Authors: John Demont
Throughout the day, in the churches and graveyards of Pictou County, the heartbreaking scene will be repeated. By then the bodies of fifteen men have been recovered. For a couple of days the families of the remaining trapped miners will cling to the slim hope that the rescue crews working night and day in the pitch-black, rubble-strewn shaft will find more alive. Six days after the explosion, Curragh Resources, the owner, will call off the search, leaving the last eleven bodies underground.
Best estimates are that 500 million tons of coal have been harvested in the history of Nova Scotia. About 2,500 men—more than the province lost in the Great War—have died in the process. That works out to about five lives lost per million tons of coal—about triple the death rate in modern-day China, where the number of coal-mining deaths is viewed as a global scandal. The Nova Scotia total doesn’t even include the victims of silicosis, emphysema and a host of cancers and heart ailments related to a lifetime in the pit.
The Pictou collieries have claimed their share of the dead. The weird faulting and dramatic variations in seam thickness have caused frequent roof collapses and made the timber, coal and rock roar down with a terrible sound. There are other ways to die, too. In 1866 someone named McCarney perished because he “fell 15 ft. and struck a timber.” Four years later the paradoxically named John Luckman was “crushed by cage.” In 1873 Malcolm McIsaac died by virtue of being “crushed by back balance.” A year later W.C. Jackson and John Potts both died due to “rope breaking in shaft.” Four years after that, Francis Colin was “run over by a pit tub,” while in 1883 D. Baillie was “killed by run away rake.” Men went to meet their maker because of “suffocation,” because of being “crushed by machinery,” being “run over by train of hoppers,” due to a “premature explosion of shot from use of iron tamping bars,” being “caught
by box on balance while putting his clothes on for home” or after being “whirled around a shaft.”
Official numbers are sketchy, but best estimates are that since 1827, some six hundred men have died in the Pictou mines. The “damps”—the term English miners used to collectively refer to all foul, noxious, poisonous gases found in collieries—have taken many away. By itself, methane, found in huge quantities throughout the field, is merely flammable; when mixed in the right concentrations with oxygen—9.5 percent methane being the mixture’s most volatile point—the gas becomes explosive. A spark is all it takes: a pick hitting a piece of scrap iron, a shovel striking coal contaminated with pyrites. Historian James Cameron figures that the Pictou field has suffered forty-eight major fires over the years. At one time or another, virtually every mine in the Stellarton area has been shut down because of fire or explosion.
Sometimes it’s impossible to know precisely what happened; other times the stories read with grim clarity. On May 13, 1873, a miner named Robert McLeod set a routine gunpowder charge in the uppermost coal face of the Drummond Colliery, in Westville, a few kilometres from Plymouth. According to accounts, an unusual amount of gas was ignited, filling the mine with smoke. Making matters worse, the ventilation system stopped working. The manager ordered an evacuation. As the miners were leaving and a squad of firefighters were entering the mine, an explosion ripped through the tunnels. Miners from nearby collieries arrived and tried to rescue the trapped men and boys, whose moans echoed upward through the airshaft. A second explosion hit, killing one of the rescuers. In desperation, the mine was sealed to starve the fire of oxygen. On the surface, “men and women wander about in groups,” the newspapers reported in the days following the catastrophe, “their saddened countenances betokening the great grief that has fallen upon them.”
Five years later, an explosion occurred in the Foord Pit in nearby Albion Mines, killing Jason Nering, James Mitchell, Lewis Thomas and Edward Savage. The rolls of the dead included Donald McKinnon, Charles Boram, the MacDonald boys—Alexander, Angus, Murdoch and Ronald—Angus McGilvary and Hugh McElvie. Also no more were Laughlin Morrison, Thomas Sullivan, Dan Cummings, Merles Benoit, Rory McKinnon (father and son) and twenty-three others.
On January 18, 1918, the Allan Shaft—the most dangerous in a risky lot of seams—exploded. This time the Pictou County church bells rang out for Thomas Adderly Jr. and Clement Barcey, for Robert Winton and Peter Zomoskie, for Isaac Luther and Victor Humblet. Some families suffered more than most: the Bartholomews (Louis and Joseph), the Hanuses (Alfred and Cammile), the Kayenses (Felican and Joseph). Joseph and John McAulay were also among the dead, alongside William and John McLellan, Floriand, Louis and August Vaast, and Desire and Sylvia Laderie. All told, eighty-eight men died that day. Most every family felt the pain—including the Johnsons, who lost a clan member named James.
I noticed, examining the rolls of the dead, that another Johnson, Peter, was a solo fatality during an accident in the McBean Mine in 1957. I have no idea if he and James were related. But I’m still willing to bet that there was some sort of connection between the two of them and Eugene Johnson, who was laid to rest in a lovely treed cemetery in a nearby hamlet on the same day that I attended Lawrence Bell’s funeral.
Illumination does not come often to someone like me. But somehow and somewhere in those grim days after the disaster I had a
vision of the black residue that coal has left everywhere in this province. Without coal, whole sections of Nova Scotia might not have been settled at all, or at least might have been settled more slowly. Without coal, Nova Scotia might still be just a collection of scattered farms and fishing villages. Without coal, the province’s people would lack their edge and urgency—their spirit forged by a flame that comes from betting everything, year after year, on the vagaries of a single commodity.
But the trade-offs! Jesus, the trade-offs. All those names on the miners’ monuments in Westville, New Waterford, and Springhill. All those old men coughing their lungs out at Cape Breton Regional Hospital. All those shattered communities, devastated wives and fatherless children. All those economies locked in the last century even as the new one begins. Coal has a lot to answer for in Nova Scotia: whenever one of us grouses about our province’s fractious politics, we’re on some level talking about coal. Anyone who laments the state of our hard-luck economy is really complaining about coal’s legacy. Why are the rural towns and villages emptying out? What’s responsible for the pockets of abject poverty dotting the countryside? Where do our appallingly bad health statistics come from? The deeper I dug through my job as a reporter, the more likely I was to find that coal was the answer.
The Westray disaster, as much as any single event, showed how coal, politics and have-not economics intersect in Nova Scotia. It was hard, for example, to sit in a Toronto high-rise office with Clifford Frame, as I did a year after the Westray tragedy, and not feel the crushing injustice of life. The Curragh Resources Inc. CEO—all Foghorn Leghorn elegance in his dark suit, green tie, handkerchief and cufflinks—seemed precisely the kind of guy who would be hailed as a saviour by the Nova Scotia government when he arrived in the 1980s, offering to create jobs in a place that sorely
needed them. “They wanted somebody they thought they could work with and not be pushed around by,” Frame said. “The province and the feds gave me the encouragement. If I didn’t have that encouragement, I wanted nothing to do with that project.”
Encouragement, in this case, meant a total of $12 million in federal and provincial funding, loan guarantees and interest rate subsidies for Curragh. There were lots of people who told the governments not to do it. But the coal industry has always been adept at backing just the right legislators and politicians to make its sooty dreams reality. And there’s always the jobs card. The money was well spent as far as the politicians were concerned. The province’s Conservative government had been rocked by a wave of mishaps and tawdry scandals. Its popularity was plummeting. Even Donald Cameron, the party’s Pictou County strongman, was in the midst of a close battle for his seat. What a stroke of unimaginable luck, then, that five days before election day a Curragh subsidiary announced it was creating three hundred jobs by developing a $127-million mine in the midst of Cameron’s riding. When the polls closed, Cameron had held onto his seat by a few hundred votes and the Tory government—will miracles never cease—had been returned to power with a slim four-seat majority.
Eugene Johnson, I later discovered, had voted Tory. When I went to see his widow on the one-year anniversary of the disaster, she told me that he had been happy to finally follow his forebears underground. By the time the mine officially opened on September 11, 1991, Eugene’s excitement was fading. He told his wife, Donna, about the sections of roof collapsing. He was sparing her the worst: the endless list of flouted safety violations, the sub-par ventilation, the dangerously high levels of methane gas and coal dust. The managers who intimidated the crew, and even tampered with safety equipment, in an effort to pull more coal
out of the seam, to keep the revenue coming for a parent company that badly needed cash flow.
