MINING DISASTERS.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1492, 15 July 1912, Page 5

MINING DISASTERS.

egpbrt inquiry into the '•' causes: ■ By Teleeraph—Press Association—Copyrfeht London, July 12. The' Home Secretary, Mr. Reginald M'Kehna, is appointing'an export'committee to inquire how to prevent spontaneous combustion, in mines. THE TOLL OR THE MINE. r A , HEAVY. LOSS OP I,TFE. loss of lifo:in getting coal is not' a epasinodic thing for • occasional tears (wrote Mr. L. G. Chiozza Money soma time ago in the- "Daily News"); it is a liny by day matter. The public at large is stricken with. . horror by tie great disasters; minors' widows aro made every day by trifling accidents of which the public never hears. ' . , . Information .as'to the real condition of tho coal miners' casualty list? cannot be obtained from * Homo Office Blue Books. Wo. have to go to the records of such Brioieties .'as tho West Riding Permanent Belief 'l< und, which deals solely with cases of mining accident, and which pays bengals to injured .miners. This particular society finds that 200 out of each 1000 of its members .receive accident pay yearly. In Northumberland and Durham the booieties seem<to.be loss called upon, but in Wales the proportion of injured members is even higher. Taking, tlio country its a. wholej about one in six of the miners insured'receive' accident pay in a year, end.this is a ; fair test of the whole 'body of coal mineTS, beamse some 300,000 miners die- members of the societies. .' Now, the number of-persons working in Bnttun s ■ coalmines is . about 825,000. -Therefore,:'the number of miners injured in a year reaches the enormous figure of about 140,000, and the coal miners' casualty list for an average year is as follows:— ':■.'. '•■ • ■■■:■'■■ : . ■■ ■ : ~'• •;.' Yearly list of killed and injured in . British coalmines. KMetJ ■:.; i,io6, .Seriously injured , 4,000. .;' Injured .'. 140,000 So jtlmt qno miner in 750' is killed, and .one miner in six is more or less"seriously injured in the course of a rear. The incapacity of the injured included in these , ugures and proportions ranges from one week to lifelong disablement. • Tho deaths in Tecent years sre almost precisely the same in number as the average of the la'stfifty-oight years. That, pt eoui-se, points to' gi-eat improvement, because the number of miners' at work and the quantity of coal got have rnpidly increased in the period. With regard to explosions alone, tho saving of life under cue Coal Mines Acts has been very great. In his valuable paper on the effect of British labour laws upDn industrial occupations, read to the Royal Statistical Society in 1905, Mr. Leonard Wa-i-d, H-M. Inspector of Factories, told us:— JLhe total number of deaths from explosions which occurred during the five years 185G-C0 was 128S, and if the number of persons employed and tho deathrate from that cause had remained constant, the total deaths for fifty years' would be 12,800; allowing-for increase in numbers employed, ' the total deaths miring that period would probably have exceeded 25,000, instead of which tho 'actual total is about 15,000 less than tliat; hence it would seem that by the prevention of explosions alone no 'fewer than 15,000 lives have been saved during the last .fifty years by the operation of the .statutes which regulato tho hygienic "Pijd'tions of employment in coalmines. ' Ihat .?. s Jo.eay, legislative insistence ?1 I J?',. 1 - ntlon / of coalmines saved some 15,000 lives in fifty years. •