I started today reading about a Kentucky mine collapse and ended up, an hour later, reading about a canary tournament in Berkeley. Welcome to August 13th, 1926.
This was the news of the day, all over every front page. Five men were sealed underground at a zinc and fluorspar mine in Salem, Kentucky, when a wall of rock came down behind them. What they had between them: four matches and a can of water. They would be down there six days and seven nights.
Indianapolis Times, Aug 13, 1926
The Wrong Hole
Above ground, more than 500 men worked in shifts, day and night, trying to reach them. One crew blasted a new shaft straight down through solid rock. Another sank a drill over 100 feet, hoping to lower food and a telephone line to whatever was left of the men below. When that hole finally broke through, the engineers had to admit they missed completely. It was in the wrong spot. All that drilling had missed the pocket where the men were entirely.
By then the men were surviving on water sucked from the mine's own support timbers, rotten with damp, which is what the "water-soaked timbers" headlines were actually describing. It wasn't a rescue technique. It was thirst.
Milwaukee Leader, Aug 13, 1926
What Actually Saved Them
What finally reached them wasn't the new shaft or the drilled hole. It was an old, abandoned one, unused for years, that a rescuer named Freeman Cobb crawled through by hand. Waiting on the other side was his own brother.
"Hello, boys," the first man out said. "I ain't neither sick nor weak."
By the time this ran, mine rescue had its own national tournament. Had its own trained teams, even its own famous canary. Said to be returned “safely back to consciousness and full vigor” after losing consciousness doing it's job.
None of it is what got these five men out. The thing that worked had been sitting there the whole time, unused, until someone finally crawled through it.
San Francisco Chronicle August 13, 1926