Mine Design, Part 2

I had high hopes for Gordon as a boss. He talked the talk. He believed in standardization, or so he said. He believed in treating his employees fairly and the same, or so he said. He said that he would not rush his group and that if a print was not ready, we would not send it underground.

If only that were true. Gordon did not live up to expectations. He had temper tantrums. He had pets. He had unreasonable expectations. If Operations said that they needed something, we were to deliver it, regardless of the time constraints. But don’t fuck up. Don’t make a mistake. He’d call us into the office if Operations called up to point one out.

I was no exception. One day, shortly after I returned from holiday, Gordon sent me a message: Come to my office, please. He had a print with my name on it on his desk. He leafed through it until he came to the drill tables.

“This went down underground like this,” he said. He pointed at the page.

I leaned over the print and saw that the drill directions were reversed. Oh my, I thought. That could create a world of problems.

But I could not, for the life of me, remember putting out that print. I took the print and skipped back to the beginning. Yup, there was my name. I was perplexed. I looked at the date.

“I didn’t do this,” I said.

“Your name is on it,” he said.

“I was on holidays when this went out,” I said, pointing at the date.

Gordon remained silent. He fumed. He brooded. He pouted. I left his office without another word.
Gordon was not that organized, either. He messed up people’s holidays. You can do that if you don’t actually do your own time. And he didn’t do his own timesheets. He, like all the department heads before him, farmed that out to my partner, Larry, with me as the alternate when Larry was on holidays or off sick. As a matter of fact, none of the other department heads ever did their own timesheets, not so far back as I can remember. Gordon was no exception. So Gordon wasn’t that good at keeping track of when his employees were off on holidays.

He allowed too many people off at the same time, too. Especially at Christmas. You’d think it would be easy to keep track of who’d requested what when you’re the one approving holidays. It’s easy. Keep a calendar. Write names down on the weeks each employee has requested. Use a highlighter. Once a week is filled, don’t approve employee’s requests for that week anymore. Easy. How hard is that? It’s how we did it in Oreflow, and we had greater restrictions. Small groups of people who were qualified to do specific jobs, with restrictions on how many people of that small group could be off at any given time. That required more than one calendar to keep and to highlight. Gordon had only one group of seven designers. I ask you, how hard could that be to juggle? Too hard, apparently.

One Christmas, I was preparing to go on holidays. I decided to bring Guy up to speed on my stopes so that he could see what had been pre-prepared and what to expect for the coming two weeks. Guy freaked.

“You’re off?” he asked. I was. For two weeks. I’d just said so.

“”Hang on,” he said, "Larry’s off, Miro’s off, you’re off, Andre’s off and Mousapha is off. I’m the only one working.”

Guy went to raise his concerns with Gordon. That’s a nice way to put it. He raised his concerns. Gordon called an emergency meeting, the long and short of it being that he was cancelling my holidays so we’d have coverage.

“No,” I said. “I have more seniority than Andre and Mous. Cancel their holidays.”

Andre and Mous did not took too happy at the prospect. But such is life, such is seniority. I’d lived with those rules for decades. So could they.

“Who is travelling home for Christmas?” Gordon asked. Andre and Mous raised their hands. “I think we should give preference to people who have to travel,” Gordon decided.

“No,” I said, “I have seniority. You’ve allowed three guys off at a time and I’m third on the list. You approved my holidays. I’m taking them.

“Well, “Gordon said, “why don’t we walk down to Tom’s office and you can explain why we can’t deliver any prints over the holidays.” Tom was the Mine Manager.

“Let’s,” I said. If we did that, Tom would have to side with me. I like to think that he would, anyways. Seniority is seniority, and there are hard fast policies about such things. That sucked for Andre and Mous, in my books. That would have sucked for Gordon, too. He’d be left explaining to Tom why he couldn’t manage his own crew. Gordon backed down from his bluff.

I left the meeting. Gordon tried to threaten me, further. I stood my ground. Larry and Miro caved. The two guys with the highest seniority. Each of them came in the next week for a couple days. I wouldn’t have bailed Gordon out like that. I’d have let Gordon fall on his sword.

Why? Because Gordon was a cruel asshole.

I had a few face offs with Gordon. He treated us like slaves, just as he, himself, was treated like a slave by Operations. If Ops said jump, Gordon not only jumped, he begged to be allowed to jump again.
I was of a different mind. I didn’t like working for nothing. I didn’t like producing prints that would never be used. So, when I was instructed to produce a print where we’d be drilling from a drift that I knew we’d blasted the shoulders out of, I informed Gordon and our Blast Specialist, Dale, that we should not give them a drill print for that stope until the drift had been inspected.

Gordon yelled at me, out in the open, for all ears to hear. “If Ops says they want a print, you will fucking well give them that print. Do your fucking job!”

I thought I was doing my job. Thinking, planning, was not part of it, apparently. I began the print, knowing full well that it would never be used. That is not hubris. I’d been in this gig for almost thirty years and I already knew what to expect. And remember, I’d just spent four years in Ground Control. So yes, I already knew that the walls would be blown out, even if I had not seen the drift with my own eyes.

Dale took it upon himself to ask Ground Control if they’d inspected the drift in question since the blast that I suspected had damaged it had gone off. They hadn’t. They said they’d inspect it that very morning and get back to us with their findings.

The drift had been destroyed. We could not drill from it without extensive rehab. The print I had misgivings about, but had worked on and completed, the print that was being signed just then would not be needed. It would never be needed. Ground Control refused to send anyone into that drift.

Gordon did not come to my desk to inform me that the print wasn’t needed. That would entail him having to tell me that I was right.

He sent Dale, instead.

Mine Design

I had no idea how little I knew about AutoCAD or mine design until I began to work in Design. Not much was expected of me at the beginning, thank god. You’d think they’d been through this before. True to expectations, I spent more time bothering the other designers than actually doing my work.

I was surprised, no, panicked, when they gave me a stope to work on. “What was I supposed to do with this?” I wondered. “What did I know about design?”

What I expected was that someone would sit with me to show me the ropes. That didn’t happen. I was informed to pick at it. “How?” was the only thing that crossed my mind. Luckily, it wasn’t due to be mined for months. That might seem like a long time, but it wasn’t, not if you have no clue what you are doing. While I tried to figure that out, I was given a few driving layouts to polish and then design, then a few raise bore prints, then a few drill books. I can’t say that they were any good. In fact, knowing what I know now, I suspect they were horrible and likely riddled with errors.

