THE RECENT MINE ACCIDENT.
IT is, perhaps, well for men not to be too much worried with the fear of preventible accidents. There are so many that are not preventible, security of any kind is held by so precarious a tenure, that something of the courage and a little of the callous- ness of the soldier would seem to be needful, if mankind is to retain any sort of serenity. It does not do to feel too deeply when exertion is impossible, or a nation might go mad over such a scene as has been presented to us this week in Monmouthshire. To see, as it were, five innocent human beings submitted to the vade- in-pace, buried alive in a huge coal-cellar, to die slowly of starva- tion, while their friends can still hear their summons for aid, is a trial of endurance and faith which, if men realised all horrors equally, would be almost unendurable. Nevertheless, it is a little strange that horrors which, though occasional, still recur, make so little permanent impression on our minds, and excite so little of the fervour of mechanical invention which is the specialty of this half of the century, and is by so many mistaken for a new guarantee of progress. We are a seafaring people, and we have a horror of great disasters at sea ; but we are perfect children in the feebleness of our efforts to prevent great maritime disasters. It is as nearly certain as anything can be, that if we were in earnest about it, we could prevent fires at sea by making arrangements for cutting off air from any part of the ship not easily reached by water ; and that although we cannot provide boats suffi- cient for a passenger-ship—that is a mere illusion intended to comfort landsmen—we could, if we chose, provide manageable rafts, which would neither sink nor overturn. We all live in combus- tible houses, and all dread fires; but we none of us build houses with permanent brick fire-escapes, little spiral staircases in little fire-proof towers placed outside the main walls, as we might do if we chose. We all go to theatres, or condemn theatres, and are well aware that theatres are doomed to be burnt, and we all know that theatres could be built so as to be emptied in thirty seconds, built so as to be one universal exit ; but we never so build them, and probably never shall. The trouble of permanent precaution seems greater in all these cases than the trouble of an occasional catastrophe. It is the same with accidents in coal-mines. We hear incessantly of gas accidents, and we know we can prevent them, but we do not care seriously to do it. We make laws about Davy-lamps, but Davy-lamps are not carried, though we all know that if the law declared the owner of a mine where an accident occurred liable to forfeit the mine to the State, an accident would not occur once in a thousand years. We all know how liable mines, and especially coal-mines, are to flood- ing, and we all grow furious with sympathy when they are flooded ; but we pay little attention to prevention, and never fairly think out ways of preventing the consequences of such catastrophes. Here, this week, we have all been reading of the scene in a mine at Pont-y-Pridd, in Glamorganshire. Never were horrors so accumulated, never was a scene so strange, and in some respects—not all respects—so ghastly, and never did men deserve more hearty admiration than the working colliers ; and yet it is impossible not to fret—fret vainly—at the inadequacy of the means of rescue. Surely science, stirred by sympathy, could do something more for men buried alive just within hearing, than set a few men to dig for them with picks. The Troedyrhiw Colliery, Pont-y-Pridd, was flooded on the 11th inst. by one of those accidents which, whether preventible or not, never are prevented ; and till men attain the faculty Sir Arthur Helps implored for them—the faculty of seeing five minutes forward—never will be, and the men of course fled for their lives. Four of them got into a recess, saw the water rise on them, prayed Welsh fashion with the fervent faith now only granted to Catholics and Calvinists, saw the water stop—resisted by the compressed air—and were dug out, after an explosion caused by the very digging, three of them still alive. Five more rushed into a " stall," or long, narrow cul-de-sac, hoping to be out of the way of the water, and were there imprisoned by the rushing fluid which would have drolvned them all, but- that it was stopped by the resistance of the compressed air. The " stall" having no end, there is, of course, a point in it at which the air, driven furiously in by water filling up the whole entrance, must either find an outlet, or burst its bonds, exploding the superincumbent weight, or must ren ain no farther compressible by the water, as solid a barrier as a ma s of india-rubber would be. The
water under such circumstances is arrested as if congealed, arrested in a wall, and the men were imprisoned in a low chamber of uncer- tain length—for we do not know at what point the elements, finding their strength equal " ceased contending "—according to Southey's fine simile—with coal for roof, coal for floor, coal for walls on three sides. and for the fourth wall water, yielding to the touch—fit to drink, or the men would have died in sixty hours—yet as im- passable as stone. The mere existence of that fourth wall, its softness, and penetrability, and impenetrability, the special form of death it must have been perpetually suggesting—for who could realise that it would stay there heaped up like the wall of
