Westray mine disaster remembered 20 years later

Cabinet members were joined by a former Westray Mine worker and a union official on Parliament Hill today to mark the 20th anniversary of the tragedy.

File photo of Westray mine disaster

HALIFAX – Moments after she learned the Westray coal mine had exploded, Bernadette Feltmate turned to face her oldest daughter as she came down the stairs.

It was Amy’s 11th birthday, and she wanted to know if her father was bringing home a cake.

But Feltmate knew her husband Roy was in the mine.

“I had to turn around and tell her,” she says, vividly recalling the moment almost 20 years ago.

“It was horrible. It was the worst thing I ever had to do in my life. To see a little girl going back up those stairs. She had her head down. She didn’t cry. She went in her room.”

It was May 9, 1992. At 5:18 a.m., far beneath the small town of Plymouth,  a sudden gush of methane gas escaped from the Foord coal seam and erupted into flames. Within seconds, a huge fireball raced through the mine, stirring up coal dust that exploded in a thundering blast.

A blue-grey flash lit up the pre-dawn sky. Homes more than a kilometre away shuddered as the shock wave rumbled through the earth.

In all, there were 26 men underground at the time, most of them in the final hours of a four-day shift.

“He was probably blown to pieces,” says Feltmate, recalling a conversation she had with a group of older Cape Breton miners who had come to Westray to offer their help. “They said there wouldn’t be enough left of him to bring out.”

A team of rescuers wearing breathing masks found 11 bodies the next day in the southwest section amid charred rubble and twisted machinery. But it would be another four agonizing days before searchers reached the North Mains, where four more dead miners were found.

The search for the remaining men, including Feltmate’s 33-year-old husband, was called off on May 14. Westray officials said the mine was too unstable and there was no reasonable possibility that anyone had survived.

The bodies of 11 men were entombed in the mine.

It was the worst mining disaster in Canada since 1958, when 75 men died in a series of collapses at a coal mine in Springhill, N.S.

Feltmate says the loss of her husband left her family so badly damaged it has yet to heal.

“I know that on the 9th of May, (Amy) will call me, and as soon as I pick that phone up, she’ll be crying,” she says, sobbing between deep breaths.

“She’s suffering because she doesn’t have the one person that she adored in her life. She was very close to her father. … They were always together.”

The mine, a two-hour drive northeast of Halifax, was supposed to be a godsend. It was supposed to provide 15 years of steady employment in an economically depressed area that saw its last coal mine close in the 1970s.

The owners of Westray, Toronto-based Curragh Resources Inc., promised to use the latest technology to ensure a level of safety the province had never seen before. The federal and provincial governments extended more than $80 million in loans and loan guarantees.

But there were warning signs from the start.

The coal seam under Pictou County was already a well-known killer. Of the more than 2,500 men who have died in Nova Scotia mining accidents since the mid-1800s, about 250 were killed in explosions caused by methane seeping from the Foord seam.

Curragh officials said they could lessen the risks, but there were other troubling signs the mine would soon become a death trap.

Within a month of Westray’s official opening in September 1991, there were three major cave-ins.

Two months later, Westray miner Carl Guptill relayed a litany of safety violations to provincial inspectors. But the Labour Department failed to take action and Guptill was fired in January 1992.

Feltmate says her husband wanted to quit because the mine was unsafe. She said he often talked to her father about what went on in the mine, but he said very little to her.

“The only thing dad ever said to me was, ‘Little girl, I’m telling you right now, if you don’t get that man out of that mine …. you’re going to have somebody in a white suit and the RCMP at your door,’” she says.

“Unfortunately, he was right.”

After the explosion, the mine closed, about 200 people were thrown out of work and a tangle of lawsuits and investigations ensued.

In April 1993, the RCMP charged Curragh and two of its former managers with manslaughter and criminal negligence causing death. But the case eventually fell apart when the Crown concluded convictions were unlikely.

