Explosion disasters

Firedamp, coal dust or blasting explosions underground.

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14 disasters in the 1950s, of 502.

Disaster	Date	Type	Region	Fatalities
Easington Colliery explosion, 1951 An underground explosion in the Fifth ('Duckbill') district of Easington Colliery killed 81 miners outright, with two rescue workers later dying from the effects of afterdamp — one of the worst British colliery disasters of the 20th century.	29 May 1951	Explosion	County Durham	83
Eppleton Colliery Explosion, 1951 An explosion at Eppleton Colliery on 6 July 1951 killed nine men. Firedamp was ignited by the defective master control box of a Joy loader — a mechanical coal-loading machine — and the flame was carried on by coal dust. The Mines Inspector reported on it.	6 July 1951	Explosion	Tyne and Wear	9
Weetslade Colliery Explosion At 6.45 a.m. on Monday 1 October 1951 an explosion of firedamp swept the 3rd East District of the Bensham Seam at Weetslade Colliery, killing the deputy Thomas Whitney and the four men of his pumping and repair shift. The district had been gassed out for five days after flooding from old workings above wrecked its return airway and the manager short-circuited the ventilation to keep a pump running. Recovering the bodies took until November 1952 and the investigation until April 1953, held up first by rising water and then by the discovery of an explosive hydrogen-methane mixture given off by broken shuttle-car batteries, which forced the district to be deliberately flooded. The inquiry could not fix a definite cause, but found the only possible source of ignition to be an arc on the battery of a shuttle car the men had been using to move a fan.	1 October 1951	Explosion	Tyne and Wear	5
Glyncorrwg Colliery Explosion On the morning of 13 January 1954 an explosion ran along the Panzer Face in the Six Feet Seam at Glyncorrwg Colliery. Of the 32 men in its path, 17 were severely burned and seven slightly; eight escaped unhurt and nobody was killed. A second explosion followed before noon the same day, and a third within the sealed district on 16-17 January. The official inquiry traced the ignition to a light-alloy roof bar: its rusted steel wedge had become smeared with aluminium in ordinary use, and when a collier struck it with a sledgehammer the resulting spark fired the methane. The Inspector recommended that light-alloy bars be prohibited on longwall faces with open wastes where inflammable gas was likely.	13 January 1954	Explosion	Neath Port Talbot	0
Blaenhirwaun Colliery explosion, 1955 At about 1 p.m. on 6 September 1955 a sudden blower of firedamp from the roof of the Q face at Blaenhirwaun Colliery near Cross Hands was drawn through a small compressed-air fan ventilating a ripping lip, and sparks from its blades striking pieces of stone set it off. Flame swept the face and supply gate. Four men were killed and two more died of their burns later that month; thirteen were injured, nine badly burned.	6 September 1955	Explosion	Carmarthenshire	6
Lewis Merthyr Colliery explosion, 1956 A firedamp explosion at Lewis Merthyr Colliery on 22 November 1956 killed nine men and injured five more, after methane that had accumulated undetected in an unventilated roof-fall cavity was ignited by a falling stone striking a steel roof support.	22 November 1956	Explosion	Rhondda Cynon Taf	9
Sutton Colliery explosion, 1957 At about 11.30 on 21 February 1957 a stone fell from a gas-filled cavity over the loader gate of the new 28's face in the Low Main at Sutton Colliery, Sutton-in-Ashfield, and smashed a conveyor motor's terminal box. The flash fired the firedamp; twenty-five men were burned and five died.	21 February 1957	Explosion	Nottinghamshire	5
Chanters Colliery Explosion, 1957 Gas that had accumulated in Chanters Colliery's No. 2 drift after a roof fall five days earlier was ignited by an electrical arc when an electrician twisted a switch's cover plate onto a live busbar, killing eight men.	6 March 1957	Explosion	Greater Manchester	8
Barnburgh Main Colliery explosion, 1957 A firedamp explosion at 3pm on 26 June 1957 in the Newhill seam's North West 1 District at Barnburgh Main Colliery killed six men and injured fourteen others, after a shot-firing blast brought down a stone that damaged a power cable, producing a flash that ignited gas escaping from a break in the roof 73 yards away.	26 June 1957	Explosion	South Yorkshire	6
Kames Colliery Explosion, 1957 An explosion in the West Mine's Six Feet Section at Kames Colliery, Muirkirk, killed seventeen men after a match struck to light a cigarette ignited firedamp in an unventilated heading — the worst Scottish mining disaster in six years, in a pit that had been considered so safe it was used for experimental blasting work.	19 November 1957	Explosion	East Ayrshire	17
Risehow Colliery Explosion Two men died at Risehow Colliery, Flimby, on the evening of 26 November 1957 when firedamp was ignited in a cross-measure drift as a round of shots was fired. The gas came from a feeder in the roof about 30 yards back from the face and had been detected repeatedly through the shift whenever the auxiliary fan stopped; the ignition came not from the explosives, which never fired, but from a spark in shotfiring cables carrying nearly forty crude, bare joints between them. The Inspector concluded that both deaths would have been avoided had the two simple distance conditions attached to the exploder’s Approval been observed.	26 November 1957	Explosion	Cumbria	2
Lindsay Colliery explosion, 1957 Shortly before four o'clock on the morning of 14 December 1957 firedamp was ignited on the No. 3 Unit of the Glassee seam at Lindsay Colliery, Kelty, and the explosion was carried along the intake gate by coal dust. Nine men were killed and eleven injured. Sir Harold Roberts's public inquiry found that the gas had been lit by a match struck to smoke a cigarette in a locked safety-lamp mine, that it had gathered in the waste because the air was too slow to clear it, and that smoking underground was common knowledge.	14 December 1957	Explosion	Fife	9
Walton Colliery explosion, 1959 On 22 April 1959 firedamp seeping from the floor at a fault in Walton Colliery's Top Haigh Moor seam, near Wakefield, was fired by an arc from a damaged coal-cutter cable in the poorly ventilated 5's Unit. The overman Lawrence Coe and the four men with him died; eight rescuers were taken to hospital with carbon monoxide.	1959	Explosion	West Yorkshire	5
Bickershaw Colliery explosion, 1959 Carbon monoxide from an explosion in an abandoned district of the Plodder Seam killed 5 men at Bickershaw Colliery on 10 October 1959.	10 October 1959	Explosion	Greater Manchester	5