the Red Sea—the possibility of its disappearance if the pumps could finally conquer, yet the certainty to experienced miners that it would not disappear in time, must have been to those confined by it an aggravation of horror, even in a scene in which all horrors seem to have been concentrated. The men—think of it !—were buried alive in a way which made death seem a certain and yet a very distant prospect. Men dread starvation as they dread nothing else—the dread is the great motor of human exertion—and the buried miners had to face starvation, to learn by actual experience that fearful as is the suffering for the first three days—one of want, one of fierce craving, and one of sickly longing—merciful Nature uses hunger as a motor, and not as a whip, and after seventy hours tempers agony to a slow and often painless sinking into exhaustion, a stage marked, we believe, occasionally—certainly marked in the two cases the writer has personally seen—by the strangest change of complexion, as if a slate-coloured pigment had risen beneath the skin. Nothing is worse than suspense, and these men had to endure suspense for seven days,—suspense as of men waiting for the gallows, certain that their sentence would not be remitted, yet aware that a mob was fighting against law in order that they might be freed. One agony—darkness —might have been spared them. They had three or four pounds of candles with them, and might have had light, but they felt the horror of hunger to be greater than the horror of darkness, and ate the candles up. In any event, however, their situation—buried a sixth of a mile below the surface, with drowning in immediate prospect, in a black cavern full of fetid air, pressing on them as it presses on divers, with nothing but a few candles to eat for a week, and with a hope wearing out day after day—was as ghastly as any Dante ever imagined to be the lot of criminal, or blasphemer, or false Pope. There was, we said, a hope, for all this time the district round the mine was in furious activity. The picked miners of the neighbour- hood—the boldest, strongest, and most experienced men of the trade, the kind of men who lead strikes, and are loathed by employers as agitating demons—were exhausting nature in the effort to deliver their comrades alas ! by their strength alone. They could only dig. The managers, stimulated by the necessity, bethought them that the engine which could drive a locomotive could turn a pump-handle, borrowed one, and so aided, pumped out water at the rate of 20,000 gallons an hour, but the men actually engaged had only their arms and picks to assist them. They dug and dug furiously, digging once, it is said, four solid yards in one shift of four hours, a feat which reduced the Government Inspector to tears of admiration, but still it took three days to dig through thirty-eight yards of coal. The escape of the com- pressed air would, it was feared, destroy the explorers, and when the supreme moment approached, a rush of dangerous gas sent the workers once more up the shaft. The engineers still resolved to persevere, but the difficulty of making air-tight shields behind the workers proved excessive, pumping had to be resorted to, and as we write, the probabilities are that the unhappy miners, with relief in full view, able even to talk to their deliverers, will still not be delivered alive.
That everything was done for the poor miners that could be done is evident, but it irritates the mind to think that it should be so little, that rescue should have depended so entirely on that weakest of physical forces,—human strength. Can man, who was given muscles inferior to a monkey's and a brain which was to supply all deficiencies, do nothing with his brain in emergencies such as this? What do we control air, and water, and steam, and electricity for, if, when it is necessary to rescue human beings from living burial under a semi-solid substance, we can only cut through a trumpery block of coal by manual labour, as British savages once piled up fortr( saes—there is one near Doncaster—by carrying earth in their bands. At the eleventh hour some one thought of a coal-drilling machine by which to make a tube through which food might be conveyed, but why was not the
machine brought at first ? Is it simply impossible to supply light to divers, feeding closed lamps with air as we feed the men, so that they could clear away obstacles in the adits and work along to the stalls, carrying not indeed safety, but food and consola- tion. Divers were employed, it is said, in this case, but were defeated by the drifting wood. Is there no machine to be constructed, which, when expense has no meaning, and miners' jealousy is dead, and risks can be run with- out regret, would cut away solid coal at a quicker rate than a yard an hour? Those who pierced Mont Cenis with drill- wheels covered with cutting diamonds would, we fancy, answer that question at least in the affirmative. Or if this idea is a dream, which experts, for reasons unknown to us, but nevertheless unanswerable, would reject, why is not one arrangement which is palpably possible permanently made ? Coal transmits sound like wood to singular distances, and the im- prisoned miners were evidently aware of the fact, for they heard the picks of their deliverers, and gave evidence of their own con- tinued existence by measured, slowly-repeated knockings. Why should not the knockings, besides conveying the certainty that they were alive, have conveyed messages as intelligible as if sent by telegraph ? Nothing would be easier than to arrange a code of signals, easily remembered even by the uncultivated, under which any man who could spell at all could by knocks, varied in number for necessary letters, send, even under circumstances as dreadful as those of Pont-y-Pridd, a connected and intelli- gible message to the outer world, a message which might be a real help to the explorers, and at any rate might be a deep comfort to relatives and friends above ? The mere names of the living, the mere statement of the hours they could hope to survive, might re- double the energy of the workers, as we know.that the knockings did on the seventh day, while any statement, however short, of the condition of the imprisoned men as to the water might prove an invaluable guide to the engineers. On the other hand, messages from the workers, an account of their progress, a statement of the hours still to elapse, assurances that all efforts were making and would be made, would keep men alive who otherwise must sink from the tension of protracted suspense, and the hopelessness which comes, as, thank God, patience also comes, of gradually in- creasing exhaustion, especially when that exhaustion is not from fatigue, but hunger. The first need in all such cases is a means of communication, and wherever artificial sounds are audible, the means of communication, if only a oonventional system is once adopted and taught to all, as they are taught the primary rules of their trade, are always ready to our hands.
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