In the end, it was left to a public inquiry to determine what happened at Westray.

More than five years after the probe was announced, Nova Scotia Supreme Court Judge Peter Richard issued a hard-hitting report that concluded the tragedy was the result of “incompetence, mismanagement, bureaucratic bungling, deceit, ruthlessness, coverups, apathy, expediency and cynical indifference.”

Richard singled out Westray management and its owner, Clifford Frame, as ultimately responsible for conditions at the ill-fated colliery. The judge also blamed complacent bureaucrats who tolerated poor safety practices and ineffective monitoring of outdated mining laws.

The inquiry found there was little safety training at the mine, ventilation was poor and the mine’s methane detectors were often broken. Mine managers ignored directives to reduce the buildup of volatile coal dust, and rockfalls were a common occurrence that went unreported.

John Merrick, the inquiry’s lead counsel, says that at one point during the inquiry a provincial mine inspector admitted he couldn’t tell what parts of the mine he had examined when shown a map of Westray’s tunnels.

“One of the things that came out of the inquiry was that so many things did go wrong,” Merrick said in a recent interview.

“Mine management knew that they had a problem but continued to proceed full-steam ahead because they were confident they could overcome the problems, when they couldn’t.”

Ramsey Hart, a co-ordinator with Mining Watch Canada, says Westray’s legacy can be measured in the application of the so-called Westray Bill, a federal law enacted in 2004 that provided new rules for attributing criminal liability to corporations and representatives when workers are injured or killed on the job.

The law has been used in criminal prosecutions several times, but the courts have registered just two convictions.

“We don’t seem to have switched the mentality to these being issues of criminality,” he says. “Unfortunately, we are still seeing an unacceptable number of fatalities in mines … There are some disturbing indications that we may be losing some ground.”

Though Nova Scotia’s last operating underground coal mine was closed in 2001, plans are in the works to open another one in eastern Cape Breton as early as 2014. The proposed Donkin mine is in the midst of an environmental assessment.

“I would hope that Westray is not that far in the past that there won’t be some twinge of people’s thinking when they’re in the course of opening that mine,” says Merrick.

“I hope the word Westray will be whispered in the back of their minds.”

Excerpt – Westray Mine Disaster

The Westray Mine Disaster stands as Canada’s worst, and only, mine disaster in many decades.  This terrible tragedy was made worse by the fact that it should never have happened at all.  Twenty-six innocent men died because of neglect, greed, carelessness and criminal negligence of mine managers.

Trevor Jahn and Ferris Dewan were quiet as they rode underground for a long 12 hour shift in the Westray coal mine.  Friends since elementary school, they had worked in various mines together from one end of the country to the other.  They were good miners and had always enjoyed their work.  But now both men were nervous.  This new mine was easily the most dangerous place they had ever worked in.   Rock falls were so common that the men had stopped counting the number of times they had jumped out of the way to avoid being hit by falling slabs of coal.   Explosive methane gas was found in high levels in many parts of the Westray mine, not removed by ventilation systems which were supposed to continually remove it.  As if that wasn’t enough, coal dust, which is highly explosive, was being allowed to build up in work areas and not being cleaned up regularly.

Both Trevor and Ferris knew how a coal mine should operate.  Coal mines can be made reasonably safe, but this wasn’t being done at Westray.   The deadly contamination of explosive coal dust and high levels of methane gas was made worse when men were being given equipment to use which could give off sparks – equipment strictly against the law for use in coal mines.

The men who worked this mine could as well have danced through an ammunition factory with lit torches. Their violent death was inevitable;  not a question of if it would happen, but only when.

Jobs were scarce.  The men should have been happy to find steady work, but Trevor had had enough.  He was saving enough money to leave this mine.  On this day, May 8th, 1992, he was about two weeks short of his goal.

