The Globe and Mail's front page on Oct. 24, 1958, offers initial estimates of the dead and missing miners in the Springhill disaster the day before.
Ken Cuthbertson’s latest book is Blood on the Coal: The True Story of the Great Springhill Mine Disaster.
Mark Twain once quipped, “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” Twain was right about that. The urge to deny inconvenient truths is as widespread as it is timeless. We’ve had yet another vivid reminder of that in our summer of wildfires, droughts and monster storms.
Despite the cacophony of alarm bells warning us that if we continue doing what we’re doing, our addiction to fossil fuels won’t end well for us or for our planet, climate-change skeptics and energy-industry lobbyists insist that, at least for now, there’s no realistic option. After all, the growth paradigm in our society dictates that the economy must always come first. That dollar-and-cents rationale has been trotted out so often it’s threadbare.
Ignoring or denying the urgency and seriousness of a crisis – even the existential environmental crisis we’re now facing – is nothing new. History is littered with the bones of those who were loathe to face reality or decided they couldn’t afford to do so.
I was reminded of that while doing research into the Springhill mine disaster that my late Nova-Scotia-born mother sometimes talked about.
This year marks the 65th anniversary of that October, 1958, catastrophe, which stands as one of Canada’s worst workplace accidents and which, for all intents and purposes, sounded the death knell for Springhill, N.S., the quintessential one-industry town.
The Dominion Steel and Coal Company (DOSCO) mine that was located there was the main employer and had been for 85 years. “Ol’ King Coal” reigned supreme; never a beneficent monarch, he was as cruel to Springhill as he was kind.
Emissions rise from the coal-burning power station in New Waterford, N.S., a former mining community.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
Coal is the most basic and ubiquitous of fossil fuels. It has been used for thousands of years to heat homes and fuel cooking fires. As such, it provided a ready source of power for the Industrial Revolution that transformed life in the Western world, beginning in the mid-18th century. Those are coal’s undeniable positives. At the same time, coal is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Burning it releases the greenhouse gases that are having such a devastating impact on the Earth’s environment.
Coal is especially abundant in Nova Scotia. At one time, there were collieries in seven of the province’s 18 counties, and those who keep track of such statistics tell us that over the years more than 400 million tonnes of coal have come out of the surface and underground coal mines in the province.
A significant amount of it came from the Cobequid Hills of Cumberland County, where Springhill is located. Commercial coal mining began here in 1873 and soon five mines were in operation.
The good times didn’t last. By 1958, all but one of them had been closed for economic or safety reasons. Springhill’s No. 2 mine was the only one still in operation.
Two major mine disasters – one in 1896, the other in 1956 – had already claimed the lives of 164 men at Springhill. Even in the No. 2 mine, accidents happened with such grim regularity that some people believed the pit was cursed.
“Remember Springhill’s big producer, / her histories of crimson hue,” a poem by veteran Springhill coal miner Maurice Ruddick declaimed. “The biggest tale the old miners tell, / is the curse of the old No. 2.”
Curse or no curse, with steady, good-paying jobs scarcer than millionaires in the small towns of Nova Scotia and the other Maritime provinces, there was never a shortage of men (and, until 1923, boys under 16) eager to do mine work.
Never mind that the work was dirty, hot, hard and dangerous. As a familiar refrain explained, “The money was clean, even if at the end of a shift your face wasn’t.”
For generations, Nova Scotians could count on coal mines as a reliable, if dangerous, source of local income.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
DOSCO miners earned about $75 a week. At a time when the average blue-collar job in Canada paid about $4,000 annually, that wasn’t a bad income.
However, by the mid-1950s, job security had emerged as a major concern for Springhill miners. Economic storm clouds were building, and the viability of the town’s last mine was in jeopardy. There were a couple of reasons. For one, the demand for the bituminous coal that was found at Springhill was shrinking and prices were falling. Canadian railways were phasing out their use of coal-powered locomotives as they switched over to diesel.
At the same time, coal mines in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky that were more productive than the Springhill mine (and others in Nova Scotia) were gobbling up an ever-larger share of the remaining coal market. The upshot was that the No. 2 mine at Springhill was losing money.
In retrospect then, it’s puzzling why, in October, 1957, A.V. Roe Canada, the renowned aircraft manufacturer, acquired DOSCO when it began diversifying its business operations. Roe was looking for corporate cash cows that would pay for research-and-development costs of the company’s pet project – the now-legendary Avro Canada CF-105 delta-winged interceptor aircraft. No matter. If Sir Roy Dobson, chair of A.V. Roe’s U.K. parent, was aware or cared that DOSCO was ailing financially, he didn’t let on. Maybe that was because he had in mind a plan to boost profits.
