Somber Anniversary In Port City History

by Steve Yablonski | August 25, 2017 6:56 am

OSWEGO, NY – Tragedy struck swiftly at 2:10 p.m. Sunday Aug. 18, 1957.

During one of the final phases of work on the Port City’s new 6,250-foot water intake tunnel, a premature explosion killed three men, one a Minetto father of three, and injured slightly two other men one a DuPont blasting supervisor.

A volunteer also died later during rescue operations before a state mine inspector ordered efforts to bring the victims to the surface be halted until the tunnel could be cleared of fumes and an oxygen supply be blown in.

For many, memories of the Oswego water intake tunnel explosion remain clouded behind the veil of 60 years.

For a few, the emotion of the moment has caused certain images to remain vivid despite the passing of six decades.

Local photographer Bill Leighton was in the tunnel in the days prior to the fatal blast.

“I had taken some pictures right near the end of the project. I was taking progress photographs of the construction for the city,” he remembers. “They were doing everything properly; they took safety very seriously. That’s why the explosion was such a shock and surprise.”

Even though she was just a young child at the time, Sue Germain has some clear memories of parts of that day.

“My father worked there. He was an electrician,” she said. “He didn’t come home for dinner that day. My mother said there had been an accident. He had stayed to help. A lot of people volunteered to help. I vividly remember that.”

Thirteen volunteers were admitted to Oswego Hospital for treatment after being overcome from a lack of air and overexertion during the 12-hour attempt to recover the three bodies.

Those hospitalized were treated and released the following morning. Three others were treated, but not held, at the hospital early on Monday (Aug. 19).

Leighton said he was living on Ellen Street in the ’50s.

“I can’t remember exactly how I heard about the explosion. Someone told me about it or maybe I heard it on the news. It was a big shock. Everyone was very surprised. We thought everything was going well on the project. People around the city were stunned by the news of the deaths,” he said.

The three workers killed in the explosion were:

Linwood (Woody) Heiston, 47, of Niagara Falls, formerly of Elkton, Va. He was tunnel superintendent for Herbert F. Darling, the general contractor. Heiston was the father of two children.

Phil Aylor, 36, of Harrisonburg, Va. He was the tunnel foreman, and the father of a young daughter.

John H. (Art) Lagoe, 40, of West River Road, Minetto. He was an electrician for Snyder & Mackin, a local electrical contractor holding a sub-contract on the project. He was the father of three children.

Lloyd John Matteson, 30, of North Road, Dempster (town of New Haven) was the volunteer rescue worker who lost his life. He was the father of four children He was employed by the M.A. Bongiovanni Co., laying water mains in the city of Oswego.

Horace Nunn, 55 of Newark, chief engineer for the DuPont Company for the Oswego territory and the blasting supervisor assigned to oversee the tunnel’s final blast project, had been near the three men when the blast occurred.

“Another 15 minutes and they would have been with me,” Nunn told reporters at the time.

The trio was carrying a sack containing five large sticks of dynamite with 90 percent nitroglycerin content. This grade of dynamite is much more explosive than the type ordinarily used.

It was to have been attached to the 1,000 pounds of charges already placed at the top of the end of the tunnel to affect the final blasting of the project through the last 15 to 18 feet of rock.

“It was a rolling type of explosion,” Mr. Nunn said.

His description indicated that the explosion was probably a gas one, for dynamite blasts give off a sharp crack.

Those residents in the college residential area who heard the muffled explosion Sunday afternoon (Aug. 18) later said it did not sound just like the blasts heard in the earlier stages of the project. This substantiates the theory of a gas, not dynamite, explosion.

Nunn, who was walking with a limp and a cane the day after the explosion, said that he went toward where the men were after the blast after regaining his footing and becoming stabilized after the force and the shock of the unexpected explosion.

He didn’t know just how far he went before he realized that this effort was a hopeless one and then he started back toward the tunnel entrance.

He was about 2,500 feet in when the explosion occurred at 2:10 p.m.

He was met at about the 500-foot mark by two Darling employees, Horace Kimball and another unidentified tunnel worker carrying a stretcher and blanket.

They had no masks and he gave one his own light as that man had no light.

Nunn continued to the entrance and came to the surface with Alex J. Rucki, 34, of 218 E. Second St., who was at the tunnel entrance sitting on a sump pump as a telephone relay man when the explosion knocked him off the pump and the pump off its base.

The phone he was holding was broken into pieces and the phone system knocked out by the explosion.

The miraculousness of their escape was testified to by the condition of their hard hats.

The hats were in the Darling Company’s offices, shattered with parts of the brim gone, and the crowns cracked by the impact.

Rescue attempts were slowed because volunteers had to wade through thigh-high water for the first 1,000 feet or so. The water had accumulated in that area due to seepage; the tunnel rises slightly as it goes out under the lake to enable the water to flow by gravity to the base of the shaft.

The bodies of the three men were found lying on their backs approximately 5,000 feet from the tunnel entrance at about 9:27 p.m. by BM2 Raymond Johnson of the Coast Guard and Charles Demm, 27, of 158 W. Bridge St., who had also worked on the tunnel job.

“I don’t recall ever hearing what the cause of the explosion was. Someone may have been smoking, or it could have been gas fumes in the tunnel. Or, it might have been an electrical spark from the (device) they used to detonate the charges,” Leighton said.

Authorities believe gas fumes to be to blame. They were ignited by a cigarette or a spark from the workers’ equipment.

Leighton recalls venturing into the tunnel for his photographs.

“I do remember I had to protect my camera equipment when I went in to take the (progress) photos for the city. There were several small leaks. They had to keep plugging them up to keep the water out of the tunnel while they were working,” he said. “At the time, I didn’t think a lot about going into the tunnel. Now, I’m not so sure I’d do it.”

Water flows in an S-shaped course before entering into the tunnel; this eliminates much of the foreign material that had plagued Oswego water users due to the broken intake pipe that was currently in place.

Construction of the nearby pumping station was approximately two months behind schedule. Actual use of the new water system wasn’t expected until March or April of 1958.

The explosion had no impact on the completion of the whole job because the intake work was ahead of schedule enough so that whatever inspections and repairs that had to be done wouldn’t affect the overall project.

“After all that time and energy … it was a shock that something like that could have happened. Things were going well; no one thought this would happen at the last minute. They had been so careful,” Leighton said.

(Editor’s Note: This article originally ran on the 50th anniversary of the event.)

Source URL: https://oswegocountytoday.com/news/oswego/somber-anniversary-in-port-city-history/

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