The Tynewydd Colliery Disaster (1)

The Tynewydd Colliery DisasterAt 4 pm, 11th April 1877, workers at the Tynewydd coal mine northcast of Cardiff hadjust finished their shift. Most had made their way along the dark, low tunnels tothe trams that lifted them to the surface and daylight. A few lingered, finishingup.Thomas Morgan and his sons William and Richard gathered their belongings and headedtoward the trams that would carry them out. Suddenly air rushed towards them, followedby a loud roar as water surged through the tunnel. Swirling past their knees, theblack water nearly knocked them down as they ran back the way they had come, pickingup Edward Williams and William Cassia along the way. The five raced into a ventilationtunnel, rushing water at their heels, only to discover more water ahead of them.The flood had trapped them in a high section of the tunnel. Water pouring in behindand before them had condensed the air so that it pressed on their ears. The watercontinued to rise, but slower. Thomas Morgan picked up a rock and banged it on thetunnel wall to signal their location. Fighting fear, the men prayed and sang a hymn,In the Deep and Mighty Waters, as they waited for death. Slowly, the flood sroar lessened and the water stopped inching towards them. Hope flared, and they tookup their tools and began to dig up toward the passageway overhead.High above, the homeward-bound miners had been summoned back to the mine. When rollwas called, 14 names went unanswered. Relatives and officials began to gather at thepit head as word spread.The first men to re-enter the mine found the main tunnel dry. They advanced slowly,hammering on the wal Is and cal 1 ing out, then pausing to 1 isten for an answer. Groaningtimbers and metal trams banging around in the flood made listening difficult. Thenthey hear the unmistakable sound of a pick striking rock. Tapping back, they heardmen singing. The prayer of the five trapped men had been heard. However, 36 feet ofcoal separated them from their rescuers. Working in four-man shifts two to dig,two to remove rock 一 the adrenaline-spiked rescuers carved a three-foot-high tunneland managed to reduce the intervening rock to a thin wal 1 by early the next morning.By now the men could easily hear each other s voices. The rescue team shouted forthe trapped miners to stand back as they prepared to cut through the barrier. Butyoung William Morgan, desperate to free himself, broke through the wall first. Witha huge boom, the compressed air rushed out, spraying the rescue party with debrisand sucking William s head into the breach. He died instantly.His head had completely plugged the hole. The rescue party drilled small holes inthe wall to release more of the pressure until the young man, s father could pul 1his dead son back. Then they enlarged the opening to free the rest.Frantic digging had also taken place in another part of the mine that night. Escapingair hissing up from faults in the rock drew the rescuersJ attention, and they heardsignals below. They quickly sank another shaft, but the signals stopped during thenight, and when rescuers broke through, the cavity was full of water. Edward Williamsand 13-year-old Robert Rogers had drowned as the escaping air allowed water to riseand engulf them.Half of the miners were now accounted for. Seven remained missing.Officials determined that the source of the water was a nearby mine, abandoned whenit was flooded. Its water level had fallen 76 feet, leaving no doubt. Tynewydd minershad worked much closer to the abandoned mine than engineers realized, and officialshad ignored reports of water seepage, a harbinger of the flood.Pumps were brought in to help empty Tynewydd, but at the rate the pumps removed water,the trapped miners would starve before they were rescued. Early Saturday morning,divers arrived from London by special train. They carefully threaded their way pastwaterborne trams and debris but failed to reach the trapped man and had to make theirhazardous return journey with a message of failure.Word of the disaster spread throughout Britain. Reporters who came to the site foundthemselves at a loss because they spoke only Engl ish. A Welsh reporter, Owen Morgan,known as Morien, acted as translator.Meanwhile, the water slowly receded as the pumps wheezed and clanked. On Sunday night,after four days and eight hours, another effort was made to rescue a group of fourmen and a boy trapped below in the black water, with a bubble of compressed air tofill their lungs. (Though the pressure was hard on them, the high concentration ofoxygen kept them from suffocating.) At the onset of the flood, the miners had fledto the face Thomas Morgan had been working. The tunnel flooded, but they could reston ledges above the water, where they wedged themselves into a coal tram, relyingon each other for warmth. A couple of them even tried to swim out but were rewardedwith failure and cold, wet clothes.The only way to get to the trapped men was to cut through 113 feet of coal. If theminers could survive the length of time that would take, they would then face thedanger of drowning when the breakthrough occurred and the water rushed in to replacethe escaping air. Calculations indicated that the men s heads probably would remainabove water.Many people volunteered to work on the four-member rescue teams. As Ken Llewellynwrites in Disaster at Tynewydd: An Account of a Rhondda Mine Disaster in 1877, themost thorough study of the event, Each man had been warned of the dangers from thewater, the gas, and the compressed air. They had an excellent chance of being drowned,crushed, burnt or suffocated. JThey began their work at 3 pm, Monday, 16th April, and worked full-out, in four-hourshifts. At the end of the first 24 hours, they, d cut through 48 feet. So great wasthe rescuers desire to free