The Orkney Elevator Disaster of 1995 | Episode 21

Of all the storied ways people have died throughout history, while mining, today's will probably be the most impactful. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you will hear about the most statistically unlikely disaster in history, complete with two safety sections, but you will also hear about people referred to as gravy without lumps and flesh described as scattered. This is obviously not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learns something that can potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones of safety glasses, and let's begin. Many people throughout history, myself included, have called Africa the cradle of civilization. Today's story takes us to the ancestral crib of human life, South Africa. They say that because it's the historical final resting place of missus plez See. Missus Ples lived there until the day she lay down and died. Two point three million years ago, Missus Ples became the oldest human fossil ever found. They called her Missus Plus because the paleontologists who found her thought she was an elderly female pleasianthropist Transvalensis. Time clarified a few things. Though she wasn't a pleasianthropist trans Valencis. She was actually an Austrolopithecus Africanist, so her name should have been Missus Austra. Second, she was a child, not an elderly woman, so she should have been Little Austra instead. They couldn't confirm her gender, so it should have been one of those they them pronoun situations. The other thing about the find was that she had the most mostly complete skull of an Australopithecus Africanists ever found. If you picture paleontologists in the field, you see them with their soft brushes gently caressing bones from their surroundings. But Missus plus was discovered by early gentlemen excavators using a dynamite and pickaxes, which is a little like opening an egg by backing over it with your car. If old, incomplete, dead people don't have you packing your bags quickly, don't worry about it. South Africa has been a travel fan favorite since apart I'd ended back in nineteen ninety four. If you're a certain age, you've seen the water cannons and the attack dogs, and you ain't going to place on city. But for younger listeners, if you don't know much about it, apartheid translates as racial segregation. It's got a part right in the name. It's a political system. It divides citizens based on race and gender and class. Long story short, it was white people versus everyone. It started in nineteen forty eight, and for forty three years, white people were enshrined as legally dominant and superior race and all. Everyone else was mistreated as second or third class citizens, with their rights heavily controlled. Inter Racial marriage was illegal, black property ownership was illegal, education was segregated and unequal, the police were allowed to kill at will, and beyond that, the list just goes on and on, and it did for forty three years. Thankfully, a lot has changed and today South Africa is better thought of for its incredible natural beauty, cultural diversity, beach life, and wildlife, safari adventures, just to name a few things. And if you don't care about any of that, that's fine too, because we are going to spend most of our time here deep underground. I could go on about how the creation of durable wearables and metal tools was the main force that pushed civilizations progress for tens of thousands of years. But let me make it more homey. If you're listening to this on a cell phone, you're only doing it because a dozen or more obscure elements you've never heard of were dug from the ground. Box heite and tetrahedrite don't exactly grow on trees. You know, you're not listening to this in a vehicle without beryllium and zinc. Same for your home. It needs everything from copper and iron to gypsum and feldspar just to stay upright. So let's spend some time on mining. The oldest evidence of human mining was found in South Africa almost forty thousand years ago. For reference, forty thousand years ago, humanity was just settling into Europe for the first time. Nowhere on the planet has been mined as long as South Africa, and there's still stuff to find industrial style mining started closer to ten thousand years ago. Back then you still had the option of taking a wooly rino or sabertooth tiger sandwich to work. Mining is among the most hazardous and deadly professions in history. Reports say that fifth fifteen thousand miners die every year around the world, and that's just the reported numbers of deaths. South Africa is also no stranger to mind related tragedy. Between nineteen ten and two thousand, as many as seventy thousand South Africans died this way and more than a million were injured. That is a lot of history to cover. But of all the available stories of subterranean tragedy, the only one that we would bring to you, our cherished audience is the absolute worst one possible. Mining accidents come in all flavors, poisant gas, explosive gas, dust explosions, collapses, cavens, unexpected flooding, and mechanical failures. Untold mine workers have met doctors or their coroners through work. You put ordinary people in a mind and they're going to feel claustrophobic. They're going to feel the weight of the earth pressing down on them. As fears go, this seems pretty fair. In nineteen sixty, the Coldbrook mine suffered a massive pillar collapse. There have been plenty of mind collapses throughout history, but this one killed four hundred and thirty seven people in one day. They say pillar design has come a long way since the nineteen sixties. Collapses are pretty rare, but