Great disasters - great escapes

 

With a death toll of more than 1,120, the fall of the Rana Plaza in Bangladesh is now confirmed as the deadliest building collapse in modern history, but in the midst of terrible tragedy, there was an astonishing story of survival.

Nineteen year old Reshma Begum was pulled from the rubble alive after being trapped for 17 days.  Rescuers had spotted her waving an aluminium curtain rail.   Reshma had come to the big city from the countryside three years ago, and had been working at her factory in the Rana Plaza for less than a month when the block collapsed.  

Three years ago, a 24 year old man was dragged out of the remains of a hotel eleven days after the Haiti earthquake, and 17 days after the collapse of the Sampoong department store in Seoul, South Korea, in 1995, an 18 year old was found alive.

In 1906, nearly 1,100 miners were killed by an explosion in a colliery at Courrieres in France.   To the astonishment of rescue workers, 20 days later, a group of 13 survivors emerged.    They had kept themselves alive on food that miners took down the pit to eat during their breaks and by slaughtering a horse.

*My third video on Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters is a story from Scotland - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKR5Ayyx6cs

 

Mining disaster survivors

After the scenes of wild celebration in Chile when it was revealed that 33 men trapped on August 5^th by a tunnel collapse at the San Jose copper and gold mine are still alive, comes the sober realisation that it may take four more months to free them.

They do have access to some water, but they have been living on two spoonfuls of tuna, a sip of milk and a biscuit every 48 hours. They are in a shelter, said to be about the size of a one-bedroom flat, though some argue they have about a mile of space to move around in.

There have been other extraordinary escapes after mining accidents. Europe’s worst was at Courrieres in northern France in 1906, when nearly 1,100 were killed. Twenty days after the explosion, to general astonishment, 13 survivors emerged from the pit. They had lost all sense of time, and believed they had been trapped for only four or five days.

After China’s Tangshan earthquake of 1976, some coalminers survived for 15 days below ground without food or clean water. They too believed they had been trapped for only a few days, but their bodies told the true story. They had each lost up to three stones. For more details, see A Disastrous History of the World.

The San Francisco earthquake

This day…..104 years ago saw one of history’s most famous earthquakes - the one that struck San Francisco at just before a quarter past five on the morning of April 18, 1906. It measured about 7.8, with its epicentre around two miles from the city.

For all its fame, it is not one of the deadliest the world has seen. The final death toll was around 3,000. (China’s Tangshan earthquake of 1976, for example, killed at least 240,000 and possibly many more – see also my blogs of July 28, 2009, Jan 22 and 24 and Feb 9, 2010.)

As with so many disasters, it was the aftermath rather than the quake itself that claimed most victims. Some people were drowned when water mains burst, but far more perished in fires that quickly engulfed the largely wooden city. Within half an hour, 50 had broken out, and they burned for three days.

More than 28,000 buildings were destroyed, including every downtown store, and nearly three quarters of San Francisco had to be rebuilt or extensively repaired, while more than half the population was made homeless. Many of the new buildings were designed to be resistant to fire and earthquake, and five years later the city hosted the world’s fair.

Survivors and great escapes

There has not been much good news from Haiti, but yesterday we got a small ration. Fifty hours after the earthquake struck, a two year old boy was found alive by a Spanish rescue team in the ruins of his home in Port-au-Prince. Redjeson Hausteen Claude’s face broke into a smile when he was handed to his weeping mother.

On July 4 last year, I wrote in this blog about what appeared to be the unusual ability of children to survive air crashes. And after the great Sicily earthquake of 1908, which killed perhaps 150,000 people, a group of Russian sailors, who played a much-admired role in the rescue effort, found two babies safe and well under a heap of rubble. They were said to have been laughing and playing with the buttons on their clothes.

There have also been astonishing escapes involving adults, of course. Twenty days after the Courrieres mining disaster in France in 1906, 13 survivors emerged from the pit, long after the rescue effort had been abandoned, and following the Chinese Tangshan earthquake of 1976, there were miners who kept going for 15 days underground without food or clean water.

Polio + Europe's worst mining disaster

There are small but ominous signs of polio making a comeback in Africa, aided by the chaos prevailing in parts of the continent. Refugees fleeing Somalia have brought the disease back to Kenya for the first time in 20 years, and Uganda has just had its first case in 12 years at a refugee camp, while Togo had three cases in 2008, after being clear of polio for five years.

A worldwide campaign against the virus reduced the number of cases from about 350,000 in 1988 to just 1,310 in 2007, but Bill Gates, who has pledged £185 million to the fight against the disease, says that if it is not eradicated, the number of victims will start rising again.

On this day....103 years ago, Europe’s worst ever mining disaster happened at the Courrieres colliery in northern France. About 1,800 men and boys were underground when a fierce explosion ripped through the pit. Rescue workers toiled day and night and managed to bring more than 650 men up, but eventually so many of the galleries collapsed that the search had to be called off.

Then astonishingly, 20 days after the disaster, a group of 13 miners emerged. They had survived by eating food taken down by colleagues who had been killed, and by slaughtering a horse. In the perpetual darkness, the group had lost all sense of time and believed they had been trapped for only four or five days.

The final death toll was 1,099 – a number surpassed only by the Honkeiko mining disaster of 1942 (see my blog of February 22).