THE COURRIERES DISASTER.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXVIX, Issue 8125, 26 April 1906, Page 3

THE COURRIERES DISASTER.

FULL DESCRIPTION OF THE AWFUL EXPLOSION. Although the cable messages at the time gave some idea of the awful tragedy in the Courrieres mine, the details of the disaster were necessarily only meagre. The English papers just to hand give very full particulars of the frightful occurrence, and some extracts will prove interesting. The Daily Mail's special correspondent telegraphed the following description:— Three miles from Lens are the mines of Courrieres, the third largest in France, and here on Saturday morning, March 10th, twelve hundred miners, men and youths, were in a few moments hurled into eterw nity 88 the result of an explosion of fire-damp, owing to a fire which nad been smoulderiogs mce Monday in one of the seams. Hundreds more are imprisoned, in the mine below from which, alas! there is little hope of.rescue. Picture to yourself a great, dreary, uninteresting plain, in the midst of which are the tail chimneys and high buildings of a coal pit. Around are the cottages of miners and numerous coal trucks. In the candle light of the early morning the GREAT BUILDINGS LOOM OUT and from the windows shines the electric light. Naught is heard save the dull thud of tho engine at the pit-moutb. Suddenly in the silence of the early morning there came a sound as of the sudden booming of great gun, and out from amid the tall buildings there shot up a huge column of fire, a flame fifty feet high. A minute * later the roof of one of the buildings

FELL WITH A CLATTER, and instantly those approaching the pit realised that a disaster had occurred at the Sallaumines Pit of the Courrieres Mines, or No. 3 shaft. At the same instant the man in charge of the windlass engine at No. 4 pit, 1,500 yards away, was blown by the rush of gas against the stairway and instantly killed. Simultaneously at Pit No. 2, a mile away from Sallaumineq, a roof was blown fifty feet into the air. _ One hour and a half before the explosion 1,800 men and boys had gone down the shafts. Immediately an aitempt was made to organise a rescue party to descend Pit No. 3, but it was inipo3sible to go down, as the force of' the explosion had demolished the timber aides of the shaft, which was thus obBtruoted for hundreds of feet. Fruitless attempts to descend wore also made in Pits 3 and 4, which aze over a mile from eaoh other, the superficial area of the Courrieres mine being no less than 14,000 acres. Through Pit No. 10,- which is not far from Pit N0.3, the engineers, notwithstanding the foul gasses, descended with a rescue party, and 300 teat below the surface succeeded at three o'clock on Saturday afternoon, in discovering a dozen men more dead than live, most of them suffertag from fearful turns. In Borne cases the ek n had completely peeled from the face. These men had ladders, and had lodged themselves on the ledge of a gallery until found. -

1 interviewed one of these survi vore, a man about fifty years of age, named Serf. He was badly burnt. "I was working," be said, "with my gang a short distance from the bottom of one of the pits. There were thirty-five of us, including the foreman. Suddenly there came a sound of a FIERCE HISSING WHISTLE. It came nearer and neaier, far more rapidly than it takes time to tell. Then it seemed to strilie a loud hollow tube; then waves of poisonous gas struck us in the faces. "In singie file we rushed . along, - beaded by the foreman, i being the last. We walked bent in two, almost fainting from the foul gases. It seemed to me an eternity. Happily, our lamps remained alight. We stumbled over scores of our prostrate comrades. Suddenly our foreman shouted out that we had come the wrong road, and were walking right into the centre of the explosion. We letraced our steps, and 1 thus became the leader. "At last we reached the mouth of a pit, but of thirty-flve'only fourteen of us were left alive. The others bad fallen on the way. Only thn desperate energy of despair could have made us climb those 450 feet of

ladders, and two of us dropped be- j fore we reached the top, one of ' them being my poor boy, my son.!' One poor woman has lost her husband, brothers, and her four sons, the youngest only fourteen. The eight of the anguish-stricken women was too much for the Minister of the Interior and several high officials, who in their distress at the painful eight broke down. "No, no, it is impossible: they are not dead; they will come up!" One hears uuch exclamations on all sides. Alas! there is little hope of any being saved. '.thousands are assembled near .the pit-rnouth, but are kept at a distance by mounted ge'ndarrnes and military. , lieia in buildings attached to the colliery yard LIE A HUNDRED BODIES, most frightfully disfigured, those brought up from Pit No. 4 being carbonised beyond all recognition. No bodies have been recovered from Pit No. 3, down which went 684 men. A man went down the shaft to look for bis father, his uncle, and three brothers. The cage was unable to go further than the 500 ft level, but the man boldly started off through the gallery, though warned that it meant certain death. He has not been teen siuoe though the cage goes down periodically. Another young fellow of twenty so vehemently insisted this afternoon in descending the pit ttiat eventually the engineer gave way, but went down with him. Terrible scenes are being witnessed at the mouth of Pit No i. where the dead are being brought up to the surface. Every time the cage comes up, with its horrible load of mutilated flesh, the MADDENED WOMEN make a rush for the bars, some trying to tear them down in their wild grief and anxiety to learn the fate of their hußbands, sons, and Mothers.

One man made fourteen journeys down the shaft, returning eaoh time with a body, but on his fifteenth journey he succumbed at the foot of the shaft. Many of the volunteers were only brought to the surface in the nick of time to esoane death from suffocation. 1 went into several houses in the populous villages or mining settlements at Merincourt and at Salaumines. In the oottage I saw two coffins, around which were kneeling five young children, while two women wept bitterly by the fireplace. The ooflins contained the father and the eldest son. The family were left destitute, for these miners aie improvident. At Merincourt there is a street of forty houses, and not a single man is left iu any of them. One poor woman told me that she had lost eight men—her husband, father, brothers, and son. "All of them were in the morning shift, and none has returned On Friday my husband said he would not go down because of the lire in the Oecile Gallery, and because it was unlucky to run risks on Friday. None of my poor fellows, therefore, went down. They took a day off, but they did go down with the Saturday morning shift."