page_title: Mining accident
section_title: Australia
hierarchical_section_title: Mining accident / Accidents by country / Australia
caption_attribution_description: English: Mount Mulligan mine disaster aftermath. The cable drums, blown 50 feet (15&#160;m) from their foundations.
context_page_description: A mining accident is an accident that occurs during the process of mining minerals or metals. Thousands of miners die from mining accidents each year, especially from underground coal mining, although accidents also occur in hard rock mining. Coal mining is considered much more hazardous than hard rock mining due to flat-lying rock strata, generally incompetent rock, the presence of methane gas, and coal dust. Most of the deaths these days occur in developing countries, and rural parts of developed countries where safety measures are not practiced as fully.
context_section_description: The Bulli Mine Disaster of 23 March 1887 involved a gas explosion in the mine that killed 81 men and boys, leaving 50 women widows and 150 children without fathers.
  The Mount Kembla Mine Disaster of 31 July 1902 was an explosion resulting in the death of 96 miners, including two engaged in rescue work. It remains the worst mining disaster in Australian history.
  A coal dust explosion at the Mount Mulligan mine on 19 September 1921 killed 75 or 76 workers.
  Tasmania's Beaconsfield Mine collapse occurred on 25 April 2006. Of the 17 people who were in the mine at the time, 14 escaped immediately following the collapse, one was killed and the remaining two were found alive after five days. The survivors were trapped in a 1.5m x 1.2m cherry picker cage, which had saved them from being crushed by rocks. As it was not safe for rescuers to blast their way through, a special borer was brought in to drill an escape shaft. They were finally released on 9 May after 14 days underground.
  Three mining disasters occurred at Moura in a 20-year period. The first of these was in 1975, at the Kianga Mine, where 13 men died in an underground explosion. The mine was sealed without their bodies being retrieved. In 1986 a second disaster occurred, as an underground explosion, which took the lives of 12 miners. The bodies of all those persons were retrieved. In Moura on 7 August 1994 a third major mining accident occurred with an explosion at Moura No. 2 Mine. A second explosion at the mine approximately a day and a half later saw rescue attempts abandoned, and the mine was sealed, with the bodies of the 11 miners unretrieved.
  In the 1996 Gretley coal mine disaster, near Newcastle, four men were killed when their mining machine broke into the flooded workings of an old coalmine, abandoned over 80 years earlier.
  Four miners were killed in a windblast incident at the Northparkes mine outside the New South Wales town of Parkes in 1999.
caption: Mount Mulligan disaster 1921-the steel cable drums were blown 50 feet from their foundations.
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