Accidents
In earlier years, coal mining had a high rate of injuries and death, most of them individual deaths. Between just 1900 and 1914 there were 141 men killed, of which 98 were individual deaths.
The largest-scale accidents are:
- 21 February 1879, Kaitangata coal mine disaster, 34 miners died when candles caused an underground explosion
- 26 March 1896, Brunner coal mine disaster, 65 miners killed by an explosion or by poisonous gases following the explosion. As of 2010 this is New Zealand's largest death toll from an industrial accident.
- 12 September 1914, Ralph Mine, Huntly, a naked light caused an explosion that killed 43 coal miners
- 3 December 1926, Dobson coal mine, nine killed due to an explosion
- 24 September 1939, Glen Afton coal mine, Huntly, 11 asphyxiated by carbon monoxide
- 19 January 1967, Strongman coal mine, 19 miners killed by explosion
- 19 November 2010, Pike River mine accident, 29 dead
Read more about this topic: Mining In New Zealand
Famous quotes containing the word accidents:
“The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. His measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy, and all the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We are the men of intrinsic value, who can strike our fortunes out of ourselves, whose worth is independent of accidents in life, or revolutions in government: we have heads to get money, and hearts to spend it.”
—George Farquhar (1678–1707)