Coal Black Heart (26 page)

The Darkness of All Darknesses

T
he spirit does not soar driving through Springhill’s downtown. Context alters perspective. And so—armed with a little backstory—a visitor begins to glimpse resolve in the rough little streets, allegory in the weathered cemetery headstones, resilience in the faded wooden houses. I’m here because of a phobia. I have more than my share. As long as I can remember, I’ve been unable to lie on my back and stare up at the sky without a terror-inducing vertigo. I worry way too much about taking out one of my eyes with a backcast from a fly rod. The sight of a plastic bag in the branches of a tree is enough to send me back to bed in an existential funk. Far as I know, the latter is a rare kind of dread. Stats, on the other hand, show that half of humanity is plunged into a heart-thumping, pupil-dilating panic at the thought of being buried alive.

While writing this book I started keeping a desktop file of coalmine disasters around the world: blood-splattered items about droves of men who never made it out of mines in West Virginia, Alabama, Siberia, Serbia, China, Japan, Turkey and Czechoslovakia.

There’s a forlorn pattern to the stories: the fire, explosion or roof collapse out of nowhere; the desperate rescue effort; the excruciating wait; the grief; the recriminations. Yet whenever I heard of a mine disaster, my first thoughts were always with the living, not the dead.

One day I headed for the best place I could think of to ask what being buried alive was really like. In the rolling hills outside of Springhill there’s little sense of the sweep of the the area’s story: its humble beginnings as a coal centre during the GMA monopoly, the late-1800s ascent when a new rail spur opened up markets for Springhill coal in Ontario and Quebec. By 1891, local historian Roger Brown recounts, the sleepy hamlet of nine hundred had swelled to a boom town five times that size.

From the start, there was blood on the coal in Springhill which has been forever beset by explosions and seismic jolts that cause roofs to cave in and tunnels to implode. From 1876 to 1969, 142 miners died in over 180 different incidents there. A disproportionate number of those deaths occurred in No. 2 mine, one of the deepest in the world by 1954, when Ken Melanson went inside at the age of seventeen. The son and grandson of miners, he didn’t do it for the love of tradition; a new man in the mines got $9.74 a day compared to the $4 that a day in the woods, the other local employment option, offered. Melanson’s first job was shoving empty one-ton boxes down to the coal face, waiting for them to be loaded, then coupling them together so they could be hauled to the surface. He worked a few months, was fired due to the inexorable slump that had begun in the coal industry, and then, a few months later, was rehired to reinforce the mine roof. On a whim he decided to try his fortune in Toronto. “When I got there I discovered the streets was not paved with gold,” he told me one rainy afternoon in early 2008. “I spent four months washing dishes and I was never so happy to get back to Springhill in my life.”

He’s sitting at his kitchen table as he tells me this, a tall, high-strung guy with a character actor’s basset-hound face. It’s easy to picture him on Thursday November 1, 1956—just nineteen and still living with his parents—as he got ready for work on the afternoon shift at the No. 4 mine. At about 1:45 p.m. he picked up his lunch can and the towel he used to wipe away coal dust and walked out the door. Along the way, he stopped at the miners’ hall and spent fifteen minutes yakking with a couple of his buddies. “It was a beautiful Indian summer day,” he says, “and we sat there and thought it would have been a great day to take off and go hunting.” Instead, they headed for the wash house, changed into their overalls, climbed into a trolley car and began the hour-long trip to the coal face.

Mining, in theory, was safer by then. The deeper the workings, the greater the pressure on the roof and sides of the mines, and the greater the cost of extracting the coal. Instead of the old grid-like pattern, mine interiors began to resemble ebony corridors. Long roadways supplied access to the coal “walls,” hundreds of feet long and wide. Miners, at first using picks, worked along the face, extracting coal that was shovelled into cars and moved to the surface. In 1950 the Dominion Coal Company built an automatic cutting machine—the “Dosco Miner”—which could extract a tonne and a half of coal, load it into a container belt and ship it to the surface.