They probably looked perfect on paper. But AutoCAD drawings have more depth than the thin sheet of paper printed. They are built with 3D wireframes. There are cavity surveys and previously blasted ground investigations to be carried out. Drill hole deviations to consider. Azimuths and grades and legal elevations. A bunch of technical stuff you probably don’t know about or give a damn about. Suffice it to say, I didn’t have a clue how to do the 3D stuff.

My skills improved. Baby steps. I got much better. But I was never happy with how I was trained. It was sporadic. It was inconsistent. I discovered that everyone did everything differently. Sometimes with good results, sometimes not. If not, then AutoCAD rebelled and crashed a lot. I inherited a couple that were not done well. Needless to say, they were difficult to work with; so difficult, in fact, that I deleted them and began anew.

It offended me that no one did things the same way. It offended me that some people’s drawings were a wireframe mess, that their layer management and naming were a mess, sometimes indecipherable. I had taken the time to figure out why my initial drawings were bad and I learned to do better. Why hadn’t they? Was it their training? If theirs was anything like mine, I wouldn’t doubt it. I decided to do something about that.

I began to write down what I did in a few word documents, do this and then do that documents, let’s call them manuals. One for block plans, one for driving layouts, one for raise bores, and one for drill books. Just as I was finishing them, I saw our newest student having the same problems I had. And she too was wandering from designer to designer, looking for guidance like I had.

“Try this,” I said, passing her a copy of my design notes. “Maybe this will help.”

It did. Within two weeks, she had completed a block plan and all the driving layouts and initial drill books.

I printed a number of copies and asked the other designers for input. I wasn’t an expert, after all. Manuals and procedures can only get better with feedback. And I was not so vain as to believe that the others didn’t have “tricks” that I didn’t and theirs might be better than mine.

I received no feedback. In fact, they each tossed my procedures aside and never once looked at them. One even held up his hand and said, “I’m not fucking interested.” That was unfortunate; he was one of two I believe needed the most help. He had post-its everywhere to remind him how to do this or that, post-its to remind him how to do everything. His drawings were a mess. Whenever I had to pick up his slack, and I had to from time to time (he could never keep up, always asking others how to do things even though he joined the group a year before me), it would take me two to four hours to clean it up and set it right before I could even begin, otherwise I’d never have been able to complete the task given me.
I suppose they thought me arrogant, insinuating that I knew their job better than they did when I’d only just begun. Maybe I was. I really don’t care. All I knew is that my prints were easier to work with than theirs were. People in other departments had told me so.

I informed my boss what I had done, asking if he might like to review it. He was the head of Design, after all; it was his department; everything done ought to be vetted through him, I believed. I thought he’d be pleased; he had always said that everyone should do things the same way; he’d even tasked Dan Groleau to teach us to do just that. That met with limited success. But Dan never wrote anything down.
I don’t know what I expected. I wasn’t sucking up. I’ve never sucked up to any boss. I just wanted everyone to be able to open the other’s drawings and not be baffled by what I saw. I thought Gordon was of the same mind. Gordon told me that he was looking for just such a project for the EITs in the group and ordered me to give it them to do.

“But it’s done,” I said.

“They need a project,” he said, “and our boss wants me to light a fire under their asses and get them working, so give it to them. I’m sure they can take it and make it workable.”

Workable? Well, that was insulting. It was workable. Our student had already proved that.

I was pissed. Gordon hadn’t even looked at it and he wanted me to give it to another person to take credit for it. What did I expect? Praise? Probably. I’ve always been seeking approval, or one reason or another. It’s a failing, on my part.

Whatever. Gordon didn’t know how to use AutoCAD, so his input would have been irrelevant. He probably wouldn’t have had a clue about what I’d written, anyways.

I swallowed my pride. I gave electronic copies to the EITs. One did nothing with it. The other, Dave Lerikos, took the body of work and interpolated and extrapolated it. He added pictures to the word document, showing the toolbars and icons referenced. He added plan views and sectional views. In short, he made it better.

I’m thankful for that; I’m thankful that the document is still in use today.

Time passed. There were rumours of another strike at the Met Site. The Mine decided to prepare for it.
A number of us were called into the boardroom, where we were informed by the Chief Engineer that we were going to be trained in the operation of the Mill. From that day forward, he said, all vacations were cancelled until further notice, likely until the impending crisis was resolved.

“Does anyone have any holidays booked over the next month?” he asked.

I raised my hand. Everyone laughed.
“Oh,” he said, “when are they?”
“Tomorrow,” I said. Everyone laughed again.
“Are you going anywhere?”
“Alaska.” Everyone laughed again.
“I’m going to need some proof of that,” he said.

I printed off the emails I had for the invoice and itinerary and presented them to him. He looked at them long and hard before saying, “I guess I have to decide if I’m going to let you go or recompense you.”

My gut tightened. How could they cancel my holidays just like that? I’d spent $10,000 on it. It was bought and paid for. I was packed. I did not mention the cancellation insurance I’d purchased.

“Go,” he said, handing the emails back. “It’s only training. Take lots of pictures.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

Ground Control, Part 4, an End

All things come to an end. So too my time with Ground Control.

I’d spent a lot of years learning to be a go-to man. Those years were hard come by. But I’d succeeded. I’d gone from being perceived as a lazy dog fucker by French crewmates who neither worked with me, nor communicated with me, often. They conversed in French and had developed a report with one another and I was left on the sidelines, clueless as to what they were about. No wonder they thought me lazy. I wasn’t. I was waiting for instruction. Things changed in Oreflow when I asked my shift boss, “What can I do to help you help me get my Code 5.” I began to rise within my ranks, finally becoming a hoist-man and then a spare shift boss, in time.

I found lessons hard to come by in Ground Control, as well. My boss rarely went underground. He was stuck in meetings all day, all week. I had to learn the job piece-meal, putting it together on my own, in most cases. I listened to him speak. I observed what he observed in the photos I took and the jottings I drew on layouts and in my notebook. I asked questions of development and drilling bosses. I kept my eyes and ears open and I absorbed what I saw and what I heard. In time, I got better at what I was doing, at auditing headings, investigating ground faults and failures, at making decisions. I think I did a good job. I could have been better at it. To think otherwise is sheer hubris.

