Three million imperial gallons of water came through the wall. The new coalface had been driven too close to the workings of an abandoned 19th-century mineshaft, one that had filled completely after being closed and forgotten by everyone except the records nobody checked. The location of the old shaft was known to National Coal Board surveyors. They had simply not believed it descended as deep as the modern workings. British Geological Survey records would have told them otherwise. Those records were in Leeds, in the Institute of Geological Sciences, in notebooks of underground workings going back to the Victorian era. The NCB never consulted them. When the flood came, seven men were on the wrong side of the breach. The rescue effort that followed lasted six days and ended with only one body recovered, that of Charles Cotton. The other six men remained where the water had taken them.

Arthur Scargill was a young compensation agent in the Yorkshire NUM in March 1973. He went down with the rescue teams. He stayed on site for six days with the relatives of the seven men, and what he learned there shaped the rest of his career. At the public inquiry, he produced those 19th-century notebooks from Leeds and used them to argue that the National Coal Board could have prevented the disaster had they done the basic work of checking what was already on paper. The miners of Yorkshire watched him do it. Later that year he was elected president of the Yorkshire Area NUM, a step that put him on the path to the national presidency and the strike that would define the 1980s. The disaster also drove the Mines (Precautions Against Inrushes) Regulations 1979, which finally required collieries to verify the depth and location of abandoned workings before driving new faces near them. It took the deaths of seven men to make that obvious precaution into law.

Above the point where the miners were trapped, on the south side of Batley Road opposite the junction with Wrenthorpe Lane, there is a seven-sided stone obelisk. One side for each man. The village of Lofthouse Gate, where many of the colliers lived, sits in what is now the Ardsley and Robin Hood ward of Leeds metropolitan borough with a Wakefield postcode. Sam Richards and Tish Stubbs wrote a folk song called The Lofthouse Colliery Disaster that is still sung in folk clubs across the north. On the weekend of 23 and 24 March 2013, services and reunions were held in Wakefield and Wrenthorpe to mark the fortieth anniversary. Some of the rescuers came back. The families came back. They have come back every decade since, because grief settled into this ground and never quite left.

The water that drowned those seven men had been sitting underground since the 19th century, in a shaft someone had abandoned and walked away from. Nobody who died on 21 March 1973 had been alive when that shaft was sunk, or when it filled, or when the records describing it went into a Leeds archive and stayed there. The disaster is a story about how the past does not stay buried. Decisions made by Victorian mine owners about what to do with worked-out seams reached forward across a hundred years and killed seven men in the night. Every coalface driven in Britain after 1979 had to acknowledge that the ground remembers what was done to it. The miners' memorial on Batley Road remembers what was done to the men.