Miles Gillis, another miner with many years’ experience, was so certain there would be an explosion in the Westray Mine, he had shown a friend a map of the Westray mine, pointing out the Southwest section, saying that was where the blast would happen.  He also predicted that all the men working in that area would be killed.  Though he tried to hide his fears from his wife at first, in time he told her how afraid he was.  With tears in his eyes, he made his wife promise to call for an investigation into the mine if the blast would happen while he was underground.

Miners cannot afford to be nervous people.  They work for decades in environments which most people would never be comfortable in.  But these men were certain an explosion or a major cave-in would happen sooner or later.  Many of them reported the unsafe conditions to the mine managers and the government, but nothing much was done.  Most had signed a contract in which they promised to stay at Westray for a year.

In the early morning hours of May 9th, a spark from one of the mining machines ignited the methane gas which was at explosive levels.  The sudden flash of fire sent a fatal shock wave and a wall of flame ripping through the mine.   All 26 men who were in the mine that night were killed.    After the flame died down the wreckage-filled mine tunnels were silent and dark as death itself.

Miles’ prediction was correct.   The blast began at the Southwest section of the mine, and all the men there were killed.   For Trevor and Ferris, who were friends in life, they were together also in death.

Shaun Comish was one of the lucky ones.  Daily he had wondered if he would be killed by a rockfall or an explosion in this mine.  He was working the day shift and had just left the mine just hours before the blast.   He came back to the mine the next day,  but this time as a Draegerman, a rescue miner, to look for possible survivors.  He described it this way.

“I could not believe my eyes as we walked down into what can only be called hell… There was a smell I can’t really describe, a smell of burning, mixed with the smell of pulverized rock. There was a hard black coating on the down-ramp side of all the pipes and arches. The mine had a deafening silence – no fans, no humming transformers, just nothing, nothing at all… All the walls were covered with a black coating of burnt dust and debris. It was like the inside of a cannon barrel that had been loaded with anything and everything. The further down we went, the worse it looked. Cement bulkheads that had been two and three feet thick had been smashed into little pieces and thrown a hundred feet or more. Steel doors that had been fifteen feet high and twelve feet wide were now crumpled, twisted pieces of strange-looking metal. Two transformers had been smashed together so hard they looked like one hunk of debris. These transformers, which weigh roughly seven tons each, had been thrown about a hundred feet across the crosscut (tunnel) and down the decline…”

“In the No.9 crosscut all the arches were knocked over like dominoes, and the conveyor belt was underneath them. Sheets of metal and six by six timbers were thrown all around the drift (tunnel). It made our walking slow and extremely dangerous. There was the fear that the methane gas in this area was in the explosive range. One spark from any metal on metal contact might set it off.”

“I looked up the drift ahead of a wrecked boom truck and I could see some of the bodies of the second group of men lying there. I lowered my eyes and asked God to be kind to their souls and to give their family comfort and strength to get through this horrible ordeal. I recall seeing one man lying there. His face was covered, but I knew who he was and I felt a lump form in my throat. It hurt me very much to see these men taken from us, all for the sake of greed. I took a deep breath and told myself to put it out of my mind for now and get these guys out to their families. We placed our man onto the stretcher and the team headed back out of this manmade hell.”

Only 15 of the 26 bodies were recovered from the mine. Shaun never returned to mining.

The families of the dead men and the off-duty miners who had escaped death demanded a proper inquiry.  It became the most important cause in their lives to see that their friends and relatives not be buried and forgotten with the mine.   The fear that another Westray could happen again has driven them on.

A detailed study by Justice K. Peter Richard pointedly blamed the mine managers.  So many violations of safe mining practice were found that he concluded the explosion was certain to happen.  The only question was, When?   He titled his report; “The Westray Story, A Predictable Path to Disaster.”

Justice Richard also found that the Government of Nova Scotia’s Department of Natural Resources and Department of Labour were partly to be blamed for the disaster.  If they had been strict in enforcing the rules, the mine management would have been forced to change or shut down.