their comrades that each team had to be forced to quitat the end of their shift so they wouldn t become completely exhausted.Up above, officials puzzled over how to deal with the compressed air so the trappedminers wouldn t drown when the rescuers broke through. They decided that air lockswould be built behind the rescue teams and air would be pumped in so the pressurecouldn, t fall uncontrollably.The teams had been signalling the trapped miners every six hours. At 3 pm on Wednesday,their signal received no response. They tried again, and according to Llewellyn, 4totheir great joy they heard a voice indistinctly from behind fifteen feet of coal.The next team worked as if their own lives were at stake; the South Wales Daily Newssaid the rapidity with which the work has proceeded is unparalleled.At 7 pm they heard one of the men calling to them, saying he thought the hole wasnearly through but that they should work a little to the right. Excitement beganto build above at the pit head, and telegraph wires hummed with the news.By Thursday morning, the rescue team had come close enough to the survivors to boreseveral small holes through to the men and make some abortive attempts to push foodthrough to them, (They quickly plugged the holes again to limit the escape of air.)Engineers prepared the first airlock but could not make it airtight. As volunteersbored another hole into the intervening coal, a large discharge of gas put out theflames in the safety lamps. The miners were excruciatingly sensitive to the dangerof a gas explosion-in 1856, 114 had lost their lives in the first big explosion inthe Rhondda Valley, at the Cymmer Colliery. There was a strong possibility thatadditional pockets of explosive gas would be released if the compressed air wasallowed to escape. Fear nearly overwhelmed the rescuers determination to go on.But Abraham Dodd, Thomas Jones, William Thomas, Isaac Pride, and Daniel Thomasovercame their dread. Trusting the calculation that if they allowed the compressedair to escape, the water would rise only to the trapped men s necks, the volunteersunstopped the holes. Air thundered through the breaches, laced with gas that madetheir safety lamps flame blue. The men behind the barrier waited in terror as thewater made its cold progress up their bodies. Then it finally ceased beneath theirchins.At 1 pm on Friday, 20th April, the rescuers had cut enough of the barrier so thatAbby Dodd could scramble into the black, would-be tomb. Isaac Pride made a bridgeof his body so Dodd could pass the men over. First they freed young David Hughes,and the rest soon followed. The 14-year-old, s first words to his rescuers were toask about his brother and father. Don, t worry, they told him, though they assumedcorrectly that they had both drowned. The rescuers carried the boy, but MosesPowell and George Jenkins insisted on walking. A few minutes later, the clanking ofmachinery announced to the crowd that someone was coming up. A tram with three grimymen emerged. One of them, Thomas Ash, called out They are all safe. . . . They, 11be up soon.The crowd shouted and sang, and the noise spread the word through the valley as thetelegraph lines sent the news to a waiting Britain. The people at the pit head stoodand waited for nearly two hours for the machinery to clank again, heralding anothertram coining up. Abby Dodd and Isaac Pride rose into view, along with a physician bentover the rescued boy. Then the others were brought up by twos as relief spread overthe countryside.John Thomas and David Jenkins, who had tried to swim through the murky water and spenttheir time in the cold darkness in wet clothes, were incoherent. All the rescued menwould suffer through the bends, the condition associated with deep-sea diverswho come to the surface too quickly, but they all recovered.Loss of life was a commonplace component of working in the mines. The year of theTynewydd disaster, 159 men and boys lost their lives in the South Wales Coalfield.Mining deaths in Britain averaged 1, 000 a year into the early 1900s. Though only fivelost their lives when Tynewydd was flooded, the disaster captured the public, sattention because of the 10 days of suspense, the rescue methods employed, and theincredible courage of the men who kept digging beyond their own endurance, in theface of great danger.Queen Victoria awarded Albert Medals to four of the five rescuers, the first everawarded for gallantry on land. The mine owner was also a candidate for a medal 一until the Queen learned he was being tried for man-slaughter in connection with thedisaster. He was accused of failing to take precautions after earlier reports of waterseepage, but a jury acquitted him on the grounds that he believed a geological faultwould have sealed off any chance of a leak from the old pit.Abraham Dodd was not among those cited for the medal-a strange omission. He sufferedsevere burns in an explosion a few weeks later. When Morien, the Welsh-speakingreporter, visited the injured man, Dodd may have had a few harsh words for mine ownersand management. Criticizing those in authority was nearly unheard of, and Dodd mayhave inadvertently talked himself out of a medal.The Tynewydd disaster had additional repercussions. Rescue stations formed aroundthe country. Even more importantly, inspectors began making routine inspections toprevent disasters instead of just determining a cause in the aftermath of catastrophe.The mines are mostly closed now, victims of their own dangers and shifting economies.But the people of the South Wales Coal Field still remember what it was like to risktheir lives in the dark and dangerous labyrinths of a coalmine.This article was written by Judy P. Sopronyi and originally appeared in BritishHcri tagc magaz ino.For more great articles, subscribe to British Heriiaoe magazine today!