The crux of Dobson’s strategy was simple – increase production, falling coal prices and demand be damned. “If we couldn’t improve a company, we wouldn’t go into it. If we can’t improve DOSCO we’ll be very disappointed people,” The Globe and Mail reported Dobson saying.
Miner Joe MacDonald looks down the sealed-off slope of Springhill's No. 2 colliery in 1959, a year after he was trapped there for days.The Canadian Press
The reality Dobson ignored or denied was that the No. 2 mine at Springhill already was running on borrowed time. Economic realities and geological imperatives doomed what was reputed to be one of the world’s deepest and most dangerous collieries. Its vertical depth from the pithead down to the mine’s nethermost reaches was 4,600 feet (to cite the Imperial measurement of the time – or 1,400 metres). That’s more than twice the height of Toronto’s CN Tower.
In order to access the coalfaces at those extreme depths, the miners rode trolley cars down mine slopes that stabbed into the earth and through the perpetual darkness at a precipitous 30-degree angle. It took as much as 45 minutes each way to make the four-kilometre descent to the mine’s lowest level.
In October, 1958, miners were working coal seams as far down as 4,200 metres. The problem was that, the deeper the No. 2 mine went, the more unstable the ground around it became. In the four decades prior to 1958, more than 500 mini-earthquakes, or “bumps,” as the workers called them, rattled the mine. The names of the 350 men who had died because of these tremors, and in the workaday accidents that happened with alarming regularity, were carved into the face of the miners’ monuments on Springhill’s main street.
What’s more, almost every man who worked underground for DOSCO suffered from black lung, the degenerative respiratory condition that comes from inhaling coal dust. The disease is a slow, merciless killer.
The miners, their family members and DOSCO officials all knew the dangers of minework. Yet – just as Roy Dobson donned blinkers – they did their utmost to ignore or deny that their reliance on mining coal was hazardous to them and to their community, and that there was no future in it. Springhillers knew it really was only a matter of time until a cataclysmic jolt, the dreaded “Big One,” would rock the mine. But they also knew they had just two choices: keep working or go hungry.
In 2018, former Springhill miner Harold Brine holds a photo taken of him in hospital after he was rescued from the cave-in.Wally Hayes/The Canadian Press
In hopes of reducing the frequency of the bumps that rattled the No. 2 mine and increasing its productivity, DOSCO’s chief mining engineer implemented changes in the way coal was being extracted. Louis Frost’s intentions were good, but the innovations he imposed were controversial. The miners insisted that even if the moves somehow reduced the frequency of the bumping that plagued the No. 2 mine, it also was likely they’d increase the likelihood of a doomsday jolt. “The college boys didn’t believe us when we told them that if they continued doing things that way, they were going to kill us all,’” veteran miner Harold Brine said.
It’s only with today’s computers and technical know-how that DOSCO engineers and government officials who diligently collected seismic data at the No. 2 mine might have been able to decipher the meaning of that data and to predict when a catastrophic bump might happen. Doing so in 1958 was impossible.
Unfortunately, it seems that Harold Brine and his workmates were right to be concerned about the impact of the changes imposed by Louis Frost. The seismic upheaval that hit the Springhill mine on the evening of Oct. 23, 1958, was the worst ever to rock a North American mine. One hundred and seventy-four miners were at work when the earth moved. “At the surface [in Springhill], people … felt a bump,” a Nova Scotia Energy and Mines senior geologist would say many years later. “That wouldn’t explain what the miners felt deep underground. It was much more violent.”
Guesstimates have it that the force of the tremors was equivalent to a 1,000 tonnes of dynamite exploding underground. The shock waves took just 17 seconds to travel 177 km through the earth to the seismograph at Dalhousie University in Halifax and a little more than a minute to reach Ottawa, 1,300 km west.
On Nov. 3, 1956, rescuers carry out one of the first survivors of the miners trapped at Springhill.The Canadian Press
“The Bump” – as it became popularly known – ripped the heart out of Springhill, wrecked the No. 2 mine and killed 74 men who never knew what hit them. (A 75th victim would succumb to his injuries later in hospital.) Death came instantly and without warning when the mine floor heaved upward by almost three metres in spots, hurling men, their gear and mining machinery against the roof.
