Tragedy at No. 10

Misery lit the bloodshot eyes of the black woman in tattered dress huddled on her knees near the mine shaft at Coalbrook North. As a white man passed, she clutched his legs and moaned, "Baas, please, baas, tell me where my man is." Five hundred feet below, her man, and 439 others, all but six of them Africans, were trapped behind thousands of tons of rock and coal in a half-mile-long gallery of No. 10 section.

The first rockfall had come 24 hours earlier, a cave-in far up No. 10's main tunnel. Everybody got out in time. When the dust settled, the miners went back in to clear the rubble with no particular fear, for ledoma (earthquake) is a commonplace to the natives who work the Rand and Free State mines. But then, without warning, the wall along the coal seam collapsed with a roar, and a gale-force gust of wind tossed men, machinery and pit props like feathers in its wake. Ventilation fans were smashed and behind the mile-long debris most of the men lay trapped with 70 pit ponies in No. 10.

That night, when the first dazed rescuers began to dig, there was hope the prisoners might still be alive. Canaries, carried underground in cages to test the air, survived, and 31 pit ponies were taken out alive and well. But, ominously, no "pipe talk" came back when the diggers tapped messages on the one water pipe that seemed to be intact, and a weary worker came to the surface shaking his head, saying, "It will take us a week to get near them." All through the night, womenfolk, some wailing, others grimly tightlipped, stood clinging to a fence near the shaft, their eyes glued to the huge lift wheels whose movements signal an ascending cage. The Salvation Army held services of prayer for the grieving; the services were segregated, one for white relatives and one for blacks.

Next morning, the repaired ventilators were pumping air back into the tunnel, but now the diggers were hampered by water, rising chest-high at the rock face. Grimly, nine foremen ordered the rescue teams out for fear they, too, might be trapped if the water-weakened shaft walls collapsed. Now the only hope was a special high-speed drill rushed down from the northern Transvaal 300 miles away to punch a 13-in. air and food hole straight down from the surface to the entombed men. But the drill hit solid rock 80 feet down, slowing the job. And as torrential rains began to fall, threatening new cave-ins, no one but the desperate families outside held out much hope for the 440 men sealed inside No. 10 section.

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