a mind can do way more than simply crush you. Mining and medical complications go together like macaroni and cheese. You can get anything from cardiovascular and respiratory track diseases to pulmonary tuberculosis. You could get silicosis or a skin disease, or maybe a fairly heavy psychological disorder, and that doesn't begin to touch the physical injuries. It's not the healthiest workplace. All I said, today's story will be very, very different. Our story takes place in Orkney, South Africa, about one hundred miles or one hundred and sixty kilometers from Johannesburg's probably best known from the ninety sitcom Orkney snork Me, which translates from Afrikaans as Orkney doesn't snore. It won't be that great or funny if you don't speak Afrikaans, which is an oddly African sounding name for a mutant Dutch hybrid tongue. Orkney has always been a mining town. It's home to the val Reef's Mine in Witswater Serm Basin. It's the second most productive in a country that holds eight of the top ten deepest and richest gold mines in the world. They're all in the same area code. They mine all sorts of stuff here, but the big money makers are uranium and gold. They say, in one ton of rock, you'd be lucky to find a single sugar cube's worth of gold. And that's only if you're in the right place. You can find gold randomly. Our planet's crust is about four parts per billion gold. But miners want to find a vein, you know, a big, nice chunk of the stuff. The year before our story, the val Reef's mine at Orkney pulled one hundred and fifty five pounds of the stuff out of the ground. They made eight hundred and forty five million dollars off it. You ever look at the price of gold and what the hell about it? It's currently over seventeen hundred dollars announced why scarcity. The thing about gold is it's not native to the planet. It's created in the heart of an exploding neutron star. The only reason we even have some is because a chunk floating in space splorked into the rough debris that came together to form the Earth. And that means there's only so much of it to be had at any price. Experts figure we've have less than fifty five thousand tons of gold left to discover. I have no idea what they're basing that on, and they have no idea how much of that would even be extractable. You can only go so far down looking for it. The deepest mine in the world is four kilometers or two and a half miles deep. The only hole deeper on the planet is the Cola Super Deep Borehole. But A it's in Russia, and b it's only nine inches wide. They wanted it to reach thirty five miles through the Earth's crust, but the drill head started melting around forty thousand feet. They kept it in nineteen ninety two at just over seven and a half miles or twelve and a quarter kilometers deep. The Russians love their firsts. They beat us to space. They had the first satellite. They put the first human there, the first woman, the first animal. They put the first space station, the first vehicle on the Moon, the first lander on Venus, the first lander on Mars. And they also beat us into the Earth's interior. So you can say what you'd like about life in the Soviet Union, but they really knew how to make an accomplishment. Enough about holes. Orkney is home to a large gold mining operation owned by Anglo Gold Ashanti. Anglo Gold Ashanti has operations across nine countries on four continents. They're the third biggest gold producer in the world. It's been in business since eighteen fifty two and has seven different mining blocks. Mine trains carry men through miles of tunnels on different levels. Deep underground mine elevators carry men, dirt and equipment to and from the depths. The deepest shaft down twenty three hundred meters. That's almost one and a half miles or two point three kilometers deep. It's the main highway for all activities in the mind. Back up on the surface, all miners do their best to clean themselves up, grab a plight to eat, tell some filthy jokes, and then just retire to their shared dormitories. I say it that way instead of grab some sleep, because life and of mine ain't easy. The men lived in work barracks, but when you live and work with thousands of men on twenty four hour shifts, work means there is constant commotion above and below ground, no one really gets a good night's sleep. I found a rare interview with a South African miner named the Biso. The thrust of the article is you do not get an experienced miner to talk about their feelings easily. The Biso recounted the first time descending down on the spaghetti thin elevator shaft in a shaking cage with only the arcs of headlamps piercing the darkness. It can be eerily quiet when the air carries the acrid scent of burnt rock and ammonia from recent dynamiting. Observers and philosophers say this is the literal smell associated with hell. When the lift doors open, he stepped into a dark and breathtakingly hot world. His ears were plugged from the change in pressure. The air showed just how dusty it was in the headlamp beams, and he thought he was going to suffocate from the heat. It was as hot as one hundred and thirty degrees or fifty five celsius. Think Death Valley in the summer. Imagine a workplace where the walls would burn your skin. The Piso had a panic attack. In the interview, he described a universe of angry rock creaking, shuddering, splintering, crumbling, groaning, jerking, and wrenching above your head, trying to crush itself down on you, night after night after night after long, hot and less sweltering night. The further down you go, the worst things get. Some men cracked up. They left after the first shift, and they never went back down. How did the so deal