the 11 men buried on the Saturday and 8 on the Sunday. The firefighters built bashings, walls of sandbags, turf and sand, approximately 18 feet (5.5 metres) deep and 17 feet (5.2 metres) up to the tunnel's roof to prevent smoke filling the rest of the workings and allow men to explore areas previously cut off. Within two days the temperatures dropped and the volume of smoke was reduced. The fire was contained, but miners still faced several obstacles, including roof collapses and large pockets of trapped firedamp. The first collapse consisted of more than 100 tons of debris; another fall was more than 300 feet (91.5 metres) long and 30 to 40 feet (10–12 metres) high. Clearing the falls and finding bodies was slow, and it took until 8 November for the first of the 4 working districts to be explored and cleared of bodies. The explosion, fire and subsequent decomposition made it difficult to identify many victims; some had to be identified by their personal effects, and some bodies remained unidentified. By 17 November the Mafeking and Pretoria districts had been fully explored, with more than 200 bodies raised to the surface in the preceding two days. On 20 November an official announcement reported that 439 miners had died, of whom 33 were still unaccounted for. Toward the end of the month, the men voted to return to work, even though the western workings were still out of action and 11 bodies were still missing. A photographer, W. Benton, took a series of photographs as the disaster unfolded, and later published them as a set of postcards. Their publication is described by the National Library of Wales as "an excellent example of early photo-journalism". The photographs came with a caption, shown below: Aftermath The Senghenydd explosion remains the worst mining disaster in Britain. The deaths of 440 men from a small community had a devastating effect; 60 victims were younger than 20, of whom 8 were 14 years old; 542 children had lost their fathers and 205 women were widowed. The impact on individual households was great: 12 homes lost both a father and son, 10 homes lost 2 sons each, while the death of one father and son left an 18-year-old daughter to raise her 6 siblings alone; another woman lost her husband, 2 sons, a brother and her lodger. The inquiry into the disaster opened on