I certainly visited enough sites during my tenure. I made 500 site visits my first year (beginning June 16^th 2007), 925 the next, and 1000 the year after that.

Then I was marginalized. Dave Black was hired upon Montcalm’s closure and he began to take over my role as Ground Control’s underground presence. It began slowly at first, then completely and abruptly after the Junior Engineer in the group didn’t want to do cable bolt layouts anymore. I was given the job and I found myself stuck behind a desk, pumping out print after print, two or three a week, eighty sections per print. It was time consuming. It was a challenge at first. It ceased to be within about a month, when it just became onerous and boring.

I snuck underground to check on and chart electrical cable borehole placement, and to inspect what I thought I might need to see with my own eyes. I had to. The position of such things like electrical cable and dewatering holes were only “draft” doodles on Level plans, not surveyed in, their exact positions not concrete at all; and “I” had already struck a dewatering hole on my first print. I began to be cautious. I began to worry about diligence, so I went underground with a “disto” to see such things for myself, to site in their exact positions for my prints.

I only made 151 site visits that final year. The rest of the time I sat at my work station pumping out one print after another until I had my JDAP for that year (my Job Description, Action Plan), where my boss declared that all upcoming training would be directed towards Dave Black and I would spend another year pumping out cable bolt prints.

I’d had enough. I was jealous. I was angry.

I saw a posting for the Design group and applied. For some reason, I had to prove my worthiness again, taking the same aptitude tests I’d had to take when I’d applied for the Engineering Group four years prior. I didn’t see why. I’d passed them already. No matter. I took them again, and passed them again, and was interviewed and offered the position. I accepted.

When Dave Counter found out I’d applied to leave his group he was livid. He fumed. He pouted. He stopped talking to me except in the most gruff, terse way. So be it, I thought. It was time to move on.
But I had to train someone to replace me first. So sayeth Dave Counter. Okay. That was reasonable, right and proper. But Dave Counter took his time posting my position and then even more time in choosing my replacement. There was a perfect candidate, early on. She had all the qualifications; indeed, she had experience in Ground Control and Rock Mechanics. Dave passed Kaylah by, probably because she was a girl, and he didn’t think she could handle the physical aspects of the job, pull tests, the installation of stress cells and such. He had a point. We handled some pretty heavy stuff, from time to time; but that didn’t stop him from accepting a female EIT once. (She was hired in the end, though, but with Production Engineering, instead.)

I candidate finally came along that fit Counter’s criteria. No experience, though. Fresh out of college. Most importantly, male.

I set about training him. I even took him underground once or twice, too, but I mostly chained him to my desk and taught him what AutoCAD skills I had, to prepare him for the drudgery that would be his for the next year. That way I could escape.

I also taught Dave Black what AutoCAD skills I had, expecting that he’d have need of them in time, too. This gave Julien, the new guy, an opportunity to escape his chains every now and again. Once he did, he was hell-bent to escape them for good, finding every reason to accompany Dave Black underground.

I decided that Julien was trained. I decided that Dave Black was competent to replace Julien in a pinch, too. But I still didn’t get my release from Dave.

I talked to Gordon Shepard, head of Design, about my lack of release. Gordon advised me to seek out Counter and press the issue. Counter was standoffish, not answering my question as to whether I could leave, but he didn’t exactly say I couldn’t, either. So, I asked the Chief Engineer and he said that I ought to just move. I’d been accepted for the new position, and they’d waited six months for me to fill it. My replacement had arrived and been trained. My new boss saw no reason why I couldn’t make the move anytime I wanted to.

I didn’t see the point in waiting any longer, either. A desk was open, recently vacated by a student who’d gone back to school. I began to move that day, that very hour.

My time in Ground Control had come to an end.

My moving was a bittersweet victory. I loved Ground Control, just like I’d loved Oreflow. I was sad to leave both.

But it was time for a change.

Ground Control, Part 3

Throughout the barrage of seismicity, I had to facilitate the University of Toronto geotechnical paste fill analysis study and install a series of stress meters as the Levels became available again. This took years.

The paste fill program began in 2008 and ran until 2010. I had little to do with it for the first year. My boss, Dave Counter, spent a fair amount of time in contact with the U of T and negotiating with Production Engineering and Operations, prepping the program. A suitable stope or two had to be found (the heir and the spare or two, so to speak), the stress cells designed, the cages built, the tech work and data streaming set up.

That was not my gig. Lots of math and politics, two things Dave loved and I could do without. I did what I did best, crawling over muck piles, taking pictures and doodling maps replete with dips, dumps and strikes, drawing up rehab plans and inspecting the work as it was done, and installing the stress and extensometers as needed.

Then one day I was introduced to Ben Thompson, an expat Brit from Durham, a PHD in geotechnical studies, articling at U of T, and now running the program I was to make happen and have no credit in. That’s okay, I really didn’t know what it did, how it did it, or what we hoped to gain from it. But I did know how to rig, set up pulleys, drive equipment, work like a tank in heat that would have dropped him and his revolving door of undergrads and understudies, and keep them from getting run over or falling down a raise. I was affectionately referred to as Sergeant-Major. I deserved that. I demanded obedience when we were underground. When I speak, you listen. When I tell you what to do, you do it. No questions, no arguments. Understand? They did. We got on fine.

Ben tagged along with me a lot in those early days of the project, growing familiar with underground and absorbing what I babbled on about, lucky to visit a few spots he wished to see while I went about my business. He contributed to my knowledge and skill, too. He’d comment on the instruments we saw in No.1 Mine, those installed years before to monitor if and how much the 50 million ton wedge was still creeping along, their state, their orientation, their overall usefulness. The long and short of that was that they’d had their day. Some were corroded, some had been installed wrong, or in the wrong direction. Some were broken. They were giving little to no useful information.

Was the wedge still moving? Yes. That much was obvious. I didn’t need any gauges to tell me that. I noted relatively freshly ground rock in the faults we were supposedly monitoring, paint flecks discharged from the coat applied by a previous wonder-boy EIT who apparently had little idea how to paint across a fault (he painted them along their full length when he should have applied it perpendicularly so that travel could be measured, but enough on that).