with the panic? It took him a month of shifts, but he forced himself to get used to it. He built up a protective shell of normalcy bias over time because he had to. This place hasn't killed me yet, so maybe it won't. That's easier said than done, of course, and from a mental health point of view, it's probably kind of questionable. While we're on the subject, let's take a moment here to talk about panic attacks in a specially requested second safety segment. Have you ever had one? Would you know what to do if you did. Panic attacks can be sudden and unexpected. They can strike and become completely overwhelming. Many people describe difficulty breathing, trembling, sweating, and chest pain. Some people go so far as to describe feeling divorced from reality. Your reaction is physical and emotional. I could say that because I've had one before I thought I was having a heart attack. A panic attack can be debilitating, but there are some things you can do if you ever found yourself having one. If you've been listening long enough, you've probably heard me describe calming breathing. Feel your pulse like right now, Just get a sense of it, how quick it is now, Breathe in, wait to account four, Hold it in for four and let it out slowly for four seconds. Do that a couple of times. You'll feel your pulse actually slowing down. It's a trick your body does when you're approaching sleep. And just important is slowing down. Is recognizing this for what it is. If you can take away that sudden and the reinforcing fear that you're actually having a heart attack, you're in a fairly good place. Some people find it helpful to find an object to focus on. They pick an object and plain sight and consciously pick it apart, like when you think about the color or shapes or patterns you see in wallpaper. The whole idea is just refocusing your attention. It's basic meditation. Any meditation is good at a time like this. Consciously relax one muscle at a time. Start with something small, like your fingers are your hand. Just try to let them relax and move up through your body. Another thing people have advised is light exercise to release endorphins. It might work for some people, but I'm never going to find out. What if you're wrong, What if you're actually having a heart attack. I know this is a super crappy thing to just interject into the middle of a safety section on the topic, but my wife's childhood doctor died because he thought he was having a heart attack and decided to go jogging about it. If you're not interested in cardio, you can repeat a simple mantra like this too shall pass or the only way past is through you use whatever you like. The smooth repetition and intention. It works like a loop. It's in your head and it can actually slow and mellow the attack until it starts to subside whatever you're feeling. Remember it is temporary. It's not forever. It will pass, and you're going to be okay. To make a whole of any size, all that dirt has to go somewhere. As far back as the fifteen hundreds, miners used hand carts for hauling out mine materials. Hand carts were replaced with wagons and eventually rails, and it made the job a whole lot faster and easier. The weirdest note I found was as late as nineteen thirteen there were seventy thousand ponies living underground in the UK alone, pulling tubs of ore and dirt out of mines. It sounds terrible, but all this pony power was a replacement for the children who previously did the job. Se thing is tough, dangerous and dirty. Work has always fallen on the poorer classes, more willing to live in mining camps and trade their health and safety to send a paycheck back home. And yes, sometimes those people were seven years old. Mining towns were actually used as models for the architects of the South African apartheid. They separate the races and they provide a cheap labor force. For white business owners. Over the years, millions of black men have worked in white owned mines. In nineteen ninety five, they earned the equivalent of about two hundred and fifty dollars a month. Miner's wages generally start about one hundred and twenty five dollars a month, but they rarely rise above five hundred for incredibly dangerous work. That was about a third of what you could have made working in a variety store in America. In nineteen ninety five, one miner said, we are certainly not paid well for the work that we do. He continued, We've heard rumors that one day we might get benefits, but right now I don't have either a pension or sick leave. I've got children in school, so I'll probably have to die working in this mine. He said it with the kind of resigned acceptance that most Third worlders really understand. This guy was fifty years old, and he'd been working in the mine since nineteen sixty five, and those thirty years had left him nearly toothless and gray bearded. Over time, mining became increasingly and mercifully industrialized. Trains were reimagined in every size and shape for use in the underworld. They carried or they carry people, they carry equipment, and what they lacked in size compared to the kind of trains you're used to, they more than made up for in towing power and to save on poisonous fumes. These were electric way ahead of their time, but also way less likely to ignite a gas explosion. Trains were one of the great time saving appliances of all time. Speaking of way back in the eighties, not the nineteen eighties, just the eighties, Like eighty eighty, back in the day of the Great Colisseum of Ancient Italy, animals and gladiators appeared in the arena as if by magic, lifted into the space by an oldie and archaic but ultimately incredible bit of engineering. Imagine