Trapped coalminer cuts off his right arm to free himself

Mr Jones, 43, pleaded with a miner to sever his badly crushed arm, but he refused, telling him a rescue team was on the way. But the desperate miner’s fear of being burnt alive was so great he refused to wait, cutting through his arm below the elbow with a Stanley knife on Saturday night.

“Col got out his Stanley knife,” a workmate said. “By the time the bloke had walked around to the other side of the front-end loader, Col had completely severed his arm.”

The agonising amputation might not have been necessary. The rescue team freed the severed arm from beneath the tractor and its three-tonne load and carried it out of the mine with Mr Jones.

Paramedics said he remained conscious during the 25-minute ascent in the mine lifts, walking up two flights of stairs to the exit, where an ambulance and a helicopter were waiting.

Surgeons at Newcastle’s John Hunter hospital hoped to reattach the arm, but it was too severely damaged. Mr Jones, a bachelor, was in a stable condition and was visited by his mother yesterday.

Mrs Betty Jones said: “he kept saying, ‘mum, it all just happened in a split second.’ He’s as well as could be expected.”

Newcastle University psychologist Diane Bull said Mr Jones’s decision to cut himself free may have been influenced by a case last month when an American mountaineer amputated his arm after being trapped for five days by a boulder in a Utah national park. After unsuccessfully trying to chip or move the boulder, and believing he would not be found alive, he had summoned the nerve to snap his arm bones, cut through his flesh with a blunt knife and go for help.

Mr Jones usually works weekdays at the West Wallsend Colliery 20 kilometres west of Newcastle and was on a rare weekend shift at the time of the accident. He was working with a stone-dusting crew, a safety procedure to minimise the risks of a potentially fatal coal dust explosion underground. He was driving a tractor when it fell in a pothole, overturned and pinned him against the mine wall.