Exhall, nr Coventry. Colliery fire damage
Exhall Colliery fire damage. Crowd of onlookers. 1916
IMAGE LOCATION: (Warwickshire County Record Office)
Reference: CR, 1281/16/25, img: 9098
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Comments
I started to work here in the winter of 1979 following training at Birch Coppice Colliery, it was an old coal mine which was used as a training site. I Remember being bussed from Coventry to Birch Coppice Colliery each morning to do my training. When I started working at Coventry mine I was teamed up with a Welsh bloke who showed me the ropes. We used to ride the conveyor belts (called man riders) to get to our places of work. My first job was called denting, which was to lower the tunnel floor by about 18”-24” by hand with the sharpest and smallest picks I’ve ever used. When working on this one day the paper bags we were using to remove the waste coal started to smoulder! We had unwitting discovered a fire burning in the coal wall/floor. We reported this and an engineer came down with a thermal camera and found the fire in the tunnel wall.
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