Everything seemed normal when Melanson started working along the east side of the mine. Then, at 5:07 p.m. he felt a powerful gust of wind blowing through the shaft. The subsequent investigation concluded that an empty train had derailed within the mine, cut an electrical line and ignited a fire in the roof of the supports. The explosion that followed shot a fireball through the shaft and out through the mouth of the mine. “The men working
on the bank head—where the coal is piled on the surface,” wrote the
New York Times
the following day, “got the full blast.”

Down at the 5,400-foot level, all Melanson noticed was that the pans into which the men loaded the loose coal had stopped moving. He sat down and had a drink of water. About fifteen minutes later he heard someone down below say, “Knock off,” the signal that the day’s shift was over, for one of countless possible reasons. Taking different routes, the men began the walk back to the main slope to board the cars that would take them to the surface. elanson didn’t even get to the bottom of the slope before coming upon men from the other side of the mine. “They hollered, ‘Don’t go out there,’” he said. “I looked ahead of me and there was a man laying dead.”

Melanson could smell smoke, but he knew the real threat was carbon monoxide, the colourless, odourless gas that stops men in their tracks and makes them keel over and die. For long minutes there was chaos in the pit. Melanson, who speaks patiently in an undulating voice, says he and some others found a trap door, went in and shut it behind them. Inside was a line carrying air from an above-surface compressor to run the mine’s machinery. Someone found a big air hose. They cut holes in the sides and connected it to the compressor line and inhaled the clean air. Without the compressed air, he figures, they wouldn’t have lasted three hours. “I can’t describe that feeling you get, right down through you,” he says. “It’s a shock. It’s like if someone came up to you and told you that you were going to be hanged in ten minutes. You shake, you quiver. You wonder, how did this happen to us?”

A natural leader emerged within the group of men: Com Embree, an overman or shift supervisor whose father had survived the
1891 blast and who had himself lived through two mine explosions. (“We knew anyone in trouble with Com Embree was going to come out of it,” a miner named Harold Tabor later told the Halifax
Chronicle-Herald.)
With the help of another miner, Embree fashioned a makeshift barrier out of an old trap door to divert the gas. On the outside of the structure someone scribbled in chalk, “FOR GOD’S SAKE COME AS FAST AS YOU CAN—47 MEN ALIVE HERE.”

More men found their way to the shelter. Some just said the hell with it, soaked their shirts with stagnant water, opened the door and headed for the slope. A while later Melanson and the others glimpsed a light in the distance, but in time it dimmed. Then the light, which one of the men making a run for it had dropped after inhaling gas and dying, finally went out, leaving Melanson and the rest to sit there in the “darkness of all darknesses” hoping someone would come. The only food was a few crumbs someone salvaged from a dead man’s lunch tin. They starved, but with their throats coated with coal dust the thirst was worse. Some of the men prayed. They sang a little to pass the time. “You say all this stuff to yourself about how—if I could just get out and see the blue sky—how I would change my life,” Melanson says. “But by Saturday I just gave up.”

On Sunday evening, Embree said he planned to write no more in his diary. He offered the leftover pages to the men to write wills, and several of them took him up on the offer. According to Brown, a few of them sang a tune from the era: “Don’t worry about tomorrow/ Just be real good today;/ The lord is right beside you/ He’ll guide you on his way.” Melanson didn’t bother. “I remember a friend of mine in town, he died just before the explosion. I went to see him in the hospital, he was dying choking on his teeth and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t take them out. So that afternoon I just
laid down and I took my teeth out and put them in my pocket. If I was going to die I wasn’t going to choke to death.”

