Mining Disasters
When it goes wrong. Firedamp and coal-dust explosions, roof falls and floods, Aberfan and Courrières and Senghenydd, the Chilean thirty-three and their sixty-nine days, mine rescue teams, and the inquiries that followed.
Part of Underground
21 moments in this segment.
- - Aberfan: valley of sorrow (1966). British Pathe newsreel filmed at Aberfan after a colliery spoil tip slid onto Pantglas Junior School and part of the village on 21 October 1966.
- - Video tour of the trapped Chilean miners' refuge. Footage released in August 2010 showing the 33 men and the shelter where they were confined after the San Jose copper mine collapsed three weeks earlier.
- - The first Chilean miner is rescued. Florencio Avalos steps from the rescue capsule as the operation to lift the 33 men from the San Jose mine begins.
- - The last trapped Chilean miner is rescued. Raw agency footage of 13 October 2010, when the last of the 33 men was raised, ending the longest underground entrapment on record.
- - Senghenydd colliery disaster: 100 years on. Channel 4 News reports from Senghenydd in south Wales, where 439 men died in 1913 in Britain's worst mining disaster.
- - Buried alive: the Chile mine rescue. On 5 August 2010 the entire day shift at the San Jose copper and gold mine went missing; for seventeen days nobody knew whether they were alive.
- - Aberfan: fifty years since the disaster. Channel 4 News returns to Aberfan half a century after an avalanche of coal waste killed more than a hundred children in their classrooms.
- - 21 October 1966: the Aberfan disaster. Some 150,000 cubic metres of colliery waste moved off waste tip No. 7; 40,000 cubic metres buried a farm, twenty houses and the school, killing 144 people.
- - The Monongah mine disaster of 1907. An explosion in the Fairmont Coal Company workings at Monongah, West Virginia, on 6 December 1907 killed 361 miners, the worst such disaster in American history.
- - An entire Swedish town is moving because the ground is caving in. Kiruna was founded by miners in 1900; cracks from the expanding excavation now reach the town centre.
- - The Courrieres mine catastrophe of 1906. French television archive on the explosion in the Courrieres pits in the Pas-de-Calais, which killed 1,099 men and remains Europe's deadliest mining disaster.
- - Coal's deadly dust. FRONTLINE and NPR investigate the resurgence of severe black lung disease among American coal miners and the regulatory failure behind it.
- - Twenty years since the Quecreek mine rescue. Local news retraces the 2002 rescue of nine miners trapped when water broke into the Quecreek mine in Pennsylvania.
- - Queen Elizabeth II returns to Aberfan (1997). ITN footage of the 1997 return visit, three decades after the colliery tip collapsed onto the junior school in October 1966.
- - Sixty-nine days underground: the rescue of 33 miners. CNN special report following three of the miners trapped in 100-degree heat half a mile beneath the Atacama Desert.
- - Aberfan: the fight for justice. Huw Edwards traces the decades-long campaign for accountability after the 1966 tip collapse that killed 144 people, 116 of them children.
- - Police end the Stilfontein mine rescue with 78 dead. South African police close the operation at the abandoned Stilfontein gold mine: 78 undocumented miners confirmed dead, 246 brought out alive, others unaccounted for.
- - A Swedish Arctic town moves its church for the mine. Reuters on the two-day relocation of Kiruna's 113-year-old church to make way for expansion of the world's biggest underground iron ore mine.
- - Kiruna church is moved before the mine swallows it. AP films the Kiruna Church and its belfry being hauled five kilometres east to the new town centre in August 2025.
- - Inside South Africa's deadly Stilfontein mine disaster. A 2024 government crackdown on illegal mining at Stilfontein left hundreds of men trapped underground for months without food or water.
- - The price of iron ore: relocating a Swedish city. DW follows the relocation of Kiruna in northern Sweden as the world's largest underground iron ore mine undermines the town.
