Slow-Motion Disaster

David Lambert’s father-in-law died digging fluorspar in the Newfoundland outport of St. Lawrence. So did two of his uncles and more friends than he cared to count. Yet when a British company, Minworth, announced plans to reopen the community’s notoriously dangerous mines, Lambert was among the 400 men who applied for one of the hundred or so jobs being created.

A visiting journalist wanted to know why. Why, when the local cemetery was filled with men who had died of lung cancer and other work-related diseases—the legacy of a half-century of corporate exploitation and government indifference? Why, when his brothers’ wives refused to let them go back underground?

“I guess it’s just as well to die with money as live without.”

Jobs or health. Food on the table or a safe place to work. That was the hard bargain that faced countless miners and other workers who built Canada in the days before strong unions, recognition of occupational health hazards and modern workplace safety codes. But David Lambert is not some figure from the distant past. The year was 1986 and the effects of exposure to dust and radiation—the twin dangers of working in the mines of St. Lawrence—were well known. Since the 1930s, in a community of fewer than 1,800, more than 200 miners had died slow, agonizing deaths. The media was already calling it a “national disaster.”

Rick Rennie explores the history and legacy of this disaster in The Dirt: Industrial Disease and Conflict at St. Lawrence, Newfoundland. It is a little-known story that has been overshadowed by more recent workplace disasters in Atlantic Canada—the loss of 84 men in the 1982 sinking of the giant oil rig Ocean Ranger on the Grand Banks, the explosion at Nova Scotia’s Westray coal mine that killed 26 miners ten years later. While dramatic tragedies such as these bring swift calls for action and reform, the miners of St. Lawrence were victims of a disaster that grew slowly, like the cancer that claimed the lives of so many of them. “When even a considerable number of workers die individually over a period of time, as they do from industrial disease,” Rennie notes, “it tends to provoke little public outrage or attention.”

Rennie, a former professor at Memorial University and the University of Manitoba, works for the Manitoba government but grew up near St. Lawrence and went to school there in the early 1970s. He witnessed first-hand the ravages of fluorspar mining. “I was … keenly aware that a tragedy had taken place and was continuing to unfold before our eyes,” he writes. “It was a fairly common experience to trek from school to church for the funeral of some child’s father. Many homes held men whose bodies had been ravaged by disease or widows left with meagre support to raise their children.”

They were victims of “the dirt,” a local term coined to refer to the “multiple miners’ diseases” responsible for the high death rate, the most common being cancer of the lung, stomach and bladder, but many also suffered from silicosis and other respiratory conditions.

The disaster had its roots in the depths of the Depression, when a New York stock promoter named Walter Siebert bought mining claims in the area. His target was fluorspar, the commercial name for a mineral composed of calcium and fluoride found in thin veins in granite. Fluorspar can be used to make hydrofluoric acid or added to glass and ceramics, but its true value is as an additive that lowers the melting point of materials used in steel making and smelting aluminum. There was a ready market for the stuff at the Sydney steel plant, just across the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Nova Scotia.

The men of St. Lawrence, hit hard by the loss of traditional markets for their fish, were desperate for work—and hope. So desperate, in fact, that they hauled Siebert’s dilapidated mining equipment across the barrens to the mine sites for free. The Second World War increased demand for steel and aluminum and eventually two companies—one American, the other Canadian-based Alcan— were operating a string of mines with colourful names: Hare’s Ears, Grassy Gulch, Lord and Lady, Iron Springs, Black Duck. After a post-war slump, demand for fluorspar rebounded and by the mid 1950s some 500 men were working underground, earning about $100 a month, to supply Alcan’s aluminum smelter in Quebec.

Conditions underground were primitive. Outdated rock drills created so much dust that miners could see only the dim orange glow of the helmet lamps of those working alongside them. There was no ventilation system to clear out the dust or bring in fresh air, and not enough oxygen to light a match. Miners sometimes disconnected the air compression hoses feeding their equipment so they could enjoy a gasp of air. Adrian Slaney, who died of cancer in 2002, told of men passing out and being carried to the surface to be revived. After a foreman administered aspirin and a glass of water to ease their blinding headaches, “they’d dress up and go down again.” Richard Clarke felt the effects within a couple of months. “You’d start losing your appetite and the strength would go,” he recalled, “and you’d find it hard to breathe.”

Mine officials ignored complaints about dust, bad air and even the lack of fresh water and bathroom facilities underground. The Newfoundland government, fixated on fostering development and keeping people off the dole, declined to enforce its own rudimentary mining regulations. It is a familiar pattern, one that would later play out aboard the Ocean Ranger and at the Westray mine. Government officials assumed employers could be trusted to run a safe job site, and ignored complaints and evidence to the contrary. An inquiry into a 1941 strike was typical, downplaying safety problems and miners’ calls for chest x-rays, relegating them to section of its report under the heading “Miscellaneous Matters.” Provincial inspection reports of the 1950s, Rennie concludes, “functioned largely as a public relations device” to cover up the problems.

