Prevention
Increasingly today Mr. Streets work is to prevent the need for rescue; to stop disaster before it happens.
The skill of his men is used in the service and maintenance of the host of fire fighting and lifesaving equipment which are kept at the pits themselves. They even have an elaborate machine to compress and liquefy air for the breathing sets.
The latest weapon in guarding the miner’s life is the self-rescuer, a handy 2lb breathing aid to be hung from a collier’s belt, which Mr. Street wants to see as familiar an item of miner’s gear as his cap and lamp. This little tinfull will help a miner fight his greatest hazard - unseen, unsmelt carbon monoxide, which can quickly gather in deadly quantity. With the self-rescuer a miner can breathe the remaining oxygen in the air and find his own way to safety away from fire and gas. |
Self-Rescuer |
Hot Room
Last year Mr. Street and his men trained 6,000 miners to use the self-rescuer. This year’s programme is for 14,000 to be trained, and Mr. Street is well up to schedule.
Systematic training of fulltime part-time rescuers goes on at the labyrinth of simulated galleries and road ways which are built beneath the rescue station - 5OOft. in all of tunnels which provide for realistic practice.
One speciality is the hot room - a tunnel which can, at the turn of the switch, be heated and humidified for the rescuers to go through their routines in the worst possible conditions.
The last time the rescuers turned out in earnest was last year - luckily for a false alarm, though with good intent. “But I prefer a pit to call for our assistance even if they don’t think they need it. It is far better for us to waste our time than for us to lose time, which could be vital, if we were really needed,” he said.
“What we don’t like is delay. The earlier we are called in, the more chance we have of saving life.”
There was no false note in the alarm of September 20. 1950, which took the rescuers racing to Creswell Colliery. “I had just become an officer, and I was a member of a team which went in to recover any body alive, if we could. Unfortunately, we could not. The first chap we got out, we applied artificial respiration for two hours. We still could not revive him.”
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In the Creswell disaster, 80 miners were killed.
