THE LAST of four Welsh miners missing after an underground pit disaster in South Wales on Thursday was found last evening, following efforts by rescuers to pump hundreds of tonnes of water out of a hillside shaft.
The four men, Phillip Hill, Charles Breslin, David Powell and Garry Jenkins, were trapped in the shaft 90 metres from the surface when the Gleision mine in Cilybebyll, near Pontardawe, flooded within seconds.
Hope had remained overnight that a rescue was possible for all or some of the men, but it began to fade after the first body was found yesterday morning, while the three others were found close together during the afternoon.
Labour Neath MP Peter Hain said: “This has been a stab right through the heart of these local communities. There’s a long tradition of mining here but nobody expected the tragedies of past generations would come today.”
Three other miners working in the privately owned mine managed to escape.
In an area used in the past to losses of life in the mines, families of the men had gathered from Thursday evening at a local community centre two miles away to comfort each other, while the rescuers struggled to save their loved ones.
Illustrating the difficulties that had faced the rescuers Chris Margetts, of the South Wales Fire and Rescue Service, said they had to dig though silt washed into the shaft by the flood and then search “a myriad of tunnels” for the men.
Drift mines such as Gleision, which reopened three years after a number of years of closures, are cut into the side of mountains and are notoriously difficult to work, and disliked by miners, though many accept the work for lack of alternatives.
Local National Union of Mineworkers representative Wayne Thomas said he believed the miners in Gleision had bored six-foot holes into the rock and then detonated dynamite in a controlled explosion.
“We believe this procedure may have been used on Thursday morning, which triggered the in-rush of water,” he said, adding that the disaster will now be investigated by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Mines.
The small pit, located under a steep hillside over the banks of the River Tawe, opened in the early 1960s, with a near-horizontal passageway into the hillside. With the passage of years, miners dug ever-deeper. However, the mine has had a history of flooding problems. The coal-seam is less than three-feet wide and the miners worked on their knees, or lying down to produce up to 200 tonnes a week of coal carried by hand to a conveyor belt.
The mine’s manager Malcolm Fyfield, who was in the mine at the time of the disaster, had a miraculous escape as he managed to get out through a long-unused tunnel, though it took him an hour to get through rock and sludge.
Meanwhile, prayers are to be said across churches in Wales tomorrow for the loved ones of the four victims.
Archbishop of Wales Dr Barry Morgan said the tragedy had moved an entire nation and the world. The archbishop’s father, who worked as a miner, often told him about the dangers of working in collieries.
“It is not an ideal occupation — my father was a miner and I knew first hand about what a tough and dangerous job it was, and still is,” he said.
“So, my heart goes out to the families of those killed in Gleision Colliery.”
