Johannesburg has suffered from a strange misfortune. Enormous quantities of
dynamite are used in the mines, and
on Wednesday eight trucks full of the explosive, which had been standing for three days in the sun, exploded in the station of Vredendorp, a working suburb of the great mining town. A hole was torn in the earth thirty feet deep and 200 ft. long; every house in the suburb was levelled, and every window in the town was shattered. Most of the miners were away; but the women and children were killed or injured in scores, one man, far instance, losing his wife and six children at a blow. The true numbers cannot be given yet, but more than a hundred are dead and many hundreds injured. Three thousand people, chiefly natives, but including many Dutch, are homeless, and there would be terrible privation but that the capitalists instantly subscribed £63,000 in aid of the afflicted. There will, of course, be inquiry, but it is clear that the cause of the catastrophe was the mad indifference to danger which the use of high explo- sives for years without injury is sure to produce. It is the hardest thing in the world to compel the hands employed in the manufacture of gunpowder to abstain from smoking.