I pressed Dave to inspect them with me, pointing out Ben’s comments. Dave did, he accompanied me, gave me a rather long-winded history of the wedge that I already knew having lived through its influence, lecturing me on the instruments’ installations, none of which I cared about. I wanted him to see that they were useless and that we ought to install new ones, but nothing ever came of it. Not on my watch, anyways.

Ben and I did get on, though. He liked to go out. So did I. He liked to watch live music. So did I. He like a beer or two. Me, too. He could get a little caustic after a few, though. I recall the Contiki German girls and their description of BBC English and Island Monkey English. Ben began the night BBC. He did not end the night BBC. He was working class. He came from Durham, the coal mining town famous for its violent strikes during the 1980s, made even more famous by “Billy Elliot.” And we invariably had more than a few. Unfortunately, after a couple, his accent grew thick, indecipherable at times. But we got on. We got on for years. We got on so well that I always met up with him whenever I travelled to Toronto, at least until he got married and moved to Kingston and then London. We got on so well that Bev and I invited him and his revolving door or undergrads and understudies for barbeques.

But all good things come to an end. The stopes came on line, were mined and mucked and once they were emptied we set about installing the carefully crafted cages, filled with their barrage of meters and gauges, their loops of cables linking and trailing them. Unfortunately, Dave got involved, taking charge at the eleventh hour. Type-A personality and all that. I was nudged aside. You can guess how smoothly things went after that. But Dave was in charge. Dave was paying the bill. So, we did what Dave said.

Disaster! There was a small seismic event when we were hoisting them in the first stope. We had to stop mid-installation for a long-hole blast. When we returned we saw that a slab had fallen on the trailing cable. We pinged the instruments. Nothing. No response. Most of the wires within the cable had been crushed and severed. We had to pull the cages back out, a time consuming task that took twice as long as hoisting them in. Then the wee wires had to be spliced together. That only took all weekend. Despite all that work, only a few of the cages did their job, so we had to do it all over again. Then again, we were going to do it all over again, anyways.

All the while, the rehab of the collapsed levels was apace. I monitored the installation of new support types, pull-tested the new support, laid out cable-bolt prints, and inspected them, too. And then, two years after the litany of Level crushing bursts had all but shut us down, I began installing the newest stress cells. Once again, my boss did all the initial prep work, only bringing me in at the last minute. I had only two days to prep for the installation. I had to drop everything else to make the deadline.

Here’s a bit of wisdom: never let an engineer head an installation. Or I should say my boss, more specifically. He had to be there. He had to show me how it was done. And he had to bring one of his faves with him. That meant I had to work with a couple engineers who didn’t know how to perform manual labour. That didn’t stop them from marginalizing me, downgrading me to just the muscle. FYI: I’m not that big.

Dave meant well, but he grew impatient. He grew frustrated when things did not go his way. He barked orders. He yelled. He fumed. He placed me in a potentially lethal position, atop a narrow platform atop our Toyota, working at arms’ length. And when the rods slipped from his hands they came cascading out of the overhead borehole we were pushing them up. They whipped about like wet pasta as they fell. And everyone ran. Except me. I was on a raised platform, if you recall, working at arm’s length, with nowhere to go. I turned my back to the whipping rods and closed my eyes and hoped for the best. I was only stung once or twice.

I was furious. I bit my tongue, lest I say something career limiting.

We only installed the one.

I went down the next day with Annetta, a visiting engineer, and Iain McKillip, our EIT. Dave deemed me “good to go” now that he’d shown me how to do it. He did. He showed me how not to do it. The sergeant-major in me rose up. I had the two with me sit for a tailgate planning session before we began. We set the rods and cable as I wished, keeping our workplace orderly and clear. I repeated my instructions, making sure they were clear, and we set about installing the first cell.

We installed three that day.

Dave gave himself a huge pat on the back when I gave him my report at the end of the shift, congratulating himself on being such a great teacher.

Ground Control, Part 2

I had barely enough time to acquaint myself with my new job in Engineering when things got busy. Things were always busy in Ground Control, what with my installing instruments, working with suppliers, testing new types of support, and having to lay out the support required for driving layouts and audit every heading. I had blast monitors to install and retrieve. We had to inspect every ground failure and support failure reported. I had rehab prints to put out. I had AutoCAD to learn. And I had to play politics with Captains and Superintendents. But things were about to get especially busy.

How? We were about to experience unparalleled ground failure from rock bursts like we’d never experienced before.

I was not involved in the first. My partner was. He was called down to inspect a lengthy collapse of the 7100 01 S after a 3.2 Mn (magnitude) burst. That’s the main drift that follows the orebody on the south side of the Level access. All production was accessed by this drift. In fact, without it, nothing could be done on that side of the Level. There are no side drifts, no bypasses of any sort. Think about it. No drilling, no blasting no mucking, no money. We were motivated to fix it. And we did. It took some time, almost six months, but we finally got it done just as I joined the group, just in time for the next burst, six months after that.

It was a big one, a 3.8. In fact it was the largest we’d ever experienced, the largest we would ever experience. To put than in perspective, a bad earthquake is about 5.0, but the epicenter is usually deep underground and can be five kilometers or more below the surface. Consider the damage such a quake can cause. Now consider a 3.8 Mn earthquake epicenter mere meters from where you’re standing. It causes the earth to move, to flow as though it were fluid and not solid; and when it finds an open space, it tries to crush it; rock fractures, it splinters, it’s thrown vast distances, all in the notion of closing the void it finds. It’s like a bomb going off right beside you.

It was large enough to damage, 6800, 6900, and 7000. It damaged 7100 again, but the new support held or it too might have been knocked out of commission too. It might have suffered the same fate as those Levels below it. It collapsed the accesses to 7300, 7400, 7500 and 7700, our main production block at the time. It also damaged 7800 and 7900.

