Walking into a room full of flames.

More pics from the closet, amazing what you find when you start digging into boxes stowed away for years.

October 1980: 500 pounds of dynamite and a couple of hundred detonators go off uncontrolled in an underground mining operation.
I was in a drift nearby drilling a round. When the ventilation duct passed over my head and I was almost thrown off my feet by the shockwave, I realized that something had gone wrong.

The explosion blasted the area clean of ventilation ducts and damaged the main fan. The thick black smoke following the explosion filled the mining area quickly, and you could hardly see your own boots. There were seven more miners working in that area and we managed to get all of them out.

The wheeloader is an Wagner ST-2B Scooptram parked nearby.

 

You don't know what you are missing, Slip.
Studying the Earth from the inside will reveal a whole new dimension for you...

 

That's the most fascinating part of it.
People use the term rock solid, but rock in large volumes are actually flexible and ductile. When an area is mined out the pillars are usually removed as you retreat from the area to get the last tons of valuable ore. When the pillars are removed the pressure will shift to the surrounding area and the remaining pillars be deformed by the pressure. You can actually watch the deformation from one shift to the next, sometimes you can even watch it during the shift.

At a certain point, when you have removed a sufficient number of pillars the back (the 'ceiling') will collapse and cave in, and that is a spectacular show watching, from a safe place of course, thousands of tons of rock being ripped apart and fall down.

And you even get well paid for doing it, that's not bad either...