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Updated: May 27, 2025
If this is not taken, the roof may fall in and crush the labourers; or fire-damp may explode and blow them to pieces, and perhaps set fire to the mine itself and destroy it; or black or choke-damp may suffocate them, as the fumes of charcoal do; or water may rush in and drown them. A lamp, invented by a very learned man, Sir Humphrey Davy, is used when there is a risk of fire-damp.
As engine-wright of a colliery so extensive as that of Killingworth, where there were nearly 160 miles of gallery excavation, in which he personally superintended the working of the inclined planes along which the coals were sent to the pit entrance, he was necessarily very often underground, and brought face to face with the dangers of fire-damp.
"Is there any gas here?" asked the Superintendent, and when the miners said "Yes," he lifted his hand light, which was encased in wire gauze, and thrust it upwards toward the roof and gave a grunt as it flickered near the top. There it was, the dreaded fire-damp, in a layer above their heads.
"Harry," said Simon Ford, turning to his son, "light our safety lamps." "Are you going to take safety lamps!" exclaimed James Starr, in amazement, knowing that there was no fear of explosions of fire-damp in a pit quite empty of coal. "Yes, Mr. Starr, it will be prudent." "My good Simon, won't you propose next to put me in a miner's dress?"
The avenging blood of the Maheus was to rise up later; of Alzire dead of starvation, Maheu killed by a bullet, Zacharie killed by an explosion of fire-damp, Catherine under the ground.
But they were evidently owing to the presence of fire-damp, and to me fire-damp means a vein of coal." "Did not these fires cause any explosion?" asked the engineer quickly. "Yes, little partial explosions," replied Ford, "such as I used to cause myself when I wished to ascertain the presence of fire-damp.
It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or gritty dust, but in what may be briefly defined in its own special phraseology as “Seven years hard.” Chief Inspector Heat was, of course, not insensible to the gravity of moral differences.
The survivors, a small party only, now reached the end of the passage, and ran on, driven on by the air, which was rushing along it. There was hope for them in that direction if no fresh explosion should take place. But the danger was still very fearful. The fire-damp might any moment find the broken lamp of a dying man, and explode, causing further destruction on every side.
The report stated that the immediate cause of the disaster was the ignition of fire-damp by naked light, the conditions of temperature being such as to exclude the possibility of spontaneous combustion. Henry M'Govern had previously been convicted of having a pipe in the mine.
Of course, when Amedee appeared, the conversation was immediately changed, and they began to talk of insignificant things that they had read in the journals; for example, the fire-damp, which had killed twenty-five working-men in a mine, in a department of the north; or of the shipwreck of a transatlantic steamer in which everything was lost, with one hundred and fifty passengers and forty sailors events of no importance, we must admit, if one compares them to the recent discovery made by the poet inquisitors of two incorrect phrases and five weak rhymes in their comrade's work.
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