Nova Scotia (49 page)

   
While reports piled up and studies stretched out over
decades, the mines around Springhill continued to operate. On
Thursday, November 1, 1956, an ore car jostled free of its
underground track and cut through a high-voltage electric line. The
spark set off an explosion and fire at the 600-metre level,
trapping 118 men below at 900 metres. The fire sucked up the
available oxygen and in its aftermath was more methane gas and
c arbon monoxide. Compressed air was pumped to the men below
and two miners crawled and climbed to the surface under their own
power, reporting on the situation of the men further below.
Rescuers and doctors scrambled bravely below and hauled out
collapsed miners along the way who were trying to escape. They had
to descend past the gas pockets and a fire that still burned until
they reached 1,600 metres below ground, where they found fifty of
the trapped men. Some could walk but others had to be carried out
on stretchers. Back on the surface, rescue workers realized that
there were still at least eight men below. Again, volunteers went
down and found thme remaining miners, but only two of the eight
were alive. The return to the surface nearly took the lives of the
rescuers as they inched forward in impossible conditions. While so
many men were saved by the valiant effotrts, thirty-nine perished
in the accident.

   
Less than two years later, Springhill again made the
headlines. On October 23, 1958, another bump occurred as the
ceiling of a mine collapsed onto the floor. Eighty-one men made it
to safety and eighteen bodies were recovered, but seventy-five were
still missing. Rescue workers kept at it day and night and six days
later, far below the earth, they heard the sound of men singing.
Ten men were alive, sealed in a tomb fifteen metres by five metres
wide, but it would be nearly impossible to tunnel through the
fallen rubble of rock. In order to send them some nourishment, a
doctor poured tomato soup into an orchard sprayer and fed it to the
trapped men one by one through a copper tube shoved through the air
line. After fourteen hours of feverish digging, these victims,
still alive, were hauled to safety, but forty-nine miners were
still missing.

   
Seven more were found on November 2 at the 900-metre level
and were brought up to tell the horrors of their days in darkness
below. That would be the end of underground mining in Springhill.
Some blamed the recklessness of the mining technique which involved
carving out entire coal faces instead of “step mining,” which would
have allowed for better ceiling support. .

A Future for Coal?

Mining declined in Nova Scotia not
so much because of its dangers but because it was no longer the
lucrative business it once was. By the 1950s, mining costs were
increasing as the mines went deeper to follow the seam of available
coal. Cheaper natural gas and oil were replacing coal as well. It
was a dying industry but not a dead one. Small family mines
continued to operate in Inverness and Cumberland counties right up
into the 1980s. Mining in Nova Scotia remains perilous to both the
body and the pocketbook. In the summer of 1995, bankruptcy loomed
in the air for the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO)
which ran the mines on the island. The privatized Nova Scotia Power
Inc. was ready and willing to sacrifice jobs locally to buy even
cheaper coal on the world market.

   
In January 1999 the federal government announced the Cape
Breton Development Corporation and its coal mines would close.
There were protest marches and a very brief sit-in at DEVCO’s Glace
Bay offices. Although the Phalen Mine was to be phased out by the
end of 2000, it was shut down on a December night in 1999 –
doubtless as an early Christmas present for the miners and their
families who faced an uncertain future. Miners maintained the
pensions, retirement and severance packages offered by the
government were inadequate. By the end of 2001, DEVCO had sold its
surface assets, consisting of shipping piers, train engines,
railway tracks and rights-of-way, and a coal storage
facility.

   
Cape Bretoners and Pictou County men may be spared the
hardship and tragedy of life as miners, but it won’t be as a result
of the concerns for safety by the federal or provincial government,
as the Westray disaster so sadly illustrates. Instead, it may
simply be bad economic forecasts for the industry that will close
the mines for good. If coal once again finds itself in serious
demand, however, Nova Scotian miners will again be lining up for
jobs, aware of the dangers, but ever anxious to earn a respectable
living, no matter how treacherous the job.

   
And Cape Breton coal may be in demand again. In 2005 the
government of Nova Scotia approved applications for surface coal
exploration and mining – another name for strip mining – in the
Sydney coalfield. The Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources
estimated about eight million tonnes of coal in Cape Breton could
be mined by “small surface operations” or strip mining. The
department assessed the market value of the coal at between $300
million and $500 million and estimated this would generate up to
100 direct jobs and more than 200 indirect jobs.

Chapter 44

Chapter 44

Pushed to the Point of
Extinction

As I look out the window of my
home, out across the vast expanse of the blue November Atlantic,
it’s easy to imagine that I’m looking at sea where very little has
changed in thousands of years. Beyond the sand dunes is the same
salt water, the same wind-spirited waves, and above, the same
cumulus clouds driven by the restless winds. Everything seems to be
as it should be.

   
What I can’t see is how much has changed beneath the surface
of the waves. It would be an exaggeration to say that the fish are
all gone. Some species still thrive, while others, such as the cod,
have been brought to near extinction, primarily by humans. The
Grand Banks that once teemed with sea life are bereft of much of
the life it once knew. John Cabot had written of the sea that could
be harvested of cod by merely dipping baskets from the side of a
ship. Now, on that same patch of ocean, it might be nearly
impossible to find a fully grown cod. We have allowed for a kind of
salt-water holocaust and now the social and economic after-blast
has come to ldhaunt us here in our very lives
ashore.

   
The phrase the “death of the fishery” may sound like
melodramatic politician’s rhetoric to landlubbers beyond the
Atlantic Provinces, but here it has profound, ominous implications.
Something has gone out of this world, our maritime world, and we
may never be the same. We will be the worse for it; many of us will
be forced to leave the shorelines and our homes.

