Lancashire pit disaster exhibition

A new exhibition at the Museum of Wigan Life in Lancashire commemorates the 100^th anniversary of the county’s worst ever mining disaster, and the third worst in British history.

On December 21, 1910, about 900 men and boys were working on the day shift at the Hulton Colliery No. 3 Bank Pit, Westhoughton, known locally as the Pretoria Pit. Just before eight o’ clock in the morning, flames shot out from the main shaft, following an explosion below.

In all 344 miners were killed. As ever they were drawn from tight-knit communities around the pit. One local woman lost her husband, four sons and two brothers. An inquest jury decided that the probable cause was that an overheated safety lamp had ignited gas and coal dust.

The worst mining disaster in British history occurred at Senghenydd, near Caerphilly, less than three years later, on October 14, 1913. A total of 440 miners died after an explosion there. The chief inspector of mines said there had been ‘a disquieting laxity in the management of the mine’, and the manager was fined £24 for five breaches of mining regulations.

For more on both disasters, see A Disastrous History of Britain. The exhibition at Wigan entitled ‘Don’t go down the mine’ runs until March 22, 2011.

http://www.wigan.gov.uk/News/PitExhibition.htm

Mining accidents - now the bad news

Amid the euphoria over the rescue of the 33 Chilean miners, a reminder of how dangerous mining can be – especially in China. An explosion at a coal mine at Yuzhou in Henan province has killed 20 and trapped another 17 underground.

Official reports say that 239 miners got to the surface safely, and that attempts are being made to reach the missing men. China’s mining industry is the most dangerous in the world, with more than 2,600 killed in accidents last year.

The government has tried to improve standards, closing down more than 1,500 illegal pits this year. It also brought in new regulations saying that mine managers have to go and work underground with their men. This tougher approach has helped to reduce the number of deaths from nearly 7,000 a year in 2002, but many miners are poorly trained migrant workers, and rules are often broken.

(See also my blog of Nov 23, 2009.)

*The Glasgow and Leicester edition of myvillage.com have kindly put up articles about my books.

http://glasgow.myangus.co.uk/article/glasgows-disastrous-history

http://myvillage.com/article/leicesters-disastrous-history

Chile - disaster averted

Just back from Turkey in time for the wonderful news of the rescue of all 33 of the trapped Chilean miners, after 69 days underground. There are some dental and eye problems and one case of pneumonia, but overall they seem in remarkably good shape.

When it was first discovered they were still alive after 17 days, it was thought that it might take until Christmas to get them out. The dramatic reduction in the time needed appears to be thanks to the drafting in of a drill normally used in the oil industry.

Two other drills, which each start with a small, pilot hole before widening the shaft, were also used, but the Schramm T-130 starts with a wide hole, and soon outpaced the other two. Chile’s president, Sebastian Pinera, has promised “very radical” improvements to health and safety regulations in mining and other industries.

For other stories of people trapped for long periods underground, see my blog of August 24.

*Latest articles on London’s Disasters: from Boudicca to the Banking Crisis – Fire News (Aug/Sept issue) and H&F News (Hammersmith & Fulham) Sept 21 edition.

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.

Blood on the coal - Turkey

A reminder this morning of what a dangerous occupation coal-mining remains. Up to 32 miners are missing after an explosion in the state-run Karadon mine near Zonguldak on the Black Sea in Turkey.

Turkey’s safety standards are generally regarded as lagging behind those of most industrialised nations. In February a methane explosion killed 13 workers in another mine, while a further 19 miners died in an explosion in western Turkey last December. Turkey’s worst ever mining disaster happened in 1992 when 270 miners perished in another pit in the Zongalduk region.

Zongalduk was a small village until the 1850’s, but the exploitation of the rich coal seams in the Zonguldak mountains have turned it into the second biggest city on the Black Sea coast.

The world’s most dangerous coal mines are reckoned to be those in China, where thousands of miners are killed every year. (See also my blogs of Feb 22, March 10, Nov 19, 23, 2009 and Jan 16 and April 14, 2010.)

*For a review of my book Disaster! see Natural Hazards Observer P17 http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/o/archives/2010/may_observerweb.pdf. And for a review (in German) of my A Disastrous History of Britain see http://bauen-und-miauen.blogspot.com/

China - land of disasters

At least 400 people have been killed in an earthquake that has struck the remote area of Yushu in China’s western Qinghai province. The quake measured 6.9, compared with 7.0 in Haiti and 8.8 in Chile in February.

Nearly every building in the town of Jiegu is said to have been destroyed. Many Tibetans live in the area, and the relief effort is being hampered by landslides that have blocked roads.

China’s worst earthquake in recent years was the one that struck Sichuan in 2008 killing 87,000, but it is truly a country of disasters. Probably the deadliest earthquake the world has ever seen killed 830,000 people in Shaanxi province in 1556, while China also suffered the worst floods in history, with the Yellow River killing up to 2.5 million when it burst its banks in 1889, and the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers accounting for perhaps 3 million in 1931.

More than 1,540 miners perished in the world’s worst mining disaster at Honkeiko in 1942, while in the late 1870’s up to 13 million people died in one of the country's regular famines. The great hunger of 1959-61, hugely aggravated by Chairman Mao’s doctrinaire policies, brought a death toll of perhaps 40 million, while an estimated 36 million were killed in the An Lushan rebellion of the 8th century. For more details on all these stories, see A Disastrous History of the World.

(See also my blogs of Jan 10, Feb 22, March 27, May 11, July 28, Nov 19 and 23, 2009, Jan 15 and 22, Feb 9 and 15, 2010.)

Survivors and great escapes - 2

Eleven days after the Haiti earthquake, a 24 year old man in remarkably good shape has been pulled from the rubble of a hotel. Wismond Exantus, who worked in its grocery store, said he survived on soft drinks and little bits of food. On Friday, an 84 year old woman and a 21 year old man were rescued. Emmannuel Buso had had nothing to eat or drink.

Mr Exantus’s rescue came shortly after the Haitian government had officially called off the search for survivors. On January 16, I blogged about some other remarkable escapes after disasters.

It was long after the search for survivors of the Courrieres coal mine explosion of 1906 in northern France had been abandoned that 13 miners emerged. They had lived for 20 days on food taken down by miners to eat in their lunch breaks and by slaughtering a horse. They had lost all sense of time, and believed they had been trapped for only four or five days.

In China’s Tangshan earthquake of 1976, miners working underground had a much better chance of survival than people on the surface. Only 13 out of 15,000 perished, but some were trapped for 15 days without food or clean water. They too thought they had been entombed for only a few days, but their emaciated bodies told the real story. For more on both disasters, see A Disastrous History of the World.

Another Chinese mining disaster

The death toll in China’s latest mining disaster has now reached at least 104. Another four men are still missing after Saturday’s huge gas explosion at the Xinxing mine in Hegang close to the Russian border.

Apparently, attempts were being made to evacuate around 500 miners from the pit when the gas ignited. About a dozen women who went to the mine early today to complain about the lack of information, clashed with police and security guards, and some were driven away in a van. Reporters who tried to speak to the women were harassed.

Despite an 18% reduction in fatal accidents in the first half of this year, China’s coal mines remain among the most dangerous in the world. In the first six months of 2009, 1,175 miners have already been killed. Another 11 died yesterday in an explosion at another mine in Hunan province.

China was the scene of the world’s worst mining accident at Honkeiko in 1942, when 1,549 miners were killed. See also my blogs of Feb 22 and Nov 19.

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).