Those miners who were lucky enough to escape the carnage scrambled to safety bruised and badly shaken. Still others, two groups totalling 20 miners, found themselves trapped deep underground with almost no food or water to sustain them. Many of these survivors had suffered horrific injuries; several of them were clinging to life by only the slimmest of threads. One would ultimately perish underground.
For almost two weeks afterward, the world focused its eyes on the rescue efforts that were under way at Springhill. CBC television coverage of events happening at the pithead captivated viewers across North America and around the world. This was the first time that people sitting in their living rooms were able to view news reports as they were beamed live from the scene of an unfolding disaster. Meanwhile, millions of people tuned in to hear radio news reports and to read the articles that appeared on the front pages of the three competing Toronto daily newspapers and the Halifax paper, as well as in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Life magazine and a host of smaller regional publications.
The scores of reporters who descended upon Springhill chronicled the efforts of the brave rescue crews that worked tirelessly 24/7 to reach any miners who might still be alive in the shattered mine. “With all its heart, Canada hopes they will succeed,” a Globe and Mail editorial stated. Happily, they did.
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, visits Joe MacDonald as he recovers from the mine ordeal at a Springhill hospital.The Canadian Press
Remarkably, all but one of the 20 entombed men survived in what the media dubbed the “miracle at Springhill.” Search crews tunnelled their way through the collapsed mine levels to reach two groups of survivors. One was made up of a dozen miners who were rescued after 6½ days; the other included seven men who were extracted after spending almost nine days underground.
The outpouring of financial and emotional support for the rescued men and for their community was as astounding as it was gratifying. People across North America donated millions of dollars to a miners’ relief fund, as did Canada’s federal and provincial governments. What’s more, job and relocation offers for the suddenly unemployed Springhill miners poured in from far and wide. So did a variety of honours, more than a few of them from individuals and organizations from outside Canada.
Those were the short-term positives that flowed from the Springhill mine disaster. Sadly, there were just as many negatives, and unlike the honours and benefits, the legacy of those was enduring.
With Springhill’s shattered No. 2 mine closed forever, the town’s economy was devastated. Despite the best efforts of local politicians, business leaders, union representatives and citizens to attract new industries to town, few arrived. The money in the miners’ relief fund inevitably ran out after a few years. Many miners and their families – those who hadn’t already done so – had no choice but to move away.
Memorials on Springhill's Main Street honour the victims of the 1958 disaster and a previous one in the 19th century.Courtesy of Ken Cuthbertson
Although Springhillers remained resolute, proud and remember their history, neither they nor their town ever really recovered from the gut-punch that destroyed the No. 2 mine. Today, the town’s aging population is only about 2,700 – less than half of what it was in 1958 – and the tax base has shrunk. In 2015, the Town of Springhill officially ceased to be when it amalgamated into the Municipality of the County of Cumberland.
The site of the DOSCO mine, once a sprawling complex of outsized buildings, towering smoke stacks and busy railway sidings, is now a weedy vacant field inhabited by ghosts. The last of the derelict buildings there – the mine’s wash house and lamp room – were torn down a couple of years ago. If not for a couple of National Historic Site plaques and a solitary coal trolley car parked at the roadside, a visitor would never know this once was the place where as many as 1,500 men worked when the mines were going full tilt, or where, during the 85 years when coal was king in Springhill, 425 men died on the job.
Parts of the old No. 2 mine have been flooded, and local officials are working to turn the burgeoning development into a geothermal energy park that hopefully will attract and power businesses. But apart from that initiative, a dandy little mine museum, and the Anne Murray Centre (a Main Street tourist attraction that salutes the life and career of singer Anne Murray, Springhill’s most famous native daughter) Springhill, beautifully scenic though it is, is a sleepy place that’s off the beaten track.
The town’s prosperous days are long gone. If you talk to locals who are old enough to remember the Springhill mine disaster, many of them will tell you that they, their parents and grandparents carried on even though everyone knew in their hearts that sooner or later the Big One would happen.
They had no choice other than to ignore that their lives, their livelihoods and the life of their town were tied to an outmoded fossil fuel – one that was killing the men who mined for it and poisoning the environment when it was burned.
The story of the Springhill mine disaster is a cautionary tale that in my mind has an eerie resonance. Sure, there are people who won’t agree. Or else they’ll continue to deny the obvious. As he so often was, Mark Twain was right. Denial ain’t just a river.