It was a disaster. It cut off most of our active production at the time and forced us to shuffle production over the entire Mine too keep us from having to temporarily lay off the workforce. It did cause a break in production, the first we’d had since we’d undermined a fifty-million tonne wedge fifteen years earlier, when we’d almost crushed the Mine and our main shaft with it. That might have closed the Mine, but we were lucky and it didn’t. The workforce was sent home for a week then; it was sent home for a week now, to give us time to assess the damage and ensure it was safe to send anyone back underground.
I was lucky. I’d been standing under the worst of it on 7500 just seven hours before the event. I happened to be in the area, inspecting an unrelated event when my eyes wandered over the back (the ceiling) at the Level access intersection. The shotcrete had always been thin there, the surface riddled with cracks that snaked here and there. They’d never bothered me before. But they did that day. I thought they might be getting worse, so I noted it in my notebook, to remind myself to put together a rehab plan for the entire area. I drew pictures. I took pictures to show my boss, hoping that they might help me convince him that the area required a little TLC. Maybe a lot of TLC. A mechanic was even luckier than I was. He’d been lined up to work on a scooptram that had broken down in that exact same place. He’d stopped for a cup of tea before starting his shift, otherwise he’d have been working on that scoop when the event happened. He would have crushed under ten meters of fall of ground, along with that scoop. But that day was his lucky day. One should always take time for a cup of tea. It may save your life.

When I say that we sent the workforce home to assess that it was safe for them to return, that did not include me. I was in Ground Control. I was the guy who was always heading north with a clipboard and a camera when everyone else was running south, screaming that the sky was falling. I spent the rest of the week listening to the ground creak and grown, crawling over muck piles, making notes, drawing little maps, taking a lot of pictures. It was the quietest I’d ever heard the Mine. Aside for the creaks and groans and cracks that is.

I never once felt like I was in jeopardy. Maybe I’m a little reckless, maybe a little stupid, maybe danger doesn’t faze me. Either way, I was never worried, never scared. I had to tell a few supervisors and engineers who was accompanying me on those investigations to “grow a pair” more than once as they hung back or jumped at the slightest ping of ground. I forged on, hugging the wall, passing under the damage, but close enough to what support still existed to expect that it might still be holding back the back. And if it didn’t, I wouldn’t know for long. My exposure time was short, I reasoned; just a blink of an eye. What could possibly happen? They followed me. They always followed me. I think I shamed them into it. I never once told them that I might have a lump in my throat as I slid past that gaping maw of a damaged drift. I almost never did, though. Like I said, stupid.

We got hit by another 3.2 Mn burst 6 months later, ripping through the same Levels that were already damaged, almost killing a rehab team installing burst rated support. That’s what saved their lives. The ground snapped and undulated. The crew said the ground actually flowed until it met the new support they were installing and the damage was held at bay, stopping the wholesale collapse cold.
Looking back, we’d missed the signs. There were plenty of them but we hadn’t seen them. We ought to have. Maybe not me, though. I was too green and for as long as I’d been in Ground Control there were rock bursts. Prior to that, it had been a long time since I’d been in the field. When I was, it was with backfill, always at the tail end of a stope, always under shitty ground, so I’d grown desensitized to it. After that, I was in Oreflow, never straying too far from the shaft and oblivious to the goings on throughout the production levels of the Mine. So what did I know?

A lot, it turned out.

I began with Ground Control in June 2007, experiencing my first seismic damage inspections in July. The next was in October. There were more in February and April, then two in August. Two more in September, and another in October. All procurers to the main event in January. More followed in May and June. The third big one hit in mid-June, the one that almost killed that rehab crew on 7500.

Kidd never once tried to kill me during that time. She’d tried before. Many times. But she never did. She’d given up trying to kill me by them. Or maybe I’d just developed a sixth sense for when she was going to try again. No matter, I felt invulnerable all through that period. To think otherwise would have been foolhardy. Had I thought about it, I’d have never gone underground again.

As a matter of fact, I hadn’t been scared underground in decades. I don’t think I’ve ever been. What would have been the point in that?

Ground Control, a Beginning

After eighteen years underground, I’d finally made it to the engineering office. I took a substantial cut in pay to do so, what with my no longer getting shift premiums or underground bonus. But I was Steady Days! No more weekends, no more night shifts. What did I bring to the position? Years of underground experience, an instinct developed over the years, and a long-established acquaintance with workers and supervision in operations.

What did I lack? Computer skills (video games are no substitute for AutoCAD and Excel). I also lacked political tact, something entirely unnecessary in the pragmatic world of field work.

My probationary period began. I shadowed the Ground Control EIT (engineer in training), Ray Stratton, for a while until I received my Toyota license. This was a good thing; it gave me a little time to absorb new skills. Ray had a passion for mining, but less knowledge and experience than he believed he had at the time. I’m not saying he didn’t know what he was talking about; he did, after a fashion; but he approached Ground Control with certain presupposed opinions, not all of which I shared. I learned a lot from Ray before he moved on, just not as much as he might think I did. I did have a few years under my belt, after all. And there was a Standards document to absorb, one written by my boss. Go to the source, as they say. I also paid close attention to what was written on Rehab Prints and Driving Layouts. And what was actually done in the field.

I learned more from Mine Captains than you might imagine. Did you gasp? Some of you might have, but Mine Captains know more than they let on. They were drift miners and drillers once. They were Shift Bosses once, too. They know their own procedures, backwards and forwards, even if they don’t always follow them to the letter. And they know how to get the job done. They also express their opinions on what they think they’re looking at. After a day of travelling around with one, I’d compare what they said to what my boss, Dave Counter, said after browsing through the pictures I took. After a while, I could tell which were more diligent and which were talking though their asses.

And in time, I began to learn a little about AutoCAD. Heather Bartlett taught me a little during her short tenure, my partner nothing at all (everything he said was fraught with mistakes and inaccuracies, if not outright bullshit). When I asked him for help, he said, “I got no time for this shit.” Yes, he was a great help.

Because of that, I began sourcing out short tutorials from the designers, asking each in turn, “How do I do this? How do I do that?” Their answers were sometimes helpful, sometimes too rushed or just performed by them, too quickly for me to absorb. Then one day I asked Kathleen, a Dutch EIT, a question about how to do something.

“Oh my god,” she said, “hasn’t anyone taught you how to work on AutoCAD?”

I shrugged. She suggested we repair to my work station where she could teach me the basics and over the next two hours taught me more than anyone else ever had. She was a good teacher. And she was patient. I’d have floundered for months longer than I had were it not for her having sat with me. I owe my foundation to her more than anyone else.

But what no one could teach me was politics. Ground Control is not just about support and fill; it’s far more than rock type and structure and faults. It’s all those things and more. It has far more to do with people and negotiation and compromise than you can imagine. And it has a great deal to do with cost management and exposure time.

Tact takes more time.