these people, who have barely seen shoes before, see the floor of the arena pulling open and the main act levitating from the depths below. We've been using things to lift ourselves higher and higher ever since, and they've continued to evolve over the years until elisha Otis created the first safety breaks. Until then, every time he got in an elevator it was always with a long and meaningful handshake and maybe some final words before safety breaks. People just figured the best thing you could do if the thing dropped was to jump at the last second, thing, which, without spoiling things, is more unlikely to work than you would think. We will come back to that. To carry men and supplies the incredible distances created by minding life most efficiently, two story double decker elevators were used. Your first impression might be that a two tier elevator sounds awesome and spacious, like leave your spot on the first floor and head up to the piano lounge for a refresh kind of stuff. Nope, not even close. If you don't like elevators, a two tier elevator is basically twice as much of the thing that you don't like. Picture a steel wire mesh cage elevator. You cram in with as many people as you can, shoulder to shoulder, sweaty and dirty and gross. Then you move the car so a second sweaty mask can fill up the other cage. If you're thinking I can enjoy the view on my way back down, The guys responsible for creating vertical shafts aren't encouraged to make any more work for themselves than necessary, so the shafts end up being fairly claustrophobic by design. The basics of a mine elevator works the same as any elevator box of people attached to a suspension cable. The thickness of the cable and the material is made out of depend on the depth of the shaft and the weight it needs to hold. Traditional steel lifting cables can't go farther than five hundred meters. Any longer in the weight of all that cable wrecks the math, and that's why in some buildings you have to switch elevators halfway up. The cable gets spooled around a drum, and a counterweight that makes up about forty percent of the car's weight hangs off the other end. All this helps control the movement. Everything moves at a comfortable walking speed, but vertically as materials are excavated or loaded into the pit. MIND rules require that three man teams manually push heavy yellow carts loaded with or supplies across a thirty meters gap before hitching them to a train or vice versa loading them on to the pulley controlled bins to be lowered into the MIND steps see for safety reasons. Trains are not allowed to be within thirty meters of the shaft opening. To enforce the rule, engineers throw everything from steel blocks across the tracks to what they call a tank trap, not like the DDA beach kind. It's a one yard stretch of trackless cement and is designed to derail anything that skids across it. Our story takes place on May tenth, two thousand and five. It was just ten thirty in the morning. The day shift had already started, and it was miller time for the night shift workers quit in time. One hundred and four of them were already well on their way back up shaft number two. They were just approaching level sixty two. That's actually sixty two levels from the surface down, not the bottom up. Think of an elevator that counts floors backwards, because it's descending either way. They were about one point one five miles or one point eight five kilometers below the surface. It's about a third of the way up from the bottom, just enough to relieve the worst of the heat and pressure. They were just at the point where the airer breathing starts to shift from mostly dust to mostly oxygen. It was just this point where you could finally relax your posture and just let the crowd kind of hold you up. And it was at this point that there is scent cultures quite a tremendous impact. Fear from the sound was immediately replaced by the terror of sudden weightlessness. Rule of thumb, it takes about ten seconds to fall one thousand feet. By then you're falling one thousand feet every five seconds. There's no way to calculate the dragon resistance of the hands being filed down to the elbows in a desperate attempt to slow their fall, but it wouldn't have really made indifference the elevator, and all one hundred and four men found themselves falling a horrifying sixteen hundred and fifty feet, almost a third of a mile or half a kilometer, before finally striking the rocky floor alive. What happened was so inexplicable and improbable it defied belief. If the men had been able to peer up the shaft as they approached level sixty two, they would have seen the impossible site of an entire train, engine and carriage in the shaft, with them closing the gap from above with incredible speed. There is a requirement that when elevators are in use, none of the trains in the surrounding tunnels are allowed to operate on any of the lines that passed near the shaft areas and somehow high above. At level fifty six, a parked train had become a runaway train that jumped the tracks, plowed over the edge, and dropped head first hundreds of feet down the vertical shaft. Imagine twenty four thousand pounds of dead weight coming straight at you, and you are powerless to do anything to help yourself. Men working in an inspection cage saw what was coming and leapt for their lives before the train passed, effortlessly erasing their platform. The train impacted the top of the elevator, and the elevator began an immediate backwards plunge down the shaft. The fall down shaft two of the Orkney Bell Reef gold Mine would have taken ten seconds. But here's the thing about that. Seventy one percent of