Miners Unknowingly Enter a Death Trap

The one thing that strikes me about the mining stories is that the survivors never hesitate in going back to save others.

"Neither the parent company nor the management seemed to care" truer words...

God am I glad that modern mines have easy access to electric lighting, especislly now in recent decades that LEDs took the lighting market by storm. Firelight is NOT your friend when air flow is so restricted.

I’ve dealt with CO Poisoning at my job before. Went into a room, ventilation system wasn’t working properly. Next thing I know I was laying on the ground on my back, very weak. I had a full face respirator on but it’s not designed for CO. Only reason I woke up was because I left the door open and fresh air got it. At the ER my COHb was 40%, which was 30 mins after I was removed from the room.

4:00 John is a beast. Ten round trips at 65? Gat damn!

I knew it was potassium chlorate. I definitely did not think that he purchased medical-grade cocaine to give everyone enough energy to climb out.

Never go diving, never go caving, never go cave diving, never be a miner

I was nearly killed by CO when I was 17, I'm still paying that price at 45. The brain damage never really recovers.

Dude knew his chemistry 👍👍👍

So I'm actually from the Isle of Man. It was quite strange to hear the name Snaefell and realise that my great grandmother had already told me all about this disaster when I was a child. Although there was a lot of detail here that I don't remember hearing, so props to you on the fact finding here! I did also get a chuckle out of the "capital city of Douglas" line. Douglas was certainly the capital at the time, but it's only been an actual city for about a month All in all, great video! It's always nice to see the island pop up around the internet

John Kewley is the definition of a selfless hero. He was the captain of the mine, meaning he was in charge of everyone. And he did not even think about his own safety one time. He just went down and kept going to get as many of his men, dead or alive, out of there. He was being poisoned and didn't care. He cared about his miners and literally kept risking his life to save them. That's heroism. And he did that at 65 years old.

I had CO poisoning when my family was in a fire as we slept. Thank God that I learned as a little girl what to do if my home was ever in a fire. I stayed low and touched the doorknobs before opening a door. That CO poisoning was terrible. It feels so difficult to get O2 in your system when CO is in there too. I can’t imagine this happening with no way out. Dear God those poor souls. 😢

10,000ppm is literally 1%. Mad how such a relatively small amount of something can be that dangerous, it's classed as saturated.

Reminds me of Little House on the Prairie when Laura’s father was digging a well and wound send a candle down every morning to make sure it was safe to keep digging. A neighbor that was helping didn’t do it and passed out and almost died

Dude who has potassium chloride coming up clutch

im so happy you hit 1mil subscribers!! ive been following you since you were small. your videos are so high quality and i always enjoy watching them, definitely my favorite channel. all love and congrats again, you deserve it ❤🎉

This is the type of tragedy where you'll hear loud wailing throughout the town in random times of the day/night, for the whole week. Being there in the aftermath must absolutely break you.

CO is serious stuff. In the fire and rescue service, gas detectors are carried by the group leads as well as medics. The latter have one strapped to their backpacks. The are slightly larger than a tic-tac container and have a display that shows the ppm value. This value is where things become heavily dependent on the context it us measured in. The figures in this video are accurate as far as I can tell, but any figured you see are based on „regular“ workers and the maximum tolerable concentration and exposure time in a workplace with an 8 hour working day. Firefighters and medics usually spend far less time in areas where the gas is present, so we can usually stay even though regulations might tell employees to evacuate. First alarm will sound at 35ppm. You can silence it with the push of a button. That gets reported over the radio, but work can proceed. If ventilation can be achieved by opening a window, then this is the next step. The next alarm will come at 90 ppm. Work can usually proceed, but with caution. I have personally measured 150ppm in an underground parking garage during a moderately busy day. But since people usually do not spend entire workdays there and leave within a few minutes of parking their car, it’s fine. So an elevated value - for us!! - does not necessarily mean to drop everything and run. It’s values around 200 and higher that will make us nervous and come back with SCBA gear. There are tragic instances each year when people fire up their gas powered heating system, and some technical glitch (usually the result of poor maintenance or a technical defect) will kill some people in their sleep due to the furnace producing and leaking carbon monoxide at dangerous levels. In some cases at levels that even tell rescue workers without a full breathing apparatus to drop everything and gtfo. We even had one case last year where someone wanted to have a BBQ and decided that rain was no reason not to have one. So that bright spark decided it was a great idea to put their coal fired grill into the freaking living room and get cooking together with their family, when suddenly the carbon monoxide warner in their bathroom went completely apeshit. And they all felt a little tipsy and light headed at that point but attributed that to the beverages they had consumed. They all survived. After bringing the grill outside and opening every window it was impressed upon them that bringing a coal fire inside was a spectacularly bad idea and might well have landed them in the morgue that evening. That warner really saved their lives. Medics gave them a once-over and recommended a trip to the hospital for one person, but they politely but firmly declined. BTW: Those signs in parking garages that tell you not to leave the engine running: take them seriously. Because underground parking garages usually have carbon monoxide detectors installed. And if you happen to park right next to one with the engine idling, you might set off an alarm, and said alarm will also send a bunch of big red trucks rolling.

1) This story infuriating! This accident only occurred because they ran this mine like it was 1699! All standard by 1899: Electric lightning, fresh air compression/ventilation via steam machines, telephone lines to the surface, electric elevators/hoists, escape rooms, sealing doors (to snuff fires,) canaries to test for bad air (if not real meters by then.) I'm just astonished. 2) Wow, great quality with your visuals, audio...everything. You did a fantastic job with this tragedy. Makes us realize how lucky we are, to have basic worker rights / safety regulations today. The Gilded Age: For most, was a hell!

I’m always impressed by how engaging your videos are despite there being so little surviving media of the events (like photos of the people, video, etc). Somehow you manage to make it visually interesting and easy to understand some of these complex situations with the graphics you create. I’m sure it takes a lot of time to develop enough graphics content to accompany and enhance so many minutes of storytelling. Well done!