THE DEADLIEST MINING DISASTERS IN HISTORY
BY BECKI ROBINS/UPDATED: NOV. 14, 2022 1:40 PM EST
Mining is one of the world's oldest professions. So old, in fact, that it even predates dating things — the earliest known mine can be found in a South African coal deposit, and it's thought to be between 20,000 and 40,000 years old (via Earth Systems). This means humans may have been mining coal while Neanderthals still roamed the Earth. Who knows, maybe it was even the Neanderthals doing the mining.
No one wrote about any of the first mining accidents, because those mines literally predate actual writing (via the British Library). But there certainly were accidents — mining isn't safe now, and it certainly wasn't safe 40,000 years ago. The difference may be in the scale of destruction. Mines of the 19th century onward were, and still are, worked by hundreds of people, and cave-ins, fires, and toxic gas are ever-present threats in that deep underground world. When disasters happen, they can kill hundreds of people, sometimes not just the miners but other people who live and work in the community. Here are some of the world's worst mining disasters — Neanderthals, sorry if any of the big ones from your era got overlooked.
LOS CEDROS MINE
Tailings dams are structures built to contain mine tailings, which is the crushed rock and heavy metals left over after the ore is removed from a mine. The problem with tailings dams is that they're forever — they have to be maintained forever, because the toxic waste they contain lasts forever.
One of the worst mining accidents in history happened in 1937 at the Los Cedros gold mine in Tlalpujahua, Michoacán in central Mexico, when torrential rains caused a tailings dam failure that released a tailings slurry into a nearby town, destroying several neighborhoods and a historic church. According to Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, the breached dam released 16 metric tons of saturated waste, which inundated the village at a speed of 20 to 25 meters per second. It probably won't surprise you to hear that there were warning signs that a disaster was imminent in the days prior to the breach, but the mining company did not act to prevent the disaster, and authorities didn't bother to evacuate anyone living in the danger zone.
Read More: https://www.grunge.com/1100822/the-deadliest-mining-disasters-in-history/?utm_campaign=clip
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