Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Mufulira Mine Disaster, #Zambia's worst ever mining disaster. On 25 September 1970, 89 miners on the night shift were entombed when vast quantities of mud and water leaked from a surface tailings dam and inundated the mine.
#mininghistory
Mufulira was the world’s largest underground copper mine, but it took only 15 minutes for the entire eastern section to flood. Survivors recalled a noise like thunder, a shockwave of air through the tunnels, then the lights going out before the wet mud rushed through the tunnels.
Pictures from the aftermath give an indication of the terrible force of the mud rush that surged through the underground workings.
Tailings entered the mine at 2:55am, and the first mine rescue team arrived 20 minutes later. Eucalyptus oil was decanted into all downward air vents, the signal to evacuate the rest of the mine.
When the scale of the disaster became apparent, rescue times were mobilised from every other mine. These teams descended into the mine 50 times in the following days to search for survivors but found only 4 people alive. It proved impossible to find and remove most of the bodies.
Contemporary news footage shows one of the proto rescue teams coming out of the mine, and the enormous size of the sinkhole in the tailings dam.
The disaster was avoidable. Tailings (a waste byproduct of metal mining) had been deposited in the dam since 1933. A subsequent investigation noted with incredulity that no mine official had seriously considered that mining underneath the dams might cause them to collapse.
A few years earlier mine management had ruled out this possibility. The 1966 Aberfan disaster in South Wales prompted an investigation into mine waste on the Copperbelt which concluded “there is no danger of any of this tailing finding its way into the underground workings”
Yet this is precisely what happened. No-one was ever criminally charged for the disaster.
Mass funerals followed in Mufulira. Some families of the men killed were repatriated to rural areas in Zambia and two families were repatriated to the UK. Each family received a monthly allowance from a disaster fund, K20 per adult and K5 per child.
The mine itself soon reopened. In 1969, the copper industry had been nationalised and copper production was essential to Zambia’s economy. The mine is still operating today.
Many miners feared to return to work though. In 1971 one miner reported that ghosts haunted the shafts “who were demanding for more people to die”
Relatives of those killed were interviewed in a 2018 documentary, which also the names of the miners lost in the disaster. An earlier documentary made in 1974 entitled 'Ordeal at Mufulira' appears to have been lost.
Union officials also appear in that documentary and the Mineworkers’ Union of Zambia released a statement about the disaster earlier this week.
Few things have been written on the disaster. There is an open access article by Alfred Tembo and it is discussed in Jennifer Chansa’s PhD thesis (soon available online) but I think that is it. I worry this terrible event is in danger of being forgotten.
scielo.org.za/pdf/hist/v64n2…
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