survivors in a study on serious accidents recalled feeling time slow down. In reality, they were just thinking faster, more focused. It's all related to the fight or flight response. Their brains were paying attention as hard and fast as they could to diagnose the problem and think of a solution. No one will ever be able to know how long the fall would have felt to the men on the elevator when it reached the bottom with the added weight crushing down on them. The elevator car was flattened to one third of its original height. The general manager the company said that the bottom level of the elevator was only eighteen inches high. The fatalities were indescribable. If you stacked two tomatoes in a container and pressed it to one third of height, you would not be put off by the following descriptions from actual management. Before I can tell you that I want to explain this, I'm not going to do nearly good enough a job of explaining this. But when you know the weight of something like the elevator around fifteen tons, and multiply it by the velocity, which in this case was about one hundred meters per second, we can calculate that the impact created about seventy six million Killo jewels of force. When you try to convert Killo jewels into something you can understand, you end up going with calories or kilowatts. So I say the elevator hit with the same amount of caloric energy provided by about fifty eight thousand big macs, or with enough kilowatt energy to power a washing machine for about twenty one million hours. And you say, I don't speak this podcast anymore, which is a real shame, because I liked it and I was about to tell a friend. Now I told you all that so that I could tell you this. Not quite one second later, the heavy locomotive arrived with another twelve tons of weight. So you can take everything I just said and just almost not quite double it. Let's just say it is an unfathomably heavy amount of weight coming to an unnegotiated stop with a limited amount of space to express itself. And remember this, there were one hundred and four people in the middle of this. In order to reach the site of the accident, rescuers used a parallel shaft shaft number five, to reach the bottom. Between the two sites, there lay a huge mountain of waste rock dugout from the deep and two miles of golden rolling fields, so rescuers had to walk two miles through a four by six foot underground passage to reach shaft two. Those who reached the site at the bottom of the pit said the shaft elevator had been squashed beyond recognition. The wreckage of the crushed elevator sat buried under the wreckage of the locomotive. Productivity toileted as miners from the other shafts heard about the accident. Four hundred of them were brought to the surface. Reporters pestered the men, who didn't have any details about the accident, but were willing to comment on how frightening it is just to be in a mine at all. Relatives and friends of miners gathered outside the mind searching into each worker's dirty face, looking for any sign of familiarity. Here's where we start to get into those company comments. The company reported that identifying the victims was complicated by the nature of the quote mangled mess at the bottom of the shaft. The occupants were pulverized, body parts were scattered everywhere, and the process of identifying individuals was described as long and distressing. The bottom deck was most badly damaged. They'd taken all of the remains of the people out of the top deck before making the first cut into the bottom deck. A government minister visited the underground site. Telling lye the union reps were not invited along, and lawyers from the union used that as a spark to insist on an independent judicial commit of inquiry to investigate. When the government minister returned to the surface, pale faced and voice cracking with emotion, he told the reporters, it is the most gruesome sight I have ever seen. It is something I will never forget. Even a nation hardened against mining tragedies was horrified by the disaster. The government minister went on to say that rescue workers trying to cut bodies out of the crushed lift cage were working under extremely difficult conditions. Back on the surface, white mining officials and senior supervisors clung together in small groups, chatting amongst themselves or giving orders to cruise a black men like cartoon villains, while idle miners gathered in large, somber faced groups pressed against the cordondoff entrance to Shaft five. Their faces were creased with anxiety, some just openly wept. Every time a team of yellow garbed rescuers carried off the remains of a crushed victim on a stretcher to an awaiting ambulance. They groaned. Seventy four bodies had been rec so far. That meant thirty people were unaccounted for. That meant thirty people were so grossly affected that they defied any kind of recognition. The switchboard was jammed with calls from relatives inquiring about their loved ones. Notifying next to kin was proving difficult see most of the miners. They came from as far as Mozambique and Swaziland and Botswana. To make matters worse, at another press conference, it was reported that the bodies are badly mutilated. It is hot and they are take a long breath beginning to decompose. Man, this guy really understands what grieving families want to hear. But on the topic, heat encourages the breakdown of organic material. Bacteria grows faster in the heat, and all that accelerates bacterial digestion of tissue. And if you think that's gross, the press conference continued, they added, at the moment they are cutting through the cage with blow torches and they must take out