Thanks to Rob in Nova Scotia for bringing this disaster to our attention. Any further details would be welcome.
Westray by Paul Cowan, National Film Board of Canada
Twenty years after Westray mine disaster responsibility for workplace deaths still elusive
By Steve Mertl | Daily Brew – Wed, 9 May, 2012
Even before it opened in September 1991, the Westray underground coal mine near Stellerton, N.S., had been labelled by critics as a potential killer.
And on May 9, 1992, a blue-grey flash lit the pre-dawn sky as a methane-fueled fireball surged through the mine and triggered a coal dust explosion that shook houses a kilometre away, CBC News recorded.
The blast killed all 26 men who were working underground. Eleven bodies were never recovered.
Miner Vern Theriault, who joined the five-day search for survivors and to recover bodies, remembers the vain rescue attempt very well.
“I know what hell looks like after that,” he said Tuesday at a news conference on the eve of the anniversary, according to CBC News.
In the weeks before it opened, Nova Scotia Liberal MLA Bernie Boudreau wrote to Labour Minister Leroy Legere warning the mine was “potentially one of the most dangerous in the world.”
But the mine was welcomed for providing 300 badly needed jobs, despite the deadly record of local mines, where 246 workers had died in similar methane and coal-dust blasts up to 1950. Many originated in the same Foord coal seam that Westray would mine.
The inquiry into the disaster, which took five years, uncovered a fatal mix of corporate greed by mine-manager Curragh Resources Inc. of Toronto, bureaucratic bungling and government incompetence.
The report’s title, as CBC noted, said it all: The Westray Story: A predictable Path to Disaster.
Most of the blame fell on Curragh and on government mine inspectors who overlooked flagrant safety violations.
Among the problems were a ventilation system ill equipped to keep methane and coal dust from building to dangerous levels, methane detectors that were disconnected because they went off so frequently, a mine layout that sacrificed safety for productivity and infrequent use of “stone-dusting” to neutralize the coal dust explosion threat.
The inquiry also found an “appalling lack of safety training and indoctrination” among the miners.
The objective, the report found, was to get the coal out and sold as quickly as possible.
“Since there was no discernible safety ethic, including a training program and a management safety mentality, there could be no continuum of responsible safety practice within that workplace,” the report said, according to CBC.
“Complacency seemed to be the prevailing attitude at Westray — which at times regressed to a heedless disregard for the most fundamental safety imperatives.”
After the blast, the mine was shut down. The surviving 117 members of the workforce received 12 weeks of severance pay, about $1.2 million, CBC reported.
The dead miners’ families tried to sue the Nova Scotia government but the province’s Supreme Court ruled the government was immune from lawsuits.
Curragh faced 52 non-criminal counts of operating an unsafe mine but went bankrupt in 1993. The charges were tossed out by the courts and criminal charges against two mine managers were stayed by the Crown, which said there was not enough evidence to guarantee a conviction.
Curragh founder Clifford Frame and former Westray president Clifford Frame boycotted the inquiry, staying in Toronto to avoid Nova Scotia subpoenas unenforceable outside the province.
The disaster did result in the federal Westray Act of 2004, which set down new rules for assessing criminal liability against corporations and their officials when workers are killed or injured on the job.
But Ramsey Hart of Mining Watch Canada told CBC this hasn’t changed attitudes in the industry.
“Unfortunately, we are still seeing an unacceptable number of fatalities in mines,” he said. “There are some disturbing indications that we may be losing some ground.”
To mark the 20th anniversary, the United Mine Workers, supported by Defence Minister Peter MacKay, a Nova Scotia prosecutor at the time, Labour Minister Lisa Raitt and Nova Scotia New Democrat MP Robert Chisholm, is launching a campaign to raise awareness of the Westray Act.
“The bill got passed in 2004 … over the years, I didn’t see it being used,” Theriault said. “There’s charges but it’s not being enforced. Let’s use it.”
Mining must be one of the most dangerous jobs of all time. My dad was shipped to mine coal in Scotland for a couple years after his release from a Soviet prison camp … “reparations” they called it. Worse job he ever had. He said his life as a pig farmer was a hundred times better.
I was in a salt mine in Austria … now a tourist thingee, not active … but it was damp, dark, low ceilings, narrow passage ways, and stale and dusty air. I can’t possibly imagine working in one of those things for even a week, no less year after year. I’d rather collect welfare and SNAP.
I see your Westray and raise you one disaster level:
The Texas City explosion of 1947, which killed 581 people and basically leveled the city. It was notable for being one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded.
It was also, and this is near and dear to my heart, the FIRST EXAMPLE OF A CLASS ACTION SUIT FILED AGAINST THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.
In Texas, we either go big or we don’t go at all.
The gentleman who works with us on the farmlette was previously a miner here in South America, where the conditions are every bit as bad as can be imagined. He isn’t a big talker, but wind him up on mines… Stucky is absolutely right.
