Pancoast Mine Fire, Throop, 1911
Near Scranton, Pennsylvania
On the morning of April seventh, nineteen eleven, fire broke out inside the Pancoast anthracite mine just outside the borough of Throop in Lackawanna County. Seventy-two miners died by suffocation as smoke filled the underground passages. A government rescue worker sent in to help also perished.
The disaster was one of the deadliest single mine fires in northeastern Pennsylvania's history. In the immediate aftermath, investigators found that interior wooden structures had allowed the fire to spread far faster than it should have. Within weeks, the Pennsylvania legislature responded by passing a law on June fifteenth requiring that all interior buildings at coal mines be constructed of incombustible materials.
It was a direct regulatory response to a specific catastrophe, the kind of reform that had to be bought with lives before the coal industry and its political allies would accept it.
