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An ammo can hidden among several nearby ponds at the visitor center. Short hike is required through a wooded area, long pants are a must here! Beware of South Louisiana wild life...
No telephones rang in the darkness. No sirens pierced the night. For families of night shift workers at the Cargill salt mine on Belle Isle, the only sign that something was amiss in the early morning hours of Wednesday, March 6, 1968, was absence.
Between 11:15 and 11:30 p.m. on March 5, a fire had ignited in the shaft that connected 21 miners to the surface 1,200 feet above them. A frantic, multi-day rescue effort that transfixed Louisiana ended in the worst disaster in the history of American salt mining. All of the trapped miners died.
Belle Isle is one of five geologic anomalies along the Louisiana coast, salt domes — vertical columns of salt that extend thousands of feet down and create islands that rise above the coastal marsh. All of them have been mined, and Cargill began test drilling at Belle Isle in 1960, began sinking a shaft into the salt dome the next year and started commercial production in 1963.
Thirty years was presumably just another work day for the employees of the Cargill Salt company's Belle Isle salt mine.
Perhaps the men appeared at work, drank, coffee, joked with their friends and coworkers before donning their hard hats and stepping into the lift which would transport them to another world 1,200 feet below the marshy earth bordering the Gulf of Mexico in St. Mary Parish.
Perhaps as they neared the completion of their shifts, they thought it would be just another completed night of work with just another dollar earned to support their young and growing families.
Unfortunately, that day – Tuesday, March 5, 1968 – was the day the solitary shaft, connecting workers in the world of work below to the world of family and friends above, became a tunnel of fire.
Twenty-one men died that day, marking forever the lives of their loved ones and the lives of those who attempted their rescue.
Included in the death toll of the 21 workers, were 10 men from Vermilion Parish: Minos Langlinais, Jr, 29, of Kaplan; Paul "J.C." Granger, 35, native of Erath; Wilbur "Bud" Jenkins, 25 of Abbeville; Roy Byron , 45, of Abbeville; Harris Joseph Touchet and Harry Joseph Touchet of Meaux, twin brothers who were 29 years old; Leroy Trahan, 27, of Abbeville; Dennis Romero, 33, a native of Erath; Michael Boudreaux, 21, of Abbeville; and, Chester Vice, 45, of Abbeville.
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