A few decades ago, before the spectacular advance of hydro-electrical development and the increased use of oil products by railways and shipping had reduced the demand for coal, a large number of workers were engaged in the mining industry in both islands. Fortunately there have been few major disasters in the field. One of the worst occurred on 21 February 1879 in South Otago in the Kaitangata Coal and Railway Co.'s mine. Thirty-five men lost their lives. The shocking character of the occurrence was twofold. Not only was the death roll high, but subsequent investigations of working conditions in the mine disclosed a disregard for generally accepted safeguards. To unskilled management was added reckless carelessness, and the result was tragedy. At 9 a.m. on 21 February, the small township of Kaitangata, a few miles from Balclutha, was shaken by a violent explosion, and 12 hours later the last of the bodies of the 35 victims had been located. The exhaustive inquiry into the accident uncovered a system of neglect and foolhardiness that the public found impossible to accept calmly. Defective ventilation, the use of naked lights (mainly candles) in the face of recurring evidence of firedamp in the mine, and the refusal of the manager (“confessedly unskilled”) and the deputy manager to abandon or modify their haphazard and slipshod methods of operation were shown to be the causes of the tragedy. In response to public clamour, new legislation was passed to provide stricter control of the working of coal mines, but even with this warning from Kaitangata it was to be many years before legislation produced the relatively safe conditions of today.
Seventeen years after Kaitangata came a similar happening at the Brunner Mine on the West Coast, as a result of which 67 men were killed by blast and choking gas, following the negligent and unauthorised firing of a shot in a disused section of the mine where no work should have been in progress. The explosion occurred on the morning of 26 March 1896, and after 36 hours of anxious, harrowing waiting by families and friends, and the herculean efforts of large rescue gangs, 66 bodies were brought to the surface. The last victim was located four days later. The death roll is the highest in the history of coal mining in New Zealand. In 1926 another disaster occurred at the nearby Dobson Mine, with a loss of nine lives.
The North Island, too, has had its quota of trouble in its coalfields. At Ralph's Mine, Huntly, in the Waikato district, 43 men were killed on 12 September 1914 by blast and fire when they were caught underground by an explosion similar to those at Kaitangata and Brunner. Had it not been a Saturday morning, with only a skeleton shift below instead of the customary 250 men, the casualty list must have been greater. Sixty-one men were underground when the explosion shattered the mine, and it was almost a week before their bodies were recovered. In fact, two weeks passed before the last body was found. Here again naked lights had been in general use in spite of warnings issued to the Mines Department by one of its inspecting engineers on no fewer than six occasions, and, as at Kaitangata 35 years before, it was found that the cause of the explosion was the presence in old workings of a man with a naked light in his cap. In the face of all that had gone before, there was something ironical about the ministerial edict that never again must naked lights be permitted in Huntly mines. Twenty-five years later almost to the day, in 1939, 11 men, including the mine manager, were asphyxiated by gas in the Glen Afton Mine at Huntly, the majority of them losing their lives in efforts to save those who had gone below to investigate reports of the presence of deadly gas in the mine.
by Ronald Jones, Journalist and Script Writer, New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, Wellington.