Colonel Ken said:
Advice: It is a good idea to ensure that at least one probe survives the initial cave in. That's all my wife had to dig me out when I got buried alive for 20 minutes. Luckily there were two air holes, one at my feet and one above my head.
A harrowing story and good advice!
My brother and I have had a couple of close calls ourselves - both at the old Waipahu Mill dump where Uncle Willie met his end......
It was a particularly scary dump to dig because the bottles were all 8 to 11 feet deep - at least where we were digging
My brother got pinned under a large collapsed section of roof and all his partner (I wasn't there that time) had to dig him out with was an o'o. While trying to break up the collapsed section my brother's digging partner inadvertantly whacked his foot with the o'o!
The moral of this story is: wear boots when you dig!
I came really close to getting squished while we were digging there late at night. The hole was 11 feet deep and pretty seriously undermined on one side. I was working it at arms length with a potato fork when I exposed the bottom of a sode. It had a big W on the base and looked kind of sick. My brother pointed out (correctly) that it was probably an Aiea Soda Works because they had notoriously bad glass.
These bottles are all starred in The Book (i.e. super rare) and fragile. My brother talked me into dropping the potato fork and carefully digging it out with a probe. When I backed out of the undermine and stood up to get the probe from him the whole ceiling collapsed! It burried my tools and my only light leaving me burried up to me knees in total darkness
I just got lucky that time - now I Dig Safe!!!
BTW - in case you're wondering why we would take such chances in the first place, check out these sodes we pulled from a single hole during one of my visits
