Disaster at Wankie

A cable car was hurled like a giant cannonball from the No. 2 mine shaft of the Wankie Colliery in northwestern Rhodesia, burning a row of papaya trees before it came to rest 50 yds. away. That was the first sign of the disaster. An explosion, possibly emanating from a dynamite magazine, had devastated the major shaft of the mine that produced all of Rhodesia's coal. On or near the surface, four men were killed instantly. Hundreds of feet below, 426 miners --390 of them black, 36 white--were trapped amid rock and deadly methane and carbon monoxide fumes.

For 15 hours, rescue operations were tragically hampered by gases seeping from the minehead. Police urged a crowd of moaning African women to move out of range. Eventually the officers of the colliery, which is owned by the AngloAmerican Corp. of South Africa, decided to clear the shaft by pumping air in to push the fumes deeper into the mine; the decision permitted the rescue effort to begin but inevitably reduced the chance of finding anyone alive.

There was never any sign of life in the three-mile tunnel. Rescue teams listened in vain for "pipe talk," the tapping of men who have somehow found sanctuary in pockets of fresh air. On the third day, the mine's manager, Sir Keith Acutt, announced that all hope was lost, adding, a bit speciously, that indications were that the missing men had "died instantaneously and were not aware of what had happened." The final death toll is expected to exceed 430, making Wankie the fifth worst coalmining disaster in history. At the mine-head, the wailing of the African women continued.

* The worst: Honkeiko Colliery, Manchuria, 1942, 1,549 dead; Courrieres, France, 1906, 1,060; Hojo Colliery, Japan, 1914, 687; Omuta, Japan, 1963, 458 dead.

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