a hand here, a foot there, and bits of body and wrap it all up and bring it to the surface. It was immensely sad to see human flesh mingled with steel two kilometers underground. Then that's their grave. I wonder what must have gone through their minds. The bodies in the lower deck of the cage were said to be mangled beyond recognition and described as grisly parcels, not resembling any human form. Some bundles took up barely a quarter of a stretcher. All one hundred and four victims were buried only a month later. So what the actual hell happened? Well before we get into that, let me say this. Your odds of dying in a car are one in one hundred and fourteen, at least in America. Your odds of being killed by lightning are one in seven hundred thousand. Your odds of ending up on the wrong end of a shark are one in almost four million. Your odds of cashing in on your flight insurance are one in five million. And for reference, your odds of dying in an elevator are one in ten and a half million. That is a zero point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero nine five eight percent chance. I say that, but in your mind, getting bisected or decapitated while entering or exiting an elevator is way scarier than you fill in the blank. According to the US Bureau of Labor, about thirty people are killed and seventeen thousand people are injured every year by elevators. The most popular cause of injury is when the door closes on a body part right off the top. Half those people were working on elevators at the time, so you can unclench. But it also says half the deaths were caused by falls down the shaft. The other half were when people were caught in between moving parts. Compared to the number of people killed by stairs every year being two thousand, elevators seem pretty safe. In fact, you are fifteen times as likely to be hurt by an escalator. You're worrying about the wrong things. Most people worry that their elevator rope will snap and send them to their deaths. But since the invention of the modern elevator, this scenario has only happened one time, and that shouldn't really count because it was because a plane hit the building and cut the cable. But let's say it happened again. Would you know what to do? The first thing to know is elevators don't fall, so you really don't need to worry. The second thing is, though, for the sake of this, the elevator is falling, but so are you together like you are falling at the same speed. About you wish you'd practice your controlled breathing earlier. When the elevator stops, you're going to stop too at the same speed. Worst case scenario, you get crushed to death and your skeleton and organs try to organize themselves out like a yard sale. Let's jump right to the million dollar question. What if I wait until the very second and jump? Here's a few thoughts. Elevators are not known for their window views, especially through the floor, So if you actually had the psychic ability to know exactly the moment that you need to jump, you wouldn't find yourself on a falling elevator in the first place, would you. Second, you're probably feeling pretty weightless as you answer gravity's awful call. If this were a cartoon, you'd kind of swim to the floor. But in a world governed by physics, you're gonna have to find your own way to stay down. You can't really jump while you're free floating in space. And third, you'd be lucky if you didn't plow into the ceiling. And now you can add head injury to the laundry list of things about to go wrong with you. So we've established you have the Olympic level strength and the reflexes and the X ray vision necessary to pull this off. So you jump, and you appear to be leaping upwards, but all you're actually doing is traveling slightly slower than the elevator. You're still going to the bottom, just at a slightly slower speed. Life Science, in a coup of creative writing, wrote on the subject life has given you proverbial lemons, and now you have seconds to make some lemonade or end up as pulp. Well. In Mary Roach's Packing from Mars, she writes, the best way to survive in a falling elevator is to lie down on your back. Sitting is bad, but better than standing because buttocks are nature's safety foam, muscle, and fat are compressible, so they'll help absorb the g forces of the impact. Apparently, if you stand, squat, or sit, you're going to explode your knees. And remember we're describing the best hypothetical practices here. There are no guarantees. With your body positioned flat on the floor. Your soft tissues, including your brain and organs, will still absorb the impact. And we've talked enough about impact injuries for you to understand why that's not good. They call this making gravy without the lumps. The other terrible possibility is that the elevator itself might transform into a kind of a tiger trap of debris that impales and lacerates everything inside from beneath. All that said, laying flat is statistically your best option for reducing injuries. Bettyloo Oliver holds the Guinness World Record for the longest fall survived in an elevator. This way. She was in the Empire State Building and the elevator fell seventy five stories after that plane we were talking about hit it. Of course, she got lucky because the elevator cable ended up coiling up at the bottom of the shaft belower and softened to the crash. Today, most elevators come with some kind of cushioning buffer to do the same thing and emergency breaks. So don't worry. I think we've already said that trains don't run near elevators. Feels pretty obvious to me, Like the coffee is hot, don't pour it in your face warning that they put on the bottom of coffee cups. So