I had no clue how I could be blamed for my boss’s decisions, but I’d realize in time that I’d have to stand toe to toe with Superintendents and weather their wrath whether however the source. I was the face they saw in the field. And I was not on equal footing with them. They couldn’t spit and fume at the head of ground Control, could they? He could talk circles around them and he had the law on his side.
Let me elucidate. Part of my job was to inspect worksites, development headings and such. When I did, I had to audit them and sent the score card by email to a list of people my boss had created. It’s a legal thing; you know, the right to know. I thought the list rather extensive, myself, probably far too extensive, but who was I to argue with my boss about his department and how to run it. Personally, I’d have created a far more exclusive one, just the specifically interested parties, but it wasn’t up to me; it was up to him and if he thought anyone who might have need to visit those areas had a right to know the state of those headings, it was his say so. So, every Tom, Dick and Harry was on that list: engineering personnel, mechanic bosses, electrical bosses, whomever, not just the operations management and development crews. Most of the recipients probably deleted the email without much thought, never having read them. I wouldn’t blame them if they did; most people get more emails than they want or need, with little time to read them.

So, it came as no surprise that the Superintendent of Development was furious with me when I gave a particular development heading a particularly scathing, failing grade. In my mind, and my boss’, it deserved it. In the Superintendent’s mind, it did not, and everyone had read it, even though they probably hadn’t. He vented his anger on me the next time I was face to face with him.

Sadly, I was introducing a ground support representative from another company to him at the time, one who was in town to test a new sort of seismic support. The time and place of that test had been negotiated well in advance and this was that day. The rep was left with his offered hand hanging out in empty space.

“That test,” the Superintendent said, “it’s not going to happen today.” His arms were crossed. He hadn’t even looked at the rep. I could tell he was angry and that anger was directed at me. Any fool could.
“Have you spoken to Dave?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “but that test isn’t going to happen. Not today.”
“Did we get the date wrong?” I asked.
“No,” he said. It was rather obvious that he was pissed and looking for a fight. I had no intention at the time of giving him one.
“I think you need to call Dave and have this discussion with him.” That seemed the best solution in my view; after all, I didn’t have a vested interest in whether the test went off or not. Let Dave deal with it.
“Why did you send that email?” the Superintendent asked, somewhat out of the blue.
“What email?” I was pretty sure I knew which email.
“The audit email.”
“Because I always send out audit reports when they’re completed,” I said. That sounded diplomatic, if a little snarky. He knew why I sent it, of course, so I didn’t understand why he was so livid about that particular one. I’d given less than favourable scores to headings before, after all.
“Why didn’t you come see me, beforehand?” he asked.
“Why would I?” I asked. I never had before and was not obligated to do so. And what would he have done? Asked me not to send it? Order me not to send it? That wasn’t his call.
“I could have explained.”
“Explained what? We both know it fell apart because of structure and stress. I said so in the report.”
His face was getting red. He was in my face. His voice was rising, honing to an edge.
“Then why did you give it a One?” (Audits were rated on a scale of one to five.)
This is where my lack of tact kicked into overdrive. In case you weren’t paying attention, I was angry now too. And I was never in the habit of taking shit from anyone who wasn’t my boss.
“Because I couldn’t give it a zero.”
“You shouldn’t have sent that to the entire Mine,” he said, his voice rising.
“First off,” I said, “You’re not my boss. Dave Counter is and he made up that distribution list. If you have issue with it, you need to have this discussion with him.”
I left just then. There was no point sticking around. Besides, this was not a conversation to have in front of an outsider.
Actually, it wasn’t a conversation I should be having at all.
It was Dave’s. And I wasn’t going to fight his battles for him.
I was learning.

Mining Games, Part 9

No sooner did I begin training to be a supervisor did I notice that all the engineering mine techs teaching me their respective skills had been hired within the year, or two years prior at the earliest. That perked my interest.

I went to speak with Luc Brousseau in Human Resources. “There was a posting for mine techs two years ago,” he said. I hadn’t seen it, I said. Could I bring my diplomas and transcripts in for their review? “Sure,” he said. “At the very least we’ll have them on file.”

Shouldn’t they already have been on file? They were, but I realized that there was no file for “employees with skills to be considered.”

I brought them in, Luc made copies, and before I knew it, Trevor Eagles, the Chief Engineer, was offering me a position. In engineering, steady days, weekends off, seniority intact. I accepted. All I had to do was give notice to my crew that I was leaving. I discovered that my Captain, Ron Maxwell, had a big part in my being accepted. He’d extolled my virtues, his having done so no small thing, apparently.
All I had to do was work off my notice, almost all of it supervising, my first and final stretch going solo. Thank God Kim Hicks was the cross-shift supervisor. He helped me line up my crew and helped me remember how to fill out SIMs, the program that charts payroll and work accomplished.

I set about doing my beat. No white hat yet. I’d yet to pick one up. And there was no need for one now, either.

Midway through the shift, the hoist paged me on the radio.

“What’s up?” I asked. They couldn’t see the skip. Bugs. Gremlins. And they couldn’t raise the guy working on the loading pocket level. I said I’d look into it. I called first, getting Pete first ring. So much for the hoist not being able to raise him.

“Can you take a peek into the shaft,” I asked, “to see if you can see the skips?”

“Sure,” Pete said. Moments passed and he picked the phone back up and said, no, he couldn’t.
Then the hoist paged me again. I thanked Pete and said I’d be right down to sort the problem out myself, and hung up. I called the hoist.

“Pete opened the cage door without calling me,” he said. “We were lucky the cage wasn’t in motion or it would have tripped.”

Shit. There are lots of laws and procedures about shafts and doors to shafts and open shafts and such. Pete should never have done that. He should have called the hoist before doing anything. But Pete was not a cage tender or a hoist man, so he wouldn’t have known them; but Pete did know one simple rule that everyone underground knew: the cage tender is the only person who shall touch the shaft doors.

 Keep thy hands off!

When I asked Pete to look into the shaft to see if he could see the skip, I thought he’d only walk around the shaft, peeking into it at points here and there to see what he could see. He didn’t. He just looked over the door and when he saw that he couldn’t see anything, he decided to open the door to get a better look. He thought that would be okay, he was in Oreflow, after all.

But it wasn’t okay. Laws dictate fall restraint or fall arrest when near an open hole. Laws dictate that “open shaft” need be noted in the log book. And those are only two of the rules and laws.

