The day 'black damp' killed three brothers

Whangarei district experienced a mining tragedy of its own 77 years ago, which had terrible consequences for the Ackers family of Hikurangi.
Black damp, a mixture of unbreathable gases formed in coal mines, killed three brothers in a mine at Hikurangi, about 10km north of Whangarei. The tragedy made national news, not only because three siblings had died together with brutal suddenness but because two of them were attempting a rescue.
The Ackers brothers died one after the other from gas inhalation, crashing to the bottom of the shaft. First Albert, 18, then James, 25, who was married with one child with another on the way, and finally John, aged 21.
James rushed to rescue Albert, sliding unsecured down a rope with nothing to stop him falling when he passed out, just as Albert had. Then before anyone could stop him, John did the same.
As soon as the alarm was raised the people of the close-knit community of Hikurangi started running across the paddocks, up the hill to the mine.
Their nephew Robert Ackers, then five, now 82, vividly remembers the moment when the community's heart stopped.
"I was playing at the Rogers place at Waro at the time and we kids started to run too to see what was happening but some adults rounded us up and made us go in the house and stay there," he says.
Robert Ackers' grandfather, William, had taken over the mine from the Hikurangi Coal Company just days before the accident. The mine had been unused for a year and was poorly ventilated - a classic black damp scenario.
An air shaft had previously been sunk from the top of the hill and a drive let into the side of the hill, but this had not connected with the airshaft. William Ackers had to join the airshaft and the drive to allow a continuous flow of fresh air to pass through, to make the mine usuable and as stipulated under the Coal Mines Act. He went into the drive to knock on the wall of coal to work out how far away the drive was from the airshaft.
Albert could not hear the knocks clearly from where he was at the top of the shaft, so tied a rope to the crossbeam and climbed down the rope. Half-way down he stood on the wooden supports for a few seconds. Then he collapsed and fell head first down the shaft. Instinctively, the other two boys rushed to the rescue, losing consciousness at the same point.
The bodies of all three boys could be seen from the top of the shaft.
Their eldest brother Robert (father of five-year-old Robert) arrived and had to be held back from going down too. A man who ran a small mine nearby tied a rope around himself and went down instead. At the fatal half-way point he just managed to call "I'm going!" and was hauled to the surface, unconscious and black in the face. He survived.
A device to fan fresh air into the shaft and use of a respirator enabled the bodies to be recovered.
Robert Ackers remembers the three coffins laid side-by-side in his grandfather's house and the big funeral, and the on-going sadness in the Ackers family.
"The awful thing was John wasn't even involved in the mine, he was a sharemilker at Helena Bay. He must have had a day off and gone to see his brother. James wasn't supposed to be there either. His wife had gone into Whangarei and he was looking after his little boy Laurence. I believe he left Laurence with my mother and went up to have a look at what was going on at the mine.
"My grandfather took it very hard. It just about finished him. When I was about 12 I had the opportunity of going down one of the Hikurangi mines to see what it was like. I didn't like it."
Beth Ackers, widow of Jim Ackers, the son James Ackers never saw, says her husband always wished he had known his father. "He really missed that in his life."
About 7 million tonnes of coal came out of the rich coal deposits from the area on the eastern side of Kamo, out to Kiripaka, and north to Kawakawa through Hikurangi, between 1860 and 1955. Hikurangi was the heartland of mining, its miners taking out about 4.5 million tonnes of the total. Financial problems and flooding brought the industry to a close. Pike River coverage: P3, P5