   
Those scientists best equipped to tell us about what went
wrong suggest they are not a hundred percent certain. We fished too
much, that’s for sure. We fished carelessly and stupidly. And
nature figured into this as well. Something changed – most likely
the water temperature. A scant degree or two was enough to throw
off the cycle of reproduction. Will the cod and other decimated
stocks of fish come back? Perhaps, the experts suggest . . . with a
little luck. On the other hand, there is no compelling hard
evidence to say that the cod population can bounce back. As we’ve
done with so many other species, we may have pushed this one to the
point of extinction.

Uncontrolled and
Overfished

Early in the eighteenth century,
fishermen in the French fleet off Newfoundland and Nova Scotia
began to notice some decline in the fish population. And then
things got worse. Canadian historian Christopher Moore came across
the writings of a 1739 “expert” on the fishery who reported, “There
has not been the slightest appearance of fish stock this fall. This
has greatly astonished our fishermen – who will all be wiped out.”
This news may offer some small comfort and hope to those of us here
at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Perhaps the fish
population is cyclical. It has disappeared before and returned.
With a little luck, we’re just in a bad patch for the cod
themselves and for the fishermen who scoop them from the
sea.

   
The other possibility is this. As the cod population
dwindled, rather than backing off and allowing for a natural cycle
of decline and recovery, we fished on, harvesting those few
survivors who could have been breeders leading toward a recovery.
In other words, when the cod numbers were low, we swooped in for
the kill. If that’s the case, cod fish may be gone for
good.

   
As technology advanced, we were painfully slow to realize its
deadly side effects and legislate some kind of control. The
situation off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland was obviously
complicated by the fact that it wasn’t just Canadian fishermen
involved, but ships, some of them massive factory ships from around
the world, harvesting fish.

   
The story of government controls of fishing in the second
half of the last century begins in 1949 with the formation of an
international commission (ICNAF – thle International Commission for
the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries) whose job it was to do research
and “bring order” to fishing in this part of the Atlantic. ICNAF
was later renamed NAFO (Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization)
and, despite some symbolic attempts at control, the Northwest
Atlantic was a bit of a free-for-all until 1970 when the Gulf of
St. Lawrence, at least, was declared an exclusive Canadian fishing
zone. The following year, actual fishing quotas were set for all
NAFO members, but not all countries were in the club and not
everyone, including some members, would play by the
rules.

   
By 1974, number crunchers in the fishing industry realized
that something big-time was going wrong. There was a major drop in
the size of the catch on the Labrador and Grand Banks. At least
twenty countries were overfishing. In 1975, Canada responded to one
of the worst offenders by closing her ports to the Soviet fleet.
Canada became even more protective after that, declaring a 200-mile
limit in an attempt to insure “control”a over what fish were left
in this corner of the Atlantic. This move, which angered much of
the international fishing community, helped Nova Scotian fishing
companies to survive, but it may have proven to be merely a
postponement.

   
Nonetheless, Canadian catches were up for five years after
that and government began to speak of something called a Groundfish
Management Plan. But if the fish were somewhat protected, the
biologists, oceanographers anewd even the companies involved in
fishing were not. In 1978 the federal fisheries lab in Halifax was
closed. In 1981 and into 1982, there was a financial crisis in the
industry because of high interest rates, huge inventories and a
lack of interest on the part of buyers. Ironically, the market was
glutted with fish and it was wrecking the business. In response,
the feds poured fifteen million bucks into “inventory relief” for
the compa.nies.

The Scale of Social
Disruption

So, while businessmen were still
trying to figure out how to “manage” the resource, government was
slashing the Department of Fisheries and Oceans on into 1985 and
1986 – at the very time that more research should have gone into
insuring a stable future for fish in the sea, not in the can or
freezer.

   
Then something weird happened in 1987: a very good year. The
Atlantic Provinces Economic Council called it the “best year ever
for the Atlantic fishery [with] landed value of $791 million.” But
those few scientists left working for DFO saw forces other than
economic ones at work on the fish population. They saw populations
of haddock and cod going down, not up, and allowable catch limits
were tightened. This led to the closing of fish plants in
Newfoundland and Nova Scotia; foreign fishing companies with plants
ashore here pulled out.

   
In May of 1990, the Atlantic Fisheries Adjustment Program was
announced and APEC would cry out that “the scale of social
disruption caused by proposals to rationalise the sector is
unprecedented.” People would lose their jobs, companies – big and
small – would go belly up and fishermen would cease to fish.
Coastal towns would die and an entire way of life was close to
disintegration. And all the while, the once bountiful cod was
headed toward extinction.

   
That same APEC report argued that fishing was the single most
important industry in our region, with more than 100,000 people
directly employed in harvesting and processing, and many towns
entirely dependent on the resource. That was
then.

   
As the federal government screwed the lid down tightly on the
fishing business, it created other massive spin-off losses in
shipbuilding and repair, manufacturing, transportation and the
like. All this came on the heels of the unprecedented short fishing
boom that resulted from initiation of the 200-mile limit. In a
short time, more fishing licences had been issued, more families
had become dependent on fishing income and more people had become
dependent on the Unemployment Insurance factor, allowing them to go
on “pogie” for the time they could not fish. Young people quit
school and fished because it all looked so attractive. Then the
bottom dropped out and these under-educated young men and women
became part of the fallout from a very short golden age of
fishing.