Most were rather quick and entirely uneventful. I’d expose my head to blasting chambers and doors to look up hung-up raises. I stood atop precarious perches, over open holes. I climbed into hung-up feeders to place sticks of powder between jammed rocks. We all did. It’s what we did to get the job done. There was little risk in most cases, but there was risk, sometimes great risk. In a word, we were lucky. Without a doubt, we were stupid to have done those things. But mostly we were lucky.
I was lucky when things did happen. I’m still here, after all. I’m still breathing. I still have all my wiggly bits. But I didn’t escape unscathed, either. I’ve had my injuries. I have my scars. I have my brushes with death to boast.
To be fair, our policies could have been better. But we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We learned from our brushes with death. Our procedures improved over time, our injury and accident rates plummeting with that hard-earned wisdom. Kidd was always safe compared to other mines. We were always winning awards. That doesn’t mean we were safe, though.
I worked overtop open holes a lot. I worked around conveyors. I worked with pressurized lines. I worked with a lot of heavy equipment.
I drove into open stopes to dump my load of cemented rockfill closer to edge. I witnessed a 4 inch drill bit break through mere meters from me while standing at the brow of a stope I was filling.
I was tasked with mucking out a 25 foot deep sump with a scoop that was too small for the task. The scoop slid back into the depths, the wheels spinning, leaving me just head and shoulders above the slime before I came to a halt.
I was once dumped from a bucket into a slurry filled sump of similar depth when I was trying to unplug a slurry pipe. I was easing off the Victalic clamp nuts when the pipe blew apart. I was half drenched. My partner was not. Exposed to the full force of the flow in the scooptram’s seat, he flinched and turned away from its force before thinking to drive away. His turning caused him to lean into the bucket joystick, dumping it and me with it. I hung on for dear life, but my fingers couldn’t hold. I fell, sinking to my waist in the cement slurry. Had I not cleaned up under the chute just before my partner arrived, pushing the muck into that very same sump, I’d have dropped into that sump without that lifesaving waste having filled it. I’d have dropped into a murky paste I could never have swum in. I’d have sunk like a stone.
My worst brush with death was while mucking. Backfill had been broken up, our number split into those who’d remain in Upper Mine, and those of us who filled stopes with mobile equipment joining Lower Mine. Our concerns for how different our job was to those others in production fell on deaf ears. Our needs were neglected; indeed, we were used as replacements for the muckers often, despite our skill sets being quite different. Frank, James and I were not muckers. We were more concerned with dropping a scoop into an open stope than with outrush of muck, a concern noted by our brass when a mucker sent to do our job had done just that.
Our Captain never learned though. He didn’t like having to develop two remote bays, one at the edge of the stope for backfilling, the other 17 meters back from the brow for mucking. We needed to be at the edge of an open stope below so that we could see the scoop when it entered the stope and rounded corners; muckers required a healthy distance back from the open stope above them (after the stope below had been filled and the one above had been blasted) to not be injured by flying muck. He decided to develop one in the middle, instead.
I did not see the danger when I was instructed to muck at one such.
I was mucking remote, standing atop the remote pad, the remote transmitter resting on my shoulders, the scoop ahead of me and at the brow. This was not one of the fortresses we construct now; this was just a flat metal box filled with concrete and set against the wall that I was to stand on. I was wrestling with big muck, more specifically, with an oversized slab that was blocking the brow. I was too close; I just didn’t know it. The chassis was directly in line with me, not a respectably safe distance away. So, when the slab shifted, sliding into the raised bucket, the weight of the slab caused the entire scoop to pivot on its front tires. The back end of the scoop rose up. It struck the back. I flinched, jerking the remote controls. The scoop bent, turning in the air, its balance shifting towards me. And that’s where the scoop fell. On me.
It struck the wall behind me, the chassis inches from my face. It also struck the remote control harness resting on my shoulders. The scoop drove me into the wall. The harness bent. I felt the tender weight of the harness and the transmitter and the scoop pressing into my chest.
I was deathly calm throughout all this, oddly. I wasn’t afraid at all. It was just something that was happening.
I blinked. I took a breath. I looked around. I was trapped. The scoop had corralled me into the wall, pinning me, holding me fast.
I turned to scoop off, and felt its final gasp shudder through me.
Once thought returned to me, I realized that the only way out of my predicament was to limbo under the scoop. I shimmied and swayed until I had slid and passed out from under its dripping, clotted, oily, greasy mass. Once free I climbed back up onto the scoop, kicked the transmitter out from its pressed bondage, and having straightened the harness back to a comfortable curve, I started the scoop again, drove it off the pad and back onto the ground.
Thirty minutes later, the shock left me. I soaked my coveralls with an icy sweat and shook for about five minutes.
I was right as rain after that.
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