Melanson wasn’t expecting the noise they heard outside their door after more than sixty hours underground. They were scared that the toxic gas would get in if they looked out. But someone opened the door anyway and the draegermen from Springhill walked in. Melanson stops talking at this point. He lets out a sound that’s partway between a shudder, a whinny and a sigh, then does it again and resumes his story: how the crowds had gathered at the pithead along with the announcers from CBC radio—broadcasting live—to wait for the survivors. “This went on all night. I got out of the mine, I don’t know, two or three o’clock in the morning. And later in the morning the radio said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that is the last survivor.’”

The death toll hit thirty-nine. Most of the bodies were still underground when it was decided to seal off the mine for fear of another explosion. In January the mine was reopened so that the bodies could be placed in steel coffins and brought to the surface. “There were no funeral homes back then,” Melanson recalls. “And I remember all these funerals every day for a while, with all those crepes on the doors. It was sad—sad, sad, sad, sad.”

All told, eighty-eight miners emerged alive from the depths, many encrusted with so much coal dust that they were unrecognizable. Some were never the same after that. Joe MacDonald had to sleep with the nightlight on for the rest of his life; “When I wake up in the night,” he told his wife, “I want to see light.” For two years after the cave-in, Hughie Guthro’s fingers shook when he tried to button his shirt in the morning. Some men never went back underground. Many had no other choice.

Melanson headed for the mine in nearby River Hebert, where the seams were thirty inches wide and the conditions seemed like a hundred years ago. A considerable number opted for the No. 2 mine, the last one operating in Springhill. Which meant they were inside two years later when the mine’s floor and rock ceiling clapped together. Within twenty-four hours eighty-one of the men had been rescued, although one of them later died in hospital. All told, seventy-four died in the mine and their bodies were eventually recovered. Another nineteen remained trapped underground—twelve in one group, six in another and one unfortunate soul alone.

Their predicament boggles my mind. The Washington-based National Academy of Sciences felt much the same way. Right after the bump, they dispatched a team of psychiatrists and sociologists to Springhill to see how the miners behaved while trapped underground.

In fragments, the story emerged. The air was hot, stagnant and full of carbon dioxide. The stench of death was everywhere; “Oh it was terrible the last two days,” one miner recounted. “The smell, that is what I was scared of.” Many of the men were badly injured, including a pinned and dying miner—whom the others were powerless to help—who slipped into delirium, pleading for someone, anyone, to amputate his arm. The lights died. By the third day the food—the group of twelve had a few sandwiches, a doughnut and some pieces of chewing gum—was gone. When the water disappeared, some of them tried drinking their own urine to stay alive. “They adapted themselves to it by stages,” the researchers reported. “They first wet their lips, then rinsed out their mouths, and then drank.” Some of them, unable to choke it down, added coal and bark to disguise the taste.

Both groups included men who had survived the 1956 explosion, and knew enough to keep their heads near the ground as a
precaution against the gas. Few seemed overly worried about another bump. Instead, “the fear of not being rescued was uppermost in the minds of the trapped miners.” Most of them focused on banal everyday things—unpaid debts, hunting trips—to keep their thoughts from their families and their situation. Before long, though, their spirits plummeted. The pleas of the trapped man and the smell of the rotting bodies drove some of the miners to the breaking point. Suspicion over the rationing of the water spiralled into paranoia. Ten of the eighteen men didn’t have a bowel movement during the entire period. Most could only sleep for an hour or two. Many suffered from hyperventilation and heart palpitations.

Cut off from all light, they started to see weird things. “There were times that my eyes were shining like headlights in a car,” one said. “I began to see a red—a yellow glow,” added a second, while a third said, “When we lay down, we would see like little spots, like little fellows running away.” Another said, “I’ll tell you what they reminded me of—these kaleidoscopes, I think they call them, with all the little cut glass in.” One miner, suffering from a fractured femur, seemed delusional: “I began to think of my leg as if it wasn’t part of me, and I would keep on saying, ‘My poor old leg! My poor old leg!’ I began to feel sorry for it. But I didn’t think it was part of me at the time. Maybe that was a good thing.”