what happened here? The twelve ton battery powered locomotive was not allowed to approach any closer than about thirty meters from the pit steel gates. Like we said, it was parked at the time. Keyword parked. You never worry about standing too close to a parked train. You think about them getting rolling, and it's a kind of a conspicuous activity, right. But what if the train were parked on an incline? There were immediate and obvious questions about the brakes. Many of the air brakes used on trains today are based on the same design invented right after the Civil War. They rely on compression systems to stop for those that are parked back up. Handbrakes are applied manually by the operator and they tighten each chain that pulls the brake shoes against the wheel. In twenty thirteen, failure to properly set the air and hand brakes resulted in a seventy two car train derailing into downtown Blackmagantique in Quebec, killing fifty. In this case, the brakes were controlled by an electric circuit, so did they fail? Investigators found that the circuits were damaged, but they did just drop half a kilometer. Another safety feature are the interlocks. Without really getting into it, interlocks act like signal apparatus and they keep the trains from being anywhere they're not supposed to be. In this case, they're the kind of thing that would prevent a train from finding itself in a tunnel it wasn't supposed to be in in the first place, so questions were raised about their performance too. Barius had already been set in place, like we said by the engineers, but pictures from the site suggest that the steel blocks were missing, and at the end they showed that the train did derail and continued nonetheless on its way towards the pit, crashing through the right hand side of the final set of steel gates. I know, it feels like we're just listing every way this could have gone wrong and putting a check mark beside it. But ever hear of a dead man switch, you know, the whole if you shoot me, the bomb will go off and we're all going to die. Thing from movies. Trains have something similar. I mean, not really in that way at all, but The train, which is capable of a maximum speed of only five miles per hour, is equipped with a failsafe set of brakes that automatically engages the moment a driver releases the controls. The idea is you could never have a runaway train because you need a well trained professional, or you know, a lunch pail at the switch, or the train couldn't continue running. It should have just come to a complete stop. The train had been parked in the prohibited area for at least sixteen hours. Hundreds of people would have seen it, and no one said anything about it. Expert testimony, extensive legal and technical evidence was heard from a variety of sources regarding every conceivable angle. Here's the most disturbing finding. When the train hit the elevator, just as everyone's sphinters must have opened, a device called the detaching hook disengaged. Without really getting into it, think of a detaching hook as the lego piece that keeps the cable connected to the elevator. With the accidental release of the detaching hook, the elevator was free to fall from the rope. Is not hard to imagine a device attached to the elevator being destroyed during the accident. I mean, everything was destroyed during the accident, But what they were saying was that they believed that this kind of result was three times more likely because of the detaching hook. They believe that the elevator cable used here would have been strong and elastic enough to hold under the strain of the impact. And if that were true, instead of blood and gore, the elevator would have been filled with simple feces and vomit. One hundred and four innocent men would have lived to tell the tale of the most statistically impossible story of all time. Investigators were at a loss to explain how the train managed to burst through at least four levels of safety. All we know for sure is that reports circulated that a sole witness heard a loud bang and turned to see the train's driver running from the vehicle as it careened into the pit. That's right. You would have thought the driver would have been poured into a sack and hoisted out of the mine with dignity, but he survived. The driver was an emotional wreck. The press were nashing at the bit to talk to him, but according to the company, he was heavily sedated and unable to speak to the press for the rest of his life. Now, imagine you're a shareholder reading the company's nineteen ninety six annual report and finding out the company me you'd invested in has been charged with culpable homicide, with a trial set for March fifth of that year. Its defense was that the accident was neither foreseen or foreseeable, but the commission of inquiry was all miss me with ah. The National Union of Mineworkers and the company set up a trust fund for more than sixty nine widows and one hundred and fifty two children after the disaster. Families of regular mineworkers received sixty thousand South African rand that's about four thousand US dollars depending on what you read. Families of contract workers had to choose between about three hundred and thirty dollars or nothing at all. That's terrible and as reprehensible. But on the other side of the coin, President Mandela visited the mine. Most people don't know this about him, but he himself was a former mine worker and they made him the honorary president of the National Union of Mine Workers. He expressed shock and sadness over the tragic loss of life A somber and dignified memorial service was then held for the dead. What made the occasion so interesting was the