Most British coal disasters are remembered as coal disasters, but Burngrange was something different — it was an oil-shale mine. The shale fields of West Lothian and Midlothian had been worked since the 1850s, when James 'Paraffin' Young pioneered the extraction of mineral oil from oil shale, lighting the world's lamps before Pennsylvania's wells took over the trade. By 1947 the industry was a shadow of its peak, but a dozen mines still operated, owned by Young's Paraffin Light & Mineral Oil Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Scottish Oils Ltd. Burngrange Nos. 1 and 2 lay 16 miles south-west of Edinburgh in the parish of West Calder. The village around it had grown up in the early twentieth century specifically to house mining families. The workings were narrow — narrower than typical coal galleries — and that narrowness mattered when the fires started, because there was nowhere for the smoke to go but along the same passages the rescuers needed to use.

Brown descended the pit with a fireman and pushed in toward the men trapped beyond No. 3 Dook. The smoke was thick but at first not impassable, and they made progress as far as the junction of another heading. There the smoke thickened and they were forced back. Brown waited a few minutes and then went in again, alone. He reached the head of No. 3 Dook itself. He shouted into the darkness and heard nothing. He saw no lights — the cap lamps of the trapped men should have been visible if any of them were alive and conscious — and he was forced to withdraw a second time. On his way out he met the fireman again, who had been trying to improve the ventilation by opening some of the brattice screens, the fabric barriers that direct airflow through the workings. It had not helped. The fires were spreading faster than any of them realised. Brown sent word back to the manager: there was no further hope of going in without self-contained breathing apparatus.

The National Fire Service, despite the fact that fighting fires underground was not part of their mandate, sent a team. Two of them put on their one-hour Proto-breathing sets. Underground they met Brown, who pleaded for the use of those sets so that he and another trained member of the Burngrange Mines Rescue Team could try again. They borrowed the apparatus. They went in. They could not reach the men. At 11:15 that night, under Brown's captaincy, a third attempt was made — a fresh team wearing goggles and using a life-line. The temperature in the workings was now very high. The smoke was so dense that the rescuers could not see their own lights. There had been a fall of stone, and sounds of strata movement could be heard from somewhere ahead. They were forced back again. A further attempt along a different level discovered another fire. By this point it was clear that nothing could be done for the trapped men until the fires themselves were under control.

The firefighting continued for four days. Not until the night of 13/14 January was it judged practicable to send a rescue team beyond the burned area. With one exception, the bodies of all fifteen men were found in No. 3 Dook. They had died of afterdamp — the toxic mixture of gases left behind when a fire consumes the oxygen in a confined space — and of the fumes from the burning timber. None of them had been killed by the explosion itself. They had been trapped, had waited, and had asphyxiated. David Brown was awarded the Edward Medal, which in 1971 was upgraded — all surviving holders were invited to exchange it for the George Cross, the highest civilian decoration for gallantry. James McArthur received the King's Commendation for Brave Conduct. The memorial in West Calder lists the names of the fifteen who did not come home. The oil-shale industry itself shut down in 1962. The villages remained, though, and the families that had grown up in them remembered.