St. Lawrence miners were able to extract better wages in boom times like the war years and the 1950s, but made little headway in improving working conditions. That began to change in 1952, when a local doctor surreptitiously sent lung tissue from a dead miner for testing and confirmed the man had died of silicosis. The federal government finally took action, ordering tests that found excessive dust. In 1959, further analysis discovered hazardous levels of radiation were leaking into the mine from adjacent uranium deposits.

The Newfoundland government continued to side with the employer, suppressing the radiation study for four months at Alcan’s request, sparking a walkout. The reaction of the local manager for St. Lawrence Corporation, the community’s other fluorspar miner, was callous and dismissive. Donald Poynter promised to install ventilation fans to “blow all those nasty little radiation bugs clear out to sea [and] we hope then that one of the Ottawa boys will come in, read his magic instruments, and make the electrifying announcement that the place is now safe, then everybody will return to work.”

The government of Joey Smallwood, Newfoundland’s first post-Confederation premier, was as slow to compensate victims as it was in addressing safety concerns. Many disabled miners and widows of those who succumbed to disease were disqualified from collecting workers’ compensation. Rennie tells of a man forced to quit due to “shortness of breath” in 1961, after a dozen years in the mine, whose claim was rejected, leaving his family of seven to subsist on welfare. Another ailing miner was upset to discover he was not suffering from silicosis—a finding that would have assured him disability benefits.

Rennie has mined union records, government reports and media coverage to reconstruct how this slow-motion disaster unfolded. His analysis of the economic, political and social factors at play is thorough, and his command of the documentary record is impressive.

But when it comes to capturing the human dimension of the tragedy, The Dirt comes up short. Rennie, despite his personal ties to the community, conducted surprisingly few interviews—a half-dozen over the course of a decade, all with miners. “One of the sad facts of doing oral history on an industrial disaster,” he notes in the introduction, “is that many of those affected are not alive to tell their stories.” While that is a tragic fact, fluorspar mining ceased less than two decades ago and there are other former miners— as well as miners’ wives and children—whose stories would help bring home the gritty reality of harsh life and slow death at St. Lawrence.

And, surprisingly, the most recent events in this saga command the least attention. Minworth stepped in after Alcan closed its mines in 1978, but Rennie devotes just over one page to its “haphazard and poorly managed” operations, which closed in 1990. The federal and Newfoundland governments backed this brief revival of mining and a few access-to-information requests to the departments and agencies involved would have allowed Rennie to better assess Minworth’s safety record—and whether David Lambert and 400other job applicants were right to risk a return to the mines.

Isolation and a tight-knit community, Rennie concludes, explain why men like Lambert were willing to risk their lives for a paycheque. The people of St. Lawrence, unlike those in the instant towns that spring up when a mine opens, “had ties to the community that went back over a century, even two … Workers with such long and deep ties to the community and the area—even if they had the skills and other resources to pursue employment elsewhere—found it no simple matter to simply up and leave.”

This sense of community also explains why the people of St. Lawrence were able to overcome corporate and political resistance and make some progress in improving mine safety and compensation for victims. Foremost among these was former miner Rennie Slaney, who was the first to document the true extent of mine-related deaths. “Unlike the case with many resource towns, most of the St. Lawrence workforce was drawn from the community, and many workers stayed after they had become ill and left their jobs, a crucial factor that made it possible to track the incidence of disease,” notes the author.

The lesson of St. Lawrence, Rennie argues, is clear: development comes at a cost, and corporations, if left to their own devices, are content to let workers and tax payers pay the price. Government has a duty to implement and enforce the regulations needed to protect workers and their families, and the Newfoundland government failed to hold mining companies accountable for their recklessness.

The parallels to the Ocean Ranger and Westray disasters are compelling and it is unfortunate that Rennie does not explore them. The Newfoundland government was more interested in asserting its jurisdictional claims to offshore petroleum royalties than it was in the safety of oil rigs, showing it had learned nothing from the fluorspar debacle at St. Lawrence. The Nova Scotia government, blinded by promises of steady jobs in an area of high unemployment, allowed Westray officials to flout the law and turn the Pictou County colliery into a powder keg. In all three cases, regulators were derelict in their duty and their neglect cost workers their lives.

As of 2001, Rennie reports, more than 285 men had died of diseases linked to working in the mines of St. Lawrence. The community has dwindled to about 1,000 people, the unemployment rate hovers at about 60 percent and a resource that could have brought employment and stability has left only death and heartbreak.

Jerome Spearns began working at the Iron Springs mine in 1951. Rennie interviewed him in 1998 and asked what he thought about the possibility that one day someone would reopen a fluorspar mine in the area. “I hope it never opens again,” he replied, “although it could be a good thing … I suppose.”

A good thing? Only if everyone involved—the company that operates it, the government officials who oversee it and the miners who head underground—heeds the lessons of the past.