level of interest in it. It's not every mining disaster that has the ruler of the country's attention and attendants. It was the first time in the long history of the mining industry that any senior corporate representative attended a remembrance of any kind, and not just that. The disaster pushed health and safety in the mining industry to the top of the country's political agenda. In nineteen eighty six, there had been a fire at the Kinross mine near Si which killed one hundred and seventy seven. After that, the Leon Commission of Inquiry had been set up to investigate mining disasters. The disaster of al Reefs happened just days before it was set to release its lists of recommendations. The report of the Leon Commission criticized both the mining groups and the government, and the lack of action by employers and mining inspectors alike to safeguard the safety of employees. A few months after the release, the union and the Chamber of Minds had been scheduled to sit down and talk about wages, and this year was going to be a little bit different. The boring old bilateral wage negotiations were going to be replaced by a ninety style moshpit of health and safety demands. They were pushing for workers' rights to elect health and safety stewards with real balls, to be their mouthpiece to the management about mind dangers, and fight for their right to refuse dangerous work. They also wanted more access to information regarding working conditions and improved in education. The root causes of many accidents are ill trained workers. We already said mine's love poor people, and in apartheid South Africa, poor people was a growth industry thanks to a little something called the Bantu Education Act of nineteen fifty three. Black children were forced into segregated schools and they were left functionally illiberate by design, but change as a whoy. The International Labor Organization and Recommendation on Mind Health and Safety was adopted by the overwhelming majority of member countries and enshrined international health and safety standards and practices. The industry had always trained workers to work as quickly as possible and treated them disposably. Because the end of apartheid didn't end racism, most mind managers are white, and union officials say changing rooms, toilets and even elevators are still unofficially segregated. They couldn't cure racism, but they could at least aim to ensure they were out and out killing people. These overprivileged nudges needed to learn that corpses are a negative aspect of any business plan. There's no reason that mining can't be safely conducted with a working goal of zero fatalities, as we have said almost two dozen times by now, achieving that goal requires an understanding of the mistakes of the past and taking actions to prevent those mistakes from ever happening again. Several people were eventually found guilty of culpable homicide. The mine manager and the company as a whole were found guilty of negligence. The tragedy at Valreefschaft Number two near Orkney may not have been the biggest loss of life in South African history, but it definitely became the most important. It also carries the dubious distinction of holding the Guinness World Record for the worst elevator disaster in history. The South African mining industry is committed to a policy of zero harm and strives to ensure that every mineworker returns from home unharmed and insound health every day. Sounds nice, but when you hear as a first step, risks must be eliminated, starting with the major ones and ends with workers must be issued personal protective equipment, you know they're talking about raising a very very low bar. That said mining is insanely dangerous to every area of human health. In this case, one hundred and four deaths were chalked up to human error, but it seemed clear to me that the entire corporate and human ecosystem underground needs to be revamped. Almost every life lost in that mind that day was black mining itself with apartheid at the hell meant that cheap labor was endless and their health was definitely considered secondary to profits. After the disaster at Orkney Mine, workers were finally given the right to representation and participation, the right to information, the right to proper training, and the right to refuse dangerous situations. In reports I studied on mine disasters, the majority had prevented causes. And just so you know, your odds of dying by train are one in two hundred and forty three thousand seven hundred and fifty six Your odds of dying in an elevator are one in ten and a half million. This puts your odds of dying in an elevator hit by a train at one in two trillion, five hundred and fifty nine billion, four hundred and thirty eight million. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, at Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or you can fire us an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review or tell a friend. If you want to support the ongoing production of the show, you can find us at Patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo or buy me a Coffee dot com slash Doomsday. If you're after swag, you are welcome to visit Evil Reindeershop dot com. But if you could spare the money and had to choose, we ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world into aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy five different countries. You can learn more and donate at Global Metic dot CA. On the next episode, if you think your work life balance is bad, be glad you didn't live in wartime England. It's the Silver Town Disaster of nineteen seventeen. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.