THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. THURSDAY, MAY 14, 1908. A HUMANITARIAN MOVEMENT.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9089, 14 May 1908, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. THURSDAY, MAY 14, 1908. A HUMANITARIAN MOVEMENT.

A new feature is being introduced in connection with coal-mining operations in Lancashire and Cheshire. It is the establishment of a Mine Rescue School. Mine rescue work has now become almost a science, and in order to reduces the loss of life in collieries the Lancashire and Cheshire Coal Association has determined to instruct teams of men from all the collieries in the two counties in the latest methods. A rescue station has been established in the centre of xhe coalfields of these counties, and round the station an experimental gallery has been built. In this gallery the men will learn rescue work under all the conditions to be faced in a mine after an explosion or fire save that of darkness. The interior of the gallery will be fitted up like a coal-working after a disaster. It will be choked with coal which has fallen from the roof, mingled with

broken timbers, and the rescuers will have to craw! over and between the debris and through narrow spaces until they reach the dummy victims, which they will have to bear to safety. The teams will be taught the use of smoke helmets and bi'eathing apparatus, and when they have mastered the knack of breathing naturally in this gear they will be allowed to en'ier the gallery under service conditions. The gallery will be filled with smoke or fire-damp—-carburetted hydrogen being pumped in for this purpose—and the helmeted learners will, in this deadly atmosphere, practise clearing away wreckage, setting up props, and carrying dummy bodies on stretchers. One side of the gallery will be fitted with glass screens, so that any sign of the learners being overcome by smoke, fire-damp, or [other ordeals may be detected. This humanitarian idea should prove of great value in the counties concerned, but if it extends to all coal-mining countries—as probably it will—it may be the means of saving thousands of lives every year, and prove an inestimable blessing to a great multitude of families of those who go down into the bowels of the earth to produce the chief means of carrying on the industries of the world.