Personnel Recovery Unit

What do you get when you cross a lifeboat and a coffin? This rescue device helps bring injured miners back to the surface.

Despite its unfortunate coffin-like appearance, this plastic orange lifesaver is a clever device. It seems to have been designed by people with miserable experience of situations where just such an apparatus might have been invaluable. The staged rescue in the film features a very placid victim, but it takes little to imagine what being strapped into the unit must have been like for someone conscious and in extreme pain.