Mining Disasters Around the World Quiz

Answer: Coal

The Westray mine was set up to mine for coal. Before the mine even opened, rumors were rampant that safety issues were being ignored. Coal mining is among the most dangerous kinds of mining. Coal miners can be killed by flooding, landslides, earthquakes and explosions.

In this instance, they searched for days before finding the bodies of 15 men, and then closed the mine permanently with 11 bodies still entombed in anthracite.

Answer: Silver

The Sunshine mine specialized in the mining of silver. It was not until May 13th that the last bodies were recovered. 173 miners had been underground when the fire was discovered. Eighty-two of them managed to escape with their lives. Possible causes of the fire range from the use of acetylene torches, the smoking of cigarettes, spontaneous combustion, and the collapse of a wooden bulkhead.

The exact cause may never be known.

Answer: Mining accident

Peter Urban was the only survivor of the Monogah mining disaster on Dec. 6, 1907. It was believed to have occurred when methane was ignited, which in turn ignited the coal dust that permeated the mine. In spite of loosing his identical twin brother as well as 300-500 co-workers, Peter Urban went back to coal mining and was killed in a cave-in 19 years later.

Answer: Fall down an elevator shaft

In this strange accident in a gold mine, a runaway train plummeted down a mine shaft on top of an elevator carrying miners down to work in the mine. The men in the elevator fell over 1 mile before hitting the bottom. The force of the fall with the train on top caused the elevator to compress to approximately one-third of its original size.

The condition of the bodies made it impossible to know for sure exactly how many men died in this accident. It is another example of one of the many perils in the mining industry.

Answer: Tanzanite

Above ground runoff caused flooding of much of the main tanzanite mine drowning at least 100 miners. Rescue attempts were hampered by washed out roads and the fact that the closest village had been washed away. One miner was found alive who had access to a hose from a compressor used to run a jackhammer. Flooding can happen from rain above ground pouring in, cave-ins while mining under a river, or accidentally hitting an aquifer. Flooding is just one of the many dangers faced in mining.

Answer: Earthquake

On April 25th, 2006, an earthquake caused this gold mine to cave in while 17 workers were underground. Only one man was killed, and 14 managed to escape. But two men were trapped nearly a kilometer underground for over two weeks with only a granola bar and water that leaked down. Both had been knocked out and partially covered in debris.

They dug each other out of the debris and waited for those in the outside world to save them. In 2007, the rock n' roll group, "The Foo Fighters" released a instrumental tribute song to the survivors titled "The Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners".

Answer: Carbon Monoxide

The El Teniente incident in Chile, has become known as "Tragedia del Humo" or "smoke tragedy". While mining for copper, there was an underground fire and some miners were burned. But when found, the vast majority of the miners appeared to have died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

A canary was often used in mines as an early warning that there was carbon monoxide or other dangerous gas leaking into the area. The idea was that the canary would die and give the miners warning to get out while they still could.

Answer: True

When the Universal Colliery in Senghenydd, Wales suffered a gas explosion on October 14th, 1913, over 400 miners were killed. Quick thinking co-workers managed to save the lives of many other men who had been burned or buried. It was the second such accident at the mine in 10 years. During a 1901 coal dust explosion only one miner of the 82 in the mine survived.

Answer: China

The Honkeiko Colliery in northeast China was the site of a coal-dust explosion that killed over 1,500 men. Most of these men were Chinese slave laborers under the control of the Japanese government, which had taken over the area. In an attempt to stop the underground fire, the mine was sealed before any attempts to save the miners were implemented.

This caused the deaths of hundreds of miners, who had survived the explosion and subsequent fire to die from suffocation and smoke inhalation. In an investigation three years later, it was determined that the majority of victims had died from carbon monoxide poisoning that occurred when the mine was sealed.

Answer: Copper

The Copiapo mine was a copper and gold mine. The world worked together to bring these men back to the surface. After 69 days the last man was pulled out, to great rejoicing by all of those present, on a job well done. It cost between 10-20 million dollars to save these miners. One third of this money came from private contributions.