12 Terrifying Facts About Being Buried Alive In A Mining Disaster

The Farmington Mine disaster hit the Consol No. 9 coal mine near Farmington, West Virginia in 1968. Seventy-eight miners died in this massive disaster. This event caused the 1969 Coal Mine Safety and Health Act. The Act raised safety rules and oversight for coal mines. Scientists found methane gas and coal dust after the explosion; the cause of the blast and collapse remains unknown.

According to theCDCCoal mine explosions happen when only one of two things meets a heat source. In Farmington, coal dust and methane gas, along with bad ventilation, made a highly flammable mix. Even after the 1969 Act passed, these combustibles and weak safety checks kept causing similar blasts in the U.S.

Survivors of the 2010 Chilean mine collapse said the air in their small living spaces became foul with the smell of human sweat. Underground heat, plus no fresh air, cooked a thick, human stench the miners endured for almost 70 days. One minersaidit smelled like death. He stated, “I’ve smelled corpses before, and after a while, it smelled worse than that.”

Federal investigators from the Mine Safety and Health Administration waited over two months to enter the Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh County, West Virginia, after a fatal explosion. The delay happened because the toxic gas buildup inside the mine made entry unsafe.

Underground mines easily release toxic gases.These gases includemethane, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and hydrogen dioxide, plus coal dust. Proper ventilation keeps the mine stable and the miners healthy. However, most mine explosions come from these gases building up and burning, whether from bad decisions or simple lack of knowledge. Some miners who survive an initial blast will suffer from gases filling the mine after an explosion.

The Knox Mine disaster in Pittston, Pennsylvania, did not involve an explosion from toxic gas. On January 22, 1959, the Susquehanna River flooded the Knox Mine, drowning 12 miners in millions of gallons of cold water. William Hastie, a survivor,remembersa “violent torrent, a great roar” as the water rushed in.

The disaster resulted from the unsafe rules set byKnox Coal Companyofficials who ordered miners to tunnel under the Susquehanna illegally without a roof strong enough to hold back the river.

Starvation threatened the 33 Chilean miners trapped underground for 69 days. For seventeen days, the miners ate food meant for 25 miners for two days.inventoryMiners included one can of salmon, one can of peaches, one can of peas, eighteen cans of tuna, twenty-four liters of condensed milk (eight of which spoiled), ninety-three packages of cookies, and ten bottles of water. To keep food going, miners ate about a teaspoon of canned fish mixed with water and two cookies daily. When supplies ran low, they cut consumption to one cookie every two days. When that stopped, and ribs showed through skin, they joked about cannibalism.

Chilean miner Jorge GalleguillosremembersChilean miner Jorge Galleguillos saw a butterfly before 770,000 tons of rock fell in the San José Mine near Copiapo, Chile on August 5, 2010. This was not a butterfly; it was a small, clear piece of quartz falling toward the tunnel floor Galleguillos walked through. This was the first sign of an underground explosion that would cause earthquakes and level a mountain.

Galleguillos’s butterfly shows how tragic warnings can precede a mining disaster, but manysurvivorsSurvivors report noticing something wrong just before the collapse. However, most times, people do little between the signal and the event.

Margaret WickerMargaret Wicker was a child when a huge explosion shook Coal Glen, North Carolina in 1925. She recalls, “this big noise, like booooom, and black smoke just boiled and rolled up into the sky.”

Ralph Wynn, a survivor of the 1882 Trimdon Grange disaster in England, described the noise a mining disaster makes. In hisA survivor's narrativepublished in theDurham AdvertiserOn February 17, 1882, Wynn recalled a “report” so loud he and others thought it “must be a shot.” It was not a shot; it was the explosion of a mine shaft that killed 69 English miners.

Randal McCloy, Jr. was the only survivor of the 2006 Sago, West Virginia mine disaster. In hisletterto the other victims’s families, he wrote that as his fellow miners fell into deathly sleep, they became thoughtful and prayed. They wrote letters to family members as they “began to accept [their] fate.”

The last thing McCloy remembers before losing consciousness was talking to his miner friend, Jackie Weaver, who told him that if it was their “time to go, then God’s will would be fulfilled.” Although McCloy writes he accepted this idea as he drifted off, he ends his letter saying, "I cannot explain why I was spared while the others perished."

As toxic gases build in a mine and survivors share a space under the earth, oxygen runs out.Randal McCloy, Jr.The sole survivor of the 2006 Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia survived with minimal oxygen for 41 hours trapped. He needed treatment for carbon monoxide in a hyperbaric chamber, where he received oxygen infusions for days.

Yonni Barrios was one of the 33 Chilean miners.These were Chilean miners.Miners survived 69 days buried 2,000 feet beneath the earth in 2010. After the collapse, Barrios faced more. Most nights, the nightmare returned, causing him to wake screaming and put on his old mining helmet.

Fellow minors, including Alex Vega, faced similar fears by facing them. Vega went back underground for a week each day. After that, he said his nightmares stopped returning.

In September 1950, a glaciated lake rushed into a mine beneath the Scottish countryside.The incident occurred at Knockshinnoch Castle Colliery.The pit mine trapped over 100 men. Moss and peat blocked every exit in the small space. One hundred sixteen men were rescued, but they survived three days together in the mine's darkness. This caused claustrophobia some miners never recovered from. Jean McMurdo’s husband, a survivor, suffered this.Jean McMurdo’s husband, a survivor of the disaster, often left the house in the middle of the night due to the feeling that the walls were closing in around him.The feeling that the walls were closing in around him made Jean McMurdo’s husband often leave the house in the middle of the night.

In 2011, Alpha Natural Resources (formerly Massey Energy) settled a corporate criminal liability suit with the U.S. Attorney for $209 million. What happened before the suit and settlement?Criminal negligence and willful blocking of safety regulation enforcement occurred on the parts of high-level Massey Energy personnel.Investigation of Massey Energy and the settlement followed a 2010 mine explosion in Raleigh County, West Virginia that killed 29 miners. This involved high-level Massey Energy personnel.

Federal investigators found poor ventilation let methane gas reach an explosion point. Massey Energy failed federal safety standards. Twenty-nine men died because of this. Investigators also found Massey controlled West Virginia legislators financially and ignored methane issues for years. In 2014, a federal grand jury indicted Massey's then-CEO, Don Blankenship, for breaking safety rules and defrauding the government.