Monongah

Two connected mines blew at ten past ten in the morning, with a force that shook buildings eight miles off and shut the ventilation fans.

The official count was three hundred and sixty-two. It was almost certainly low: men routinely took sons and nephews below on their own check numbers and those boys were not on any book. Estimates run above five hundred.

Most of the dead were immigrants - Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Slovak, Russian. Two hundred and fifty women were widowed and about a thousand children lost a father.

Rescuers could work only fifteen minutes at a time in the afterdamp and several died trying.

It is the worst mining disaster in American history and it led, four years later, to the creation of the Bureau of Mines.