The Mellette County Pioneer

18 KNOWN DEAD
IN A TNT BLAST

FOURTEEN PERSONS ARE UNACCOUNTED FOR. INQUIRIES ORDERED.

New Brunswick, N. J.—The number of known dead as a result of yesterday's disastrous TNT explosion and celluloid fire at the little town of Nixon today was placed at eighteen. Only one additional body, the torso of a woman, was found today. Rescuers who worked in the smoking ruins throughout the day said eight persons are missing, six are unaccounted for and sixty are being treated for injuries suffered in the disaster.

The body found was that of Mrs. Arthur Dumas, who with her three little children and a visiting woman friend was killed when her home, just outside the Nixon plant boundaries, was demolished.

The bodies of the Dumas children and Miss Janice Rockefeller, her friend, were found last night.

Firemen with tractors resumed tearing at the masses of twisted and shattered tile that are all that remain of the Nixon Nitration Works company's 45 buildings where celluloid novelties were manufactured.

They also dug among the wrecked tanks, railroad cars and heaps of TNT and ammonia in boxes and barrels which fringe the gigantic crater marking the site of the explosion.

Fires continued to burst forth in scattered heaps of the debris, but authorities asserted all were under control. The rows of magazines filled with tons of highly inflammable celluloid in sheets—most of them with doors blown off or roofs crushed in—were believed out of danger.

What caused the explosion remained a mystery and prompted several investigations which will begin tomorrow. Officers of the Raritan arsenal adjoining the destroyed properties and where a half dozen scores of magazines stuffed with high explosive shells were blown in, will conduct an inquiry for the government.

The most generally accepted theory was that the explosive properties had not been eliminated from the TNT before it was transferred from the arsenal to the 300-foot building of the Ammonia company where the blast occurred.