| Disasters - Names |
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Disasters - Names | ||
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| Date: | 18th August 1708 |
| Colliery: | Fatfield |
| Cause: | Explosion |
| Lives Lost: | 69 |
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| Description | |
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Explosion at Fatfield, in the parish of Chester-le-Street, at three o'clock in the morning; the sudden eruption of violent fire discharging itself at the mouths of three pits, with as great a noise as the firing of cannon, or the loudest claps of thunder, and sixty-nine persons were instantly destroyed. Three of them, viz., two men and a woman, were blown quite up from the bottom of the shaft, 342 feet deep, into the air, and carried to a considerable distance from the mouth of the pit. The engine used for drawing up the coals, which was of great weight, was removed and cast aside by the force of the blast; and singularly the fish in a rivulet flowing within about twenty yards from one of the pits were found dead in large numbers, floating on the surface of the water.
After explaining the effects of "stith," or chokedamp, and "sulphur," or firedamp, the narrator proceeds to say:
"To prevent both these inconveniences, as the only remedy known here, the viewer of the works takes the best care he can to preserve a free current of air through all the works, and as the air goes down one pit it should ascend another. But it happened in this colliery, there was a pit which stood in an eddy, where the air had not always a free passage, and which in hot and sultry weather was very much subject to sulphur; and it being then the middle of August, and some danger apprehended from the closeness and heat of the season, the men were with the greatest care and caution withdrawn from their work in that pit and turned into another; but an overman, some days after this change, and upon some notion of his own, being induced, as is supposed, by a fresh, cool, frosty breeze of wind, which blew that unlucky morning, and which always clears the works of all sulphur, had gone too near this pit, and had met the sulphur just as it was purging and dispersing itself, upon which the sulphur immediately took fire by his candle, which proved the destruction of himself and so many men, and caused the greatest fire ever known in these parts."
From the above account it is obvious that the Fatfield pits were at this date still dependent upon such circulation of air as could be obtained from natural ventilation.
| Source: | Annals of Coal Mining and the Coal Trade by Robert L. Galloway. Published in 1898. |
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