Fifty-Five Minutes at No. 5
A true story of Brookwood, Alabama — September 23, 2001.
Fifty-five minutes. Thirteen lives. A nation's silence.
Available now on Kindle and in paperback.
The Kindle edition includes the archival maps and photographs, with a note on sources and method.
What happened at No. 5
On the afternoon of Sunday, September 23, 2001, thirty-two men rode down for a maintenance shift at the Jim Walter Resources No. 5 mine, two miles north of Brookwood, Alabama.
At 5:20 p.m., an explosion deep in the section left one man injured and trapped underground.
Twelve of his coworkers went toward him.
Fifty-five minutes later came a second and far larger explosion. Thirteen men lost their lives.
It happened twelve days after September 11th. The country was looking somewhere else. Fifteen hundred people came to the funeral. The country never did.
The thirteen
Jim Walter Resources No. 5 Mine · September 23, 2001
- Gaston E. Adams, Jr.
- Raymond F. Ashworth
- Nelson Banks, Jr.
- David L. Blevins
- Clarence H. Boyd
- Wendell R. Johnson
- John W. Knox
- Dennis R. Mobley
- Charles J. Nail
- Sammy J. Riggs
- Charles E. Smith
- Joseph P. Sorah
- Terry M. Stewart
Twenty-five years
The twenty-fifth anniversary falls on September 23, 2026. The news will be full of the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th, exactly as it was the first time.
Each year on September 23, the town gathers at West Brookwood Church, on Lock 17 Road, where a monument bearing the thirteen names was raised in 2002, on the lawn where families once waited for news from the shafts.
The country should not let it pass in silence again.
Sources of record
- MSHA accident investigation report
- Released December 11, 2002. Maps, photographs and findings, including Appendices H, K, P, Q, T, U and DD.
- Federal court and Mine Safety and Health Review Commission decisions
- Enforcement, citation and penalty record
- Contemporaneous newspaper reporting and published accounts of those present
- Survivors, rescue teams, families
All maps and photographs in the book are reproduced from the MSHA accident investigation report, a United States government work in the public domain.