6am, May 9 2006 – the moment a country had held its breath waiting for.
Two long weeks after Brant Webb, Todd Russell and Larry Knight were buried in a rockfall at the Beaconsfield Gold Mine, Brant and Todd walked out to hug their families, greeted by cheers from waiting media and wellwishers.
Their mate Larry didn’t make it out alive.
Brant Webb and Larry Knight could very easily have not been working underground that night – twelve months prior, they’d changed shifts.
“Larry and I, we thought it was getting a bid dodgy at the face, the working part of the mine,” Brant said.
“There’s a lot of rocks coming down and Larry and I looked at each other one morning at crib that we were thinking of bailing back to the service crew. We both actually took a ten grand pay cut so we didn’t have to go to the working face anymore where all the accidents were.
“It was funny, because we go down the track twelve months and all of a sudden it’s 2006 and [our manager] said ‘could you guys go and give Todd a hand?’”
Larry, Todd and Brant were working underground on the night of April 25, 2006 when a 2.3 magnitude earthquake struck in the vicinity of the Beaconsfield mine. Larry was found dead by rescuers two days later – Brant and Todd were found in a small cage three days later.
“We sat there for five days and we could hear the machines working,” Brant said.
“Then all of a sudden we were singing The Gambler [by Kenny Rogers] and we heard this ‘hey shut up in there’ and we were like, ‘oh what, someone’s there!’”
That was the first contact they had with their rescuers. Brant says the first five days flew by, compared with the days they were waiting to get out.
“The first five days was a lot of reflection on things, you’d have thoughts like ‘I hope the Mrs knows all the paint to paint the house is in the shed, I hope she knows I’m insured’ because we never spoke about that sort of stuff,” he said.
“She looked after the kids and the house and I went to work, played hard and worked hard. We just didn’t have that type of communication and we didn’t talk about everything like that.”
At long last it was the morning of May 9, when Brant and Todd heard the words they’d been waiting for.
“Pat said, ‘you can come out first Brant’, and I was like, ‘alright no worries, see you later Toddy!’ I was gone,” he said.
“The psychiatrist is on the phone and saying your emotions are going to go wild, you’re probably gonna cry and don’t feel less of yourself if that happens. I’m like, ‘mate, I’m not going to cry.’
“Anyway they wheel me out and there’s about 20 guys there you know and they’re all looking down at me, I’m on one of those carts with wheels like a mini wheelbarrow and when we get out to these guys I’m a blubbering mess and they’re all laughing.
“They run back in to get Todd and he’s crying when he’s come out and I tell him to stop that blubber we’re free – and all the blokes are laughing because I’d just done the same thing but Toddy didn’t know.”
Todd and Brant were taken to hospital for medical treatment before being released a short time later to attend Larry’s funeral – which had been delayed in the hopes they’d be able to make it.
To hear more from Brant Webb about his experience underground, as well as learn more about his friendship with the Foo Fighters and Dave Grohl – tune in to this week’s episode of iHeart Tassie:
