF CATASTROPHE OVER TWO HUNDRED MINERS BURIED AND BUT FEW ARE RECOVERED ALIVE. Cause of Explosion Has Not Been Ascertained and Probably Never Will Be Hope of Saving Buried Men Has Been Abandoned. , Bluefleld, W. Va. With a thunderous thunder-ous detonation which made the hills quiver and sent the valley folk panic-stricken panic-stricken from their homes, two mines of the New River Collieries company here blew up on Tuesday, burying 248 miners 550 feet underground. Of the seventy-one men who were buried in one shaft, No. 6, sixty have been taken out alive and eleven dead; of the 190 known to have been in the other, No. 5, not one has been rescued. res-cued. Flames and smoke are belching from the crumbled shafts, and although al-though all hope of saving any of the buried men has been abandoned, colliers col-liers from mills around are risking their lives in an effort to snuff out the the flames with earth and water. The cause of the explosion has not been ascertained and perhaps will never be known. The New River company operates six mines at Ec-cles. Ec-cles. Nos. 6 and 5 connect. At 2:30 Tuesday afternoon there was a slight explosion in No. 6, followed by another an-other slightly greater in No. G. Ten minutes later the valley shook with the third blast in No. G. The timbers over the main shaft, the ventilators and the cages were shot to the sky and deposited far up the hillside. |