Now I had to give Pete a talkin’ to.

The hoist was all for giving him a warning slip.

I was less inclined. His was an honest mistake. And I believed that warning slips ought to be reserved for gross misconduct and willful disregard for the rules.

Why? Because I’d received warning slips for stupid things before and that only got me mad. I didn’t learn anything except that sometimes supervision gave warning slips to exercise and feel their power.

Like the time that me and my partner had received one for not doing a post-check on our crusher system conveyor. A post-check? We’d never heard of a post-check before. There were pre-checks, which might as well be considered a “post-check.” But a pre-check is really only a cover your ass check, to make sure you weren’t held responsible for the prior shift’s breakage.

Sean and I had the proverbial nightmare shift. The muck kept hanging up, constantly having to be washed down to keep it running. But too much water invariably migrated to the inner belt, causing it to go out of alignment. When that happened, mids and fines spilled inside, collecting in and around the tail pulley. Too much muck in the tail pully and it jumped the track. We did not notice that it jumped the track. When our cross-shift came on, the first to see the mess called his boss, and his boss and the captain wanted to rush down and take pictures, proof of Sean and my evil-doings. Buddy’s partner was livid when discovering that his partner had “ratted” out on us, saying, “They had the shift from hell trying to keep the muck moving, and you ratted out on them for trying to do their job.” He then worked like the devil to set the tail pulley back on its rails before the bosses arrived.

So, Sean and I were only cited with leaving a mess and not reporting it (hence the post-check BS) and for going up early without permission.

We deserved that last one. We were soaked and chaffing with grit and could not reach our shift boss. So, we went up early without permission.

But we were railroaded by the other made-up charge.

And the corrective discipline backfired. They needed Sean and me to do something to save our supervisor’s ass and we stepped back, stood by, and said “That’s so sad. Ain’t that a shame.” And we worked to rule for a couple months afterwards, too, just for good measure.

So, I didn’t see the need to use a heavy hammer on Pete for an honest error. I took Pete aside and explained what he’d done and why it was wrong, repeating the age-old wisdom of “the shaft door belongs to the cage tender and only he can lay a hand on it.” I had to tell him that I was giving him an informal verbal warning (there’s no such thing, only actual verbal warning notices and warning slips), telling him that if he ever did something like that again that I would have to formally discipline him.
”When you’re a cage tender,” I said, doubting that he ever would be one, “You can open the door to the shaft,” then adding, “but only when you have the cage. When the hoist has the shaft, hands off.”

Pete took it in stride. He even thanked me for taking it easy on him. He shook my hand.

I thought on all the things I’d seen my partners do over the years. Some had only the dimmest view of how to work safely. I thought that were I to have continued supervising, I’d have to deal out one or two actual warning slips from time to time.

I didn’t like that thought of that.

Not one bit.

I’d become The Man. I hated The Man.

Mining Games, Part 8, The Spare Supervisor

What can I say? I didn’t do this for long, only a few months. Then fate dealt a hand, as we say.

John Cayen had asked me to be his spare. He didn’t have one, and we’d been without one for almost a year, necessitating spares from other crews to be temporarily reassigned to our crew whenever our shift boss went off on holidays. It turns out that each of our supervisors had been asking the crew to take up the white hat for some time. Nobody had asked me.

Take that was you will. Lack of confidence? Perceived bad attitude? Maybe. I wouldn’t doubt it, were that true. I probably wouldn’t argue with that, either.

That said, I’d transformed from disgruntled employee with a bad attitude, seething rage, disinterest and a bug up my ass about authority, to go-to, Code 6, lead man. Crusher leader, cage tender, hoist man. I’d definitely come a long way. But I did not have many friends on the crew, either. There weren’t a lot of shared interests. There was a bit of an age gap with those who’d been on the crew prior to my joining and a bit of an age gap with those coming up behind me. Not to sound snobbish, but I’d also been post-secondary educated, most others (none, actually) had not. (You’d be surprised how much even one year in post-secondary opens your mind to other interests). I read, most others on the crew did not, although some were beginning to read some of the magazines I passed on to them, issues of the New Yorker, the Walrus, Harpers and the Atlantic. I found those tattered and dogeared magazines in the strangest places afterwards, belying my earlier statement. Miners do read, not all of them, but most do have something in their lunchboxes to pass the lonely hours they have to endure sometimes, like when guarding a blast: novels, magazines, newspapers (that may date me, but it has been a number of years since I wiled away the hours underground). I’d find those aged magazines in lunchrooms and rock-breaker booths, folded and rolled, their shapes long lost, sometimes with pages missing, the staples that once held them together rusted and broken, or missing altogether. Reading materials can make their rounds underground.

So, anyways, John asked me to spare for him. He enrolled me in Supervisor Common Core and began to take me on his beat from time to time. This meant that I was off the hoist. That saddened me. The hoist was one of the best jobs I ever had. But, upwards and onwards and all that. I spent more time on 2 Cage between those tutorial trips.

I loved 2 Cage. I was busy. There was never a dull moment, always jobs to do, schedules to keep. Hour passed in minutes. I had to keep track of the time, too; always mindful of how much time any given task was to take, and whether I’d be able to do another round trip before one of the scheduled “man” trips were to happen.

Note to self and all aspiring cage tenders: Never miss a “man” trip. Don’t be late, either; the boys are counting on them, and they’re scheduled for those times, too. The white hats demand them to be on time. So, don’t be late; you’ll hear about it! And don’t fall behind on garbage bin trips, either. And don’t skip or do fewer slime trips than need be done, either. And remember that Monday mornings and Thursday mornings are powder days (or were then), and that there’ll be flatbeds waiting to move the explosives off the stations for the powder magazines. Oh yeah, could you get this list of materials to these stations, too, while you’re at it. No yard man? That’s not a problem, is it? Remember not to stray too far from the headframe, lest you miss the cage calls.

I loved it. It was fun. It was fast. The shifts melted away. And I got to see the weather, or more importantly, the sun. Most miners never get to see that.

Then John left and Marcel joined us. Marcel was alright. He wasn’t John, but he was alright. He lacked a certain patience, though. He railed against what he called, “babysitting,” and grew angry when the guys I worked with complained about not getting raises, but also refused to “play ball” when asked to do the jobs asked of them.

