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Submitted by Linda Talbott
for the USGenNet Data Repository http://www.us-data.org/
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Formatted by USGenNet Data Repository Chief Archivist, Linda Talbott
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Osceola Mine Fire - 1895
Houghton County, MI

Annual Report of the Bureau of
Labor and Industrial Statistics
Vol. 21, 1904 - p. 105

        The two most serious disasters ever known in Michigan mines were
     ascribable to carelessness pure and simple.  In September, 1893, 28
     miners were drowned in an iron mine of the Menominee range, due to
     the criminal negligence of the management in following an ore seam
     up into the bed of a river flowing above, despite the warnings of
     some of the older miners, a number of whom quit their jobs in time
     to save their lives.  In September, 1895, thirty men and boys were
     suffocated by a fire in the Osceola mine.  This terrible loss of 
     life was due to the carelessness of the victims themselves, who
     neglected warnings to leave the mine at once, in the belief that
     there could be no danger, owing to the merely trivial amount of
     timbering contained underground.  Unfortunately they forgot, or
     never knew, that wood, when burned with an insufficient supply of
     oxygen, gives off carbon monoxide, an acrid and deadly gas.  This
     gas was suddenly whirled through the mine by a change in the natural
     system of ventilation, due to the rising of the heated air from the
     burning shaft, down which, under normal conditions, air was sucked
     as though through an inverted syphon.
     
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