Fatfield Colliery Explosion – Chester-le-Street – 1708

FATFIELD. Chester-le-Street, Durham. 18th. August 1708.

The colliery was on the River Weir and an explosion occurred there at three o’clock in the morning. A sudden eruption of violent fire came from the mouths of the three pits with a noise like the firing of a cannon. Sixty-nine people lost their lives and two men a woman were reported to have been blown from the bottom of the shaft to the surface and carried a considerable distance from the pit. According to one account, the girl was found “with her bowels hanging about her heels.”  The shaft was 342 feet deep. The engine that was used to draw the coal from the pit was blown aside by the blast and fish in a stream nearby were found to be floating, dead in the water.

A steam engine, built by William Brown, who was the engineer at Throckley Colliery, was installed in 1772. Firelamps were introduced to ventilate the pit in 1732. Dunn says that this was the first time that this method of ventilation was used.

After explaining the effects of “stythe” or chokedamp and sulphur, which we now know as firedamp, the Philosophical Transactions go on to say:

To prevent to both these inconveniences as the only remedy known here, the viewer of the work takes the best care he can to preserve a free current of air through all the works, and as the air goes down one pit it should ascend the other. But it happened in this colliery, there was a pit which stood in an eddy, where the air was not always free passage, and which in hot sultry weather was very much the subject of sulphur and it then being the middle of August, and some damage apprehended from the closeness of the heat of the season, the men were with the greatest care and caution withdrawing from their work in that pit and turned into another but an overman, some days after this change, and upon the notion of his own, being induced, as is supposed, by a fresh, cool, frosty breeze of wind, which blew on that unlucky morning, and which always clears the works of all sulphur, had gone too near this pit and had met the sulphur just as it was purging and dispersing itself, upon which the sulphur immediately took fire at his candle, which proved the destruction of himself and so many men and caused the greatest fire ever known in these parts.

From the account, it was clear that the Flatfield Pits were ventilated by natural circulation of air and were subject to any changes in weather conditions.

REFERENCES
Annals of Coal Mining. Galloway, Vol. 1, p.234.
A History of Coal Mining in Great Britain. Galloway, p. 88.
Philosophical Transactions, No.38, p.215.
Great Pit Disasters Great Britain. 1700 to the present day. Helen and Baron Duckham.

Information supplied by Ian Winstanley and the Coal Mining History Resource Centre.