Diglake Colliery, in the village of Bignall End, had been worked off and on since 1733 before being abandoned in 1854 for want of a canal or railway to move its coal economically. When the North Staffordshire Railway opened a line through the district in 1870, mining became viable again, and a new pit called Audley Colliery was sunk close to the old one. It had three shafts, the deepest reaching 240 metres. The intention had been to leave 80 yards of solid ground between the new workings and the old flooded tunnels of Diglake. The intention failed. The plans for the old colliery had survived only as imprecise sketches, drawn to inconsistent scales, and nobody could say with certainty where the boundary actually ran. When that fireman fired his shot, the barrier in front of him was a fraction of what the maps had promised.

A wall of water poured into the workings. One miner's son, on an errand for his father, was carried by the surge through the No. 1 Shaft galleries to the bottom of the shaft, where he and a group of other miners managed to climb out through a connection into the disused Boyles Hall Colliery. His father William Sproston, and his other son, both drowned. William Dodd, the under-manager whose office sat at the bottom of No. 2 Shaft, heard the inrush and ran through the tunnels shouting warnings, then organised the surface rescue parties; between 35 and 40 miners reached safety because he did. The pumps at the pithead, shifting 180 imperial gallons a minute, made almost no impression on the rising water. Four days later, more than 20 tonnes were pouring in every minute. By then, everyone knew there would be no more rescues.

The dead were 77 men and boys, almost all of them from Bignall End and the villages immediately around the pit. They were sons, husbands, fathers, brothers; they were apprentices not long out of school. The figure of 78 sometimes appears in older accounts because one name was carved twice on a memorial by mistake. Only three bodies were ever recovered in the immediate aftermath of the flood. The water in the old workings did not drain as the engineers had hoped, and the search parties found nothing but flooded galleries and silence. When coaling work in an adjacent mine in 1932 and 1933 turned up three more bodies underground, the dead were buried in the local cemetery to a service that drew much of the village. Seventy-three miners remain in the sealed workings, where they have lain for more than a century.

The inquiry six months later cleared the mine owners of legal blame but made a point that would echo through British mine safety law: no accurate records had existed of the old workings, and there had been no system to require them. Queen Victoria approved the award of the Albert Medal for Lifesaving to William Dodd for his actions in warning the miners. Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the Polish concert pianist and later prime minister of Poland, donated the proceeds of a Hanley concert he gave in 1895 to the disaster fund. In London the following month, three of the rescuers and a boy who had been brought out alive appeared on stage at the Canterbury Music Hall to raise money for widows and orphans. The Mines (Precautions Against Inrushes) Regulations 1979 finally enshrined in law that a minimum of 37 metres of solid ground must separate new workings from old ones. In January 2020, on the 125th anniversary, a sculpture of two kneeling miners was unveiled in the churchyard of Audley Methodist Church. A minute's silence preceded it. The names on the plaque are still read each January.