| Name | Age | Sex | Injuries | Injured areas |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Koerschner, Bill | Not recorded | Male | Not recorded | Not recorded |
Bill Koerschner and Joe Saunders spent three trips attempting to dig open an entrance at Dig Springs which was blowing air. Saunders describes what took place: "On May 11th, our fourth visit to the spring, we came armed with a winch and cables to pull a large rock from the entrance. Our working area was an alcove about ten feet long, eight feet wide, and six to eight feet high. Two rather large blocks lay on the ground, damming the spring. These we wished to winch out as a sledge hammer had proven worthless the week before.
"In order to minimize the effect of mud suction, we started digging around the rock's base, which would also give us a better hold with the chains. While we were doing this, Bill got carried away and started to dig away from the target rock, at the base of the blocks forming the right wall. A few minutes after he started digging there, he said, "I hope this thing doesn't fall on me." A minute or two later I heard, and then saw from the corner of my eye, some crumbs of dirt roll down from the side of the block. I looked up, expecting to see someone standing above us on the small cliff. What I saw instead was the right wall of the alcove toppling toward me. In a split second I jumped for my life toward the outside of the alcove, yelling as I did, It's falling, get out!' Bill, who was crouched at the very base of the wall when I yelled, had time to stand up and make a brief move to his left before he was hit. The wall was composed of two 3- to 4-ton blocks with a half ton of smaller stuff on top. With a ripping noise the whole stack toppled. The bottom block was stopped by the target rock, but upper block slid off the lower one, hitting Bill on the right side of his body, knocking him down.
"I got up, dismissing my minor scrapes, and looked over to Bill. His shirt was in shreds, his shoulder was bent in a grotesque angle, and a deep gouge in his lower right arm showed the tendon or bone. He said something about going to black out, so left for aid. I got a local [person] to call for an ambulance from Princeton, 15 miles away. While the local waited for the ambulance at my car, I returned to Bill with some clean clothes to cover the wounds with. I covered him with the clothes to keep him warm and minimize shock, and I kept talking to him to keep him with us. About forty minutes after the accident, the ambulance crew arrived. After securing the lower block with a cable, we dug his foot out from the rubble and put him in a stretcher. It took another 30 minutes to carry him back to the road, and about two hours after the accident he was in the hospital. He underwent four or five hours of surgery. His injuries were a broken jaw, broken shoulder, broker lower right arm, and various nerves, muscles, and blood vessels ripped loose from the upper arm. The orthopedic surgeon who worked on Bill described the injuries to the arm as as bad as he's seen for survivors of mining accidents. There is considerable question now as to whether any use of the right arm can be recovered, even with future surgery attempts to put the nerves back in place."
Analysis: Even considering the serious injuries sustained by Bill, both he and I were lucky. If I had not heard the crumbs of dirt rolling, neither or us would had any warning. I would have been struck frontally and Bill would have been pinned or crushed by the lower block. Bill was lucky that the rock hit him while he was standing and that it didn't hit him more on his head. We were also lucky that I could go for help.
"What can we learn from this? Certainly not that digging should be stopped, for part of the essence of caving is digging to new passage. It is rather that entrances feature the more unstable walls and ceilings and cavers should respect potentially unstable rocks. Bill and I got too careless, ceased thinking about collapses. We thought about part of the alcove collapsing after we removed the target rock, but we didn't think it would happen as soon as it did. Perhaps having only two people digging was unwise. We needed a third or fourth person." (Saunders)
This record was last updated on 27th Apr 2024 at 23:11 UTC.