David Joseph Kidd
For those on the surface that bright late spring morning, the twenty five pitmen who had escaped, others from the resting shift, and relatives of those still trapped underground the scene at the surface was terrifying. Within twenty minutes the water was sixty feet deep in the engine pit, the pit where the men were, and by the afternoon it was a hundred and twenty feet up the shaft...Buddle started pumping immediately, but the pumps at full capacity made no impression on the water which seemed to be coming from a vast underground reservoir and flowing like a subterranean river in spate. The only hope for the trapped men was to find another way into the workings. There were plenty of possibilities, but everyone knew it was a desperate gamble; old pits were death traps, a maze of half collapsed shafts and tunnels filled with gas, only madmen would want to go down them, but there was no shortage of volunteers and Buddle himself led the way.
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