A FEARFUL ACCIDENT.

Oamaru Mail, Volume II, Issue 546, 31 January 1878, Page 2

A FEARFUL ACCIDENT.

Last night, a painful accident occurred to a foreman of the Waterworks named Andrew Adamson. He went down a shaft to pierce the bottom with a crowbar, in order to ascertain how much further he had to go to complete it. Previously to going down, lie told the men working in the tunnel into which the shaft was being driven, to pull him up after he had been down an hour. From some cause, probably in consequence of some misunderstanding, the manager being an Englishman and the workmen Italians, they failed to do this. He got tired of waiting, and attempted to haul himself up by means of a man rope that was hanging down from the top of the shaft. When he had risen fifty or sixty feet from the bottom, the rope either broke or came loose from its fastening, and he was iirecipatited to the bottom, where he lay till six o'clock this morning. Hearing the trucks at work beneath him in the tunnel, he knocked the head off a pick and tapped with it on the ground, the tunnel being only 4ft. Cin. in width, and too small to admit of the use of a piok with handle attached. The workmen immediately went to his relief. He called up the shaft that both his legs were broken, and one of the workmen descended, put a rope round his body, and raised him to the surface. He was then conveyed in a trap to the Hospital, where Dr. Garland was promptly in attendance. His legs are now set, and the poor fellow is in remarkably good spirits considering his painful situation. It will probably be six weeks or two months before ho will be well enough to leave the Hospital, and three months before he will be sufficiently recovered to resume his calling.