Editorial

Easington Pit Disaster

The worst fears about the Easington pit explosion are most likely to be only too well founded. Hope must now be almost abandoned for the men who have not yet been reached by the gallant rescue workers, striving unceasingly day and night to work their way through heavy falls of stone and debris. It may be another day or two before the worst is really known. Meanwhile this morning the number of dead was announced as 18, including a Shotton Colliery rescue worker, who has laid down his life in trying to save his comrades. This, the greatest act of sacrifice of which man is capable is no uncommon thing in pit disasters and must command the respect and sympathy of all.

There are still sixty-three men trapped nine hundred feet underground in an area shattered by a fierce explosion and infected with deadly gas. It will be a miracle, as Mr. Skinner Chairman of the Durham Division of the National Coal Board, said, if any number of them are got out alive. Yet there will be no slackening of the rescue workers efforts to reach the entombed men, rather will their fight against the heavy odds be intensified in the faint hope that they may be in time to save some lives.

This disaster at Easington, the worst that the Durham mining industry has suffered for many years, is yet one more of the periodical reminders of the heavy price in human life that is paid for the coal our miners produce. In taking so much of the output that is undoubtedly needed we tend to forget the risks and dangers that are inherent in the miner’s occupation, risks which, he cheerfully takes and sometimes, maybe, makes too light of. The recurring loss of so many useful lives, and the anguish and suffering it brings, forces everyone to consider whether still more cannot be done to make the mines safer.

Meanwhile we would join most sincerely in the many expressions of sympathy with the men who have undergone this terrible ordeal and with their bereaved families, and continue to hope against hope that more men may yet be rescued from the jaws of death.