On the night of May 8, Eugene said goodbye to his wife and hugged his two sons, both under ten. Once the twelve-hour shift ended, Eugene, who played the guitar and even wrote some poetry, was due for four days off. The Commission of Inquiry’s report into the explosion—
The Westray Story: A Predictable Path to Disaster
—picks up the story from here. The spark was probably caused when the continuous miner—an electrical machine that literally carves the coal from the working face of the mine—struck either pyrites or sandstone in the coal wall. The tiny flame should have faded harmlessly. Instead, it ignited a cloud of methane gas that had been allowed to accumulate in the shaft due to improper ventilation. Some of the miners may have had a ten-second head start. It’s hard to think of them racing down the shaft as the rolling flame—which consumed all the oxygen in the roadways and left poisonous carbon monoxide in its wake—licked above their heads. Breathing in the carbon monoxide, they would have fallen on the spot. When the fireball hit a thick layer of coal dust—another contravention of provincial mining regulations—it triggered a massive explosion that burst through the entire mine, devastating everything in its path.
I’ve thought a lot about coal since Westray. And that has led to a revelation. It took time to merge together our extended storyline. But noodle around a little—with the help of the Internet, the archives and some energetic distant relatives—and a pattern becomes clear. My family’s tale is no different from that of millions of other Canadians: centuries of struggle in the underclass of the old country, a decision to take a flyer on a new life in a new world,
then a long slog making some other guy rich, until we finally abandon the muck, woods and subterranean depths for the expanding middle class. In between, the usual mix of heartbreak, triumph and tedium. There is, as far as I can discern, only one constant thread running through our collective yarn. Coal.
Coal brought my people here from the farmlands of Scotland and England’s industrial heartland, and drew us inexorably to Cape Breton. Coal mining brought our disparate tribes together and then, for better or worse, gave our lives an organizing principle. Without coal, no me; at least, not someone with the same genetic topography, the same inherited molecules, predilections and phobias. It made us all who we are. When coal mining disappeared we scattered to the winds; a century after the Brierses, DeMonts, McKeigans and Browns arrived, they’re mostly gone again, to Halifax, the outskirts of Chicago, Toronto and Montreal. As I write these words, I have precisely one uncle, an aunt and two first cousins—including the only remaining member of my people who has worked a coal seam—still living in Cape Breton.
So the story of coal is my story too, which means that the best way to understand my family’s storyline is to understand the history of that soft, sooty black mineral in this province. There was a sense of urgency; time was wasting. The links between family members had invariably started to fray. The elders with any direct connection to coal were dwindling. My father had Alzheimer’s; the last of my uncles still living in Cape Breton underwent bypass surgery; during the writing of this book their other brother went to bed one night and did not wake up, and the final Cape Breton uncle on my mother’s side also died. I wanted to make sense of their stories while they still echoed in the air.
So much about the story of coal mesmerized me. I’m far from the first writer with a thing about the subterranean life, those
unimaginable passageways and cities where thousands of men led parallel lives inside the earth. I also got hooked on the story because it seems to encapsulate everything about Nova Scotia: its geology, settlement and economic development, along with its social history, place in the world and aspirations for the future. It’s a story that’s connected to the great events of the world, but at the same time remains an extraordinarily human journey. The chronicle of coal in Nova Scotia is the story of how a simple black rock irrevocably changed a society and its people. It’s a narrative of outrage, but also a drama filled with heroism, loss, the cruel but hypnotic spectacle of time and the inexorable force of economic progress. As much as anything, it’s a story that ends with a question: what happened to these people after their land was eviscerated and emptied out?
Not everyone sees them the way I do. “Grim” is a word often used to describe coal miners and coal-mining towns, particularly in the thirty years since the industry began its inevitable decline in these parts. It’s not a word they necessarily use to describe themselves—even if few of them would wish a job in the pits on their sons. Weirdly, at least in the view of the rest of the world, they talk mostly in positive terms: of the camaraderie of soldiers, professional athletes and other men who have shared intense, dangerous work; of the professionalism that comes from doing a difficult job well. There is a swell of pride evident even in the voices of broken old men when they say, “I am a Cape Breton miner,” a “Springhill miner” or a “Pictou County collier.”