Marcel and I were on the beat together one day and on our way to visit J.M.

Marcel was venting on me: “I got to babysit, now,” he said. “I hate having to hold a grown man’s hand.”

“How so?” I asked.

“I hate it when someone bitches about not getting their code when they don’t want to do the work for that code.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Marcel was bitching about J.M., someone who always pulled his weight as far as I could see, but Marcel had a different perspective, I was willing to admit. I decided to wait and see for myself before making up my mind.

I could see the tension between them, straight off.

They got straight to arguing. J.M. wanted to get his Code 5. He did not want to man the cages. He couldn’t see why he couldn’t get the code, when he never had to man the cages, anyways. He had all his crusher licenses, and the crusher leaders never manned the cages. Why did he have to?
Marcel disagreed.
Before long, Marcel and J.M. were roaring, red in the face, their voices growing as hot as their words were.
“Whoa,” I said, stepping between them.
I asked each of them to tell me their story. No interruptions.
J.M. was claustrophobic when wearing the Scott Air Pack, something that had to be checked every shift, something that would have to be worn during stench gas releases. It’s a fire thing. It’s the law. The shaft could presumably fill with smoke. That might kill the cage tender. Not a good thing. Hence the cage tender having to be licensed on it and having to wear it. He could potentially have to wear it for hours. That freaked J.M. out.

I cut a deal with J.M. Did the job bother him? No. Only wearing the mask? Yes. Did he feel terror upon first putting it on? No. After a minute? Yes. I asked him if he would put it on every day, not attached to the tank, a couple times a day, each time keeping it on for 10 seconds more than the last time. He looked dubious but agreed. I also told him that he had to do this for a month straight, and not just a week and then we’d consider giving him his code.

I looked at Marcel. “Good?” I asked.

“Good,” he said.

I cut my first deal. I could see what Marcel meant about handholding and babysitting. I just didn’t know that I’d be doing it with him and not J.M.

Mining Games, Part 7

No sooner had I begun to get a good feel for 2 Hoist, I was shuffled to 4 Hoist. It was a bit of a shock. It was a double drum, double clutch, a completely different animal from a friction hoist. And where 2 Hoist sits directly atop the shaft, the hoistroom adjacent to it, 4 Hoist is far removed, the hoistroom situated in the administration building. This is not to say that the isn’t a hoistroom at the hoist and sheave like every other hoist, there is; but it’s only there for emergencies, never actually used. 3 Hoist was much the same. Its hoistroom was atop 2 Shaft, seated next to 2 Shaft’s.

Having the hoistroom removed from the shaft means that the hoist man does not feel the hoist. When operating 2 Hoist, you feel it. It’s right there. You feel the clutch engage. You hear it. The volume mounts, the floor shutters and vibrates, the headframe sways ever so slightly. It’s like driving a car; you get instant feedback for everything you do. Not so 3 Hoist, when it was atop 2 Shaft, not so when it was moved to the administration building when they were commissioning 4 Hoist to sit beside it. You couldn’t feel what was happening with 3 or 4 Hoist. You had to rely on cameras and electronic readouts. You had to trust your instruments. It could be eerily silent in there. Okay, it’s not silent in there. There’s a perpetual hum of electronics that slips into a state of white noise, and there are bells and buzzings and hoist signals, but they all fade into the background. And then there are the moments when all is quiet. The bells cease. The chirps and rings and buzzings cease. And everything is quiet. The silence is loud in comparison.

If only they all worked. 2 Hoist worked. 3 Hoist worked. 4 Hoist did not. It was new. It had bugs. Many of the sensors were installed wrong. The skips would get lost in the shaft. You could see them on camera, and watch them inch past the loading pockets, but the loading pockets would not detect the presence of the skips, so the hoist would send an alert, and we’d have to try to place them while in manual. Sometimes it worked straight off, sometimes it took twenty or thirty tries before the loading pocket magnets found the skip magnets.

And the main cage would trip when leaving certain stations, requiring hoist overrides. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

And I was training on it. And I had only been given two short weeks to learn it. Keep in mind that it can take some people months to learn a new hoist. I’d only just been licensed on 2 Hoist, a friction hoist, a simple beast compared to the double drum. I did not have to rebalance when skipping from different horizons, I didn’t have to worry about rope stretch.

What I did have to worry about was that the hoist was full of bugs. Its hard enough to learn when everything works perfectly, its harder still to learn it when you have to separate what the rules and laws were when it was working fine and what to do when it wasn’t (and those fixes were not covered in the rules, not written in the procedures, sometimes not entirely legal, either), and keep them separate so as not to be confused when writing the test.

Closing in on the date I was to be handed off to the trainer for licensing, I thought I was going to have a stroke. I was on night shift, trying to memorize the double drum section of the Green Book, monitoring the skips that were “tripping on magnets,” and having to rescue the cage tender every time he tripped leaving the levels the cage always tripped on, bouncing between the hoist stations, all the while listening for his calls on the radio between alarms. It was distracting. It was harrowing. It was exhausting. More than once, Joe had to roll his chair over from 3 Hoist to assist me on one station or another.

Then, my exhausted mind lifted. It opened up. It felt like someone poured cool water over my mind. I was dizzy. I was on the tip of vertigo. I literally thought I was having a stroke. Joe told me to step back from the hoist for a while and relax. Thank god 3 Shaft worked like a charm, with never a hiccup, otherwise we’d never have been able to keep things going.

Then Joe handed me off to Marc and within the week I wrote my second test in so many months and I was expected to run that nightmare, hiccups and trips and all. But by then I was accustomed to it. I’d seen just about every fuck-up it could dish out, and I’d weathered them all. By-passes and moments of manual manipulation had become old hat. The millwrights and electricians continued to crawl over the hoist and the stations and the loading pockets and were beginning to root out the mistakes made by the shaft sinkers, righting the misaligned magnets, realigning the wrongly installed sensors, and little by little, it began to do what it was supposed to do.

And just when it came to pass that I’d be able to put my feet up and let Otto do the work (our nickname for Automatic…Auto…Otto…get it?), my temporary full time shifter, John Cayen (we went through a lot of shift bosses on our crew—Sly Beaupre, Joe Joliet, Doug Maki, Craig Watson, Marc ?, John Cayen, and then very soon we’d have Marcel Ouimette