Lofthouse Colliery disaster

The village, to which the colliery was adjacent, now falls within the Ardsley and Robin Hood ward of the City of Leeds metropolitan borough but with a Wakefield postal address (WF3).

[5] The location of the flooded shaft was known to National Coal Board (NCB) surveyors but they had not believed it to be as deep as the modern workings.

[6] The incident led to the Mines (Precautions Against Inrushes) Regulations 1979 (PAIR), requiring examination of records held by the Natural Environment Research Council which might be relevant to proposed workings [and] diligent enquiry into other sources of information which may be available, e.g. from geological memoirs, archives, libraries and persons with knowledge of the area and its history.

[8] At the enquiry he used notebooks of underground working from the 19th century retrieved from the Institute of Geological Sciences in Leeds to argue that the National Coal Board could have prevented the disaster had they acted on the information available.

The men who died were: Services and reunions were held in Wakefield and Wrenthorpe on the weekend of 23/24 March 2013 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the disaster.