Near Gladewater

Oil, which gushed sudden wealth into eastern Texas last winter (TIME, Feb.2), caused horror and tragedy there last week. Near Gladewater, Sinclair Oil Company's No. I Cole well was brought in. Instantly the null gusher went wild. While 14 men were trying to get the well under control, a spark caused by tool friction suddenly turned a plenteous natural blessing into a howling inferno. Some of the workers managed to dodge out of the flames, two jumped for safety into the slush pit where they were boiled alive. The rest were quickly roasted. Fatalities, originally estimated at twelve, then nine, were finally put at seven, with two other men perhaps fatally burned. In the past fortnight 19 men have lost their lives in eastern Texas oil well fires.

As the flames, bountifully fed by the gusher, leaped and spiraled 300 ft. in the air, Marvin Cole, 18, whose father owns the farm on which the well was drilled, told his version of the disaster. "The men's clothes," he said, "were saturated with oil that had been gushing over the top of the derrick and when the fire started the men ran back and forth through the woods, yelling and clutching at their flaming clothes. I would have given a million dollars if I hadn't heard those awful screams of the men in that fire. You could have heard them for half a mile."

Next day Oilman Harry Ford Sinclair flew over from Dallas, 110 mi. to the west, to see his costly cauldron. He found the entire countryside shrouded in haze. Workmen were busy clearing away 20 acres of pine forest surrounding the flaming gusher, trying to remove bits of the white-hot derrick and machinery. There was not much that Oilman Sinclair, always popular with his men, could do but assure speedy pensions to the families of the victims.

Thirty hours after the disaster, men with asbestos suits got close enough to the bore to make preparations for a nitroglycerine blast. M. M. Kinley and his brother Harry, famed wild well tamers, came from Oklahoma to begin that hazardous undertaking which is calculated to blow out the fuel supply long enough to extinguish the towering pillar of fire.

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