My first brush with industrial death was while still at school. It was a distant brush, but it affected me, just the same. A friend of my future ex-brother-in-law (Marc), Ingo Budwig had died the summer before I arrived in Haileybury. He’d done a foolish thing; he’d walked out onto a hung-up bin. It let go while he was atop it, and when it dropped, he was sucked into the muck and crushed. Death of those my age was rare to me then. Any death was a shock.
I experienced my first fatality at Kidd, my first year there. That’s not to say that I witnessed it. Nobody did. I didn’t know the man, not personally; but I knew him to see him, having done just that at the beginning of the shift, while waiting for the cage. He was a mucker, working alone, as all muckers did. Mid-way through the shift, he clipped the level tag board on the tri-pillar on 1600 Level, pulling it from the wall. The tag board bounced off the scooptram’s front tire and flipped, driving one of the four rebar anchors through his chest. He died instantly. It sounds gruesome. It probably was for the man who found him. It was gruesome enough to me, and I hadn’t seen anything.
I found out when the Mine decided to send the workforce home early. They stenched the mine, the quickest way to get our attention, and once we made our way to surface, and after a headcount, told us what happened and sent us home. They thought it prudent to; had we stayed, word would have spread regardless how tight a lid they’d have tried to keep on it. Bad news has a way of doing that, getting out, and once it was out, we’d have all been distracted, inviting more accidents. I definitely was.
Looking back, I realize that taking chances and accepting risk was routine. We exposed ourselves to danger as a matter of course, sometimes not even aware of how much danger we were in.
We built bulkheads inches from the brow. We straddled open holes without a safety harness or a means of rescue. Indeed, I used to reverse my belt, bringing the D-ring to my front, and trusting in just that, would climb out into an open-stope, a 100 foot drop beneath me, to do pipework. We used to climb into hung-up raises, hung-up feeders, wander within the exposed risk of outflow.
Fern Carriere and I were blasting a hang-up on 2200. The prior shift had been at it all shift, to no effect. Fern decided that a bag of AMEX ought to do the trick, so we tied a stick of powder with B-line had stuck it in the bag. We hauled the bag up the muckpile to the gap between the brow and the slope, and stuck it in. Almost stuck it in. To have actually placed the bag in the raise would have meant that we’d have had to climb right into the raise. We were disinclined to do that. We shouldn’t have done what we had, either; we were as exposed to the same danger at the brow as we’d have been had we actually climbed into the raise. Had the hang-up come down while we were there, we would have been killed, just the same; we knew that while we were doing it, too, not thinking that if we’d have refused to expose ourselves and demanding a safer way to do the job, our brass would have had to do just that, leaping our safety programs ahead by a decade just then. That said, we did what we did, we pushed it, we shoved it, and even tried to throw it, but we couldn’t get the bag past the brow.
Fern cursed and said, “I guess that’ll have to do.”
So, we slid back down the slope and unrolled a roll of lead wire. It wasn’t long enough to get us safely around the corner into the ore pass access, leaving us exposed in the 01 DR, only to discover that we didn’t have a battery to set off the blast. We didn’t think to bring one. The prior crew had been blasting all shift, after all. We set about looking for theirs, but couldn’t find it. That meant we’d have to blast using one of our cap lamps. We decided on mine. That decided, we went back to the waste pass, tied on the electric blasting cap, and retreated to our blasting “station.” I exposed the shunts. Fern prepped the lead wire.
Before touching the wires to my cap lamp, he asked me, “Ready?”
I nodded and said, “Give ‘er.”
He touched the wires to the shunts.
We heard a vacuous, hollow thump. The air in the drift shifted, drawn back towards the pass. Then the full force of the blast funnelled down the drift to us. It picked us up off our feet and laid us flat. My hard cap flew down the drift, bouncing some ways away, coming to a rest in a murky puddle.
Still stunned, we sat up. I put my lamp back together and spun about, looking for my hat. I felt naked without it.
“Phew,” Fern whistled. “That was close.”
Much later, Frank Chiera and I were tasked with unplugging a slurry line. The shift prior had failed to do so. Frank and I arrived, surveyed the scene, and followed the pipes up-level until we saw where the pipe was apart. We ordered a flush from surface and after about 15 minutes watched as it decanted from the open line. We decided the line was good. We thought the prior shift had actually unplugged the line at the end of their shift and had not known it. We ought to have put a hose in the pipe and watched the water decant to the level below us, but we didn’t. We reattached the pipe and called for a batch of cement, waiting for James to call us from levels below us, informing us that he received it. We received no such call. We called him to confirm that he didn’t get it. We called Dan Lehoux, our slurry-man to confirm that he’d sent it, and at what time. Referring to our watches, we noted that the batch ought to have passed us, so we walked back in to check the pipe. We found the pipe askew, the clamp barely clinging to the edges.
“Wow,” I said, my nose inches from the clamp, “the pipe almost blew.”
That’s when it did. The ends separated from the clam, the laden, pressurized pipe rose up, narrowly missing my head, and the slurry blew out, hitting me in the chest. It knocked the breath out of me, flinging me backwards like a rag-doll, my flung body barely missing the scoop parked just behind me. I spun and rolled, unable to see when I came to a stop.
I gasped, catching my breath. Everything was murky, brownish black. I spit the
slurry from my mouth.
“Frank!” I called.
“What?” he called back.
“Frank, I can’t see!”
He laughed. I thought, you fucker! I’m blind and all you can do is laugh at me!
“Take off your glasses,” he said.
Oh crap, I thought, feeling disoriented and stupid. I reached up and found them still on my face. I took them off, wiped my face, my eyes. I blinked hard, my vision clearing. My glasses were covered with slurry. That would explain why I couldn’t see.
Yes, I’ve had closer brushes with death than those.
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