Mr. M. Dunn on the Explosion at Harraton Colliery. 241 



No. XXIV. — Extract from a Minute Book on the Explosion at Harraton 

 Colliery, in the Year 1808. — By Mr. Matthias Dunn. 



Read, February 21, 1831. 



November 29. — In consequence of an accident having happened to 

 the machinery of the 6th Pit, then working in the Hutton seam, sixteen 

 of the men and boys started to travel through the old workings to the 

 Row Pit, where they expected to be drawn up, and as the air in the 

 drifts through which they were to pass was very violent, they carried 

 with them a torch or lowe-rope. As they were strangers to the in- 

 numerable windings of the road, they straggled out of the regular air 

 course and into the vicinity of a pair of frame dams, which shut off a 

 considerable tract of old workings charged with inflammable air. These 

 dams, insei-ted in a pair of drifts each 9 feet wide, were constructed of 

 endways Memel balks, in lengths of 5 or 6 feet, lined with slit deal and 

 wedged air tight, but were not supplied with a discharging cock as the 

 experience of later times would have suggested. A leakage of inflam- 

 mable air from these dams having accumulated in the neighbouring 

 workings into which they were then entering, an explosion was imme- 

 diately the consequence. Such of the people as were slightly injured 

 succeeded in finding their way to the Row Pit, but the greater number 

 being more seriously burnt or otherwise injured, were left to their fate. 

 The leakage of inflammable air from the dams continued to supply fuel 

 for several successive explosions, at lengthened intervals, of so gene- 

 ral a nature, that their effects were felt at the top of the working pit, 

 although half a mile distant. As soon as the explosions seemed to have 

 subsided, Thomas Defty, the overman, and others, went down in search 

 of the unfortunate people, some of whom were dead, others grievously 

 burnt ; but scarcely had they reached the vicinity of the dams, when 