Long ago and far away a family of delightful people who were among my closest friends were (and still are) the owners by inheritance of US coal companies. Philanthropic folk, warm and generous friends, they would NEVER enter into a discussion about the industry from which their incomes came: NEVER! It was an anomaly that I found vaguely disturbing. As the years have gone by, the vagueness has solidified into dismay.
Mining is a necessary industry, although coal mining apparently could be largely replaced by thorium nuclear reactors in theory. For so long as coal mining continues, if gov is going to regulate it (and for once I believe in gov regulation), it should not pull its punches.
If only non-corruptible private, disinterested oversight boards could be appointed! I’d volunteer to serve without compensation, asking only for expenses, heh heh.
My family came from the coal mines of southern Indiana and northern Kentucky. Grandpa said climbing down into empty vats to purge the chemicals from them was millions of times better.
Isn’t life funny, gramps died of late onset fibrosis of the lungs. Doctors surmised that the time gramps was lowered into a not-all-the-way-empty-vat, that knocked him out cold and resulted in a hospital stay (chem plants are highly unionized and insured) probably caused the damage that eventually resulted in his sudden illness and death.
These mines are competing with mines in countries with little, to no, regulatory oversight, or care for the workers.
Unions demand wages first, corporations demand profit first, everything else becomes secondary to that reality.
As the lot of the Western man resembles more of the third world, I fear these such disasters will start to squash the smallish gains made in worker safety.
These men are heroes. Without them, our entire way of life could not have occurred. Their sacrifices heated our homes, built our offices and provided electricity for invention after invention.
God bless the men that risked their very lives to feed their families and keep mine fed, safe and warm.
Here is interview I did on CBC last year
http://www.usw.ca/media/news/in?id=0181
As well as original article
http://www.naturalresourcesmagazine.net/?article=closure
I have more information than what is disclosed in these links.
I recently was thinking about why people in my province would rather forget about all this. I think what it boils down to is we get blood on our hands when we hit the power button on our remotes. People don’t want to think about how the energy that drives our economy is created.
rob
Just listened to the audio version while making a sourdough bread crab sandwich for out lunch.
I can hear the sadness in your voice when speaking of it, which is to be expected, of course. Or, maybe I’m just imagining things. At any rate, you are a fine human being, and we are lucky to know you.
Texas City explosion:
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=texas+city+explosion+1947+video&FORM=VIRE16#view=detail&mid=A3E3E160C411937CAA37A3E3E160C411937CAA37
Wow, just wow.
Bob.
You are not imagining anything. I have over the years beat myself up wondering what I could have done to stop this from happening but in the end a young man from Rural Nova Scotia out of work couldn’t stand in way of BIg Government and Business. I tried and got run over anyways.
I don’t know how to post stuff on this blog so if you or Jim could send an email to
[email protected]
I can forward some of my ramblings I have collected over last couple of months in preparation for speech.
cheers
rt
@Rob
Thanks and don’t give up! “Vox clamati” and all that. TE’s granddad story and expression of gratitude put me in a contemplative mood, for which I am grateful. Think I’ll go watch “Matewan” again.
My Dad worked as a pipefitter in a plant that made synthetic rubber and rocket fuel. This plant was located between several other plants all making dangerous shit and all backed up to the Ohio River in the West end of Louisville, KY in an area called “Rubbertown”. He once told me a chain-reaction explosion was likely and would change the course of the river. He was always the one making waves about safety and the lack thereof. He was union and according to him that’s the only reason he was able to be outspoken and keep his job. Sure enough, one day a 500 gallon tank of some sorta explosive shit blew. Lucky for us he hadn’t left for work yet and as I recall in the month following I didn’t see him much since he worked a lot of OT rebuilding the plant.
I don’t know, I don’t know.
Mines are inherently dangerous as all hell.
Mine owners want to build mines, extract resources and make money. So they will always be looking to say that the mines are safe enough. (Mines will never be safe).
Miners want the mines safe, but also need to make money to feed their families. (Mines will never be safe). In the end, many people will be willing to go down suspect mines because they need to make money.
Governments need the resources, so for that reason they will be joining with the mine owners. On the other hand, governments hate the fallout from mine disasters, and will therefore place laws on the books that will allow for prosecution of mining companies when a disaster arrives – gotta have someone to blame when the shit hits the fan.
But the governments, who need the resources, will not tend to enforce inspection laws before the accident can occur. They need the resources, and enforcing strict inspection laws will reduce the extraction of said resources. So they will wait for the accident, and then prosecute those responsible.
I see no answer. Mine companies may, or may not, cut corners, but they will surely lean toward saying the mine is safe enough. Miners need the money, so some will be willing to enter. Governments need the resources so will allow the mines to run, and will punish after the fact.
It is what it is. And so there will continue to be too many mining disasters. Advanced economies will do their best to export this risk to third world nations.
Rob – my sympathies. A truly awful experience for you.