The Chickasha Daily Express

Grow Careless of Danger

Constant Handling of Explosives Make Men Reckless
"After a miner has handled dynamite for eight or ten years without a serious mishap it is a good idea to put him to doing something else about the works," says one who has had a great deal of experience with high explosives. "The chances are 100 to 1 that his long immunity from accident has given him such a contempt for danger that he is an unconscious menace to everybody on the premises. He will do things that not only imperil his own life, but the lives of his comrades. To give you an illustration, I once had an old Cornishman at work at a mine in which I was interested and had intrusted him with a general supervision of all the blasting. He had been handling dynamite for twenty years or more and was justly regarded as an expert. During the entire period he had never had an accident worth speaking of, and by degrees the care and vigilance that were responsible for his excellent record had worn away until he was beginning to entertain the delusion, common to old hands, that the danger of the stuff was much exaggerated.

"One day I was passing through a cut where some blasting had been going on and noticed the old Cornishman hammering a drill into what seemed to be a boring in the ground. I asked him what he was doing and he told me coolly that there was a cartridge in the hole that had failed to explode and that he was just knocking out the tamping to reprime it. I was horrified, for at every blow he was liable to explode the dynamite, and I ordered him sternly to stop and never to repeat such a performance. The proper method would have been to have drilled a new hole near by and exploded the first cartridge with a second blast. He obeyed sullenly, grumbling to himself, and in less than a month afterward was blown up while doing exactly the same thing. He lost his left arm at the shoulder, his left eye and part of his left ear. He also lost his contempt for dynamite, and when he finally emerged from the hospital I gave him back his former job. I never had a more scrupulously careful employe than he was from that time on. It seems a brutal thing to say, but there is nothing that does an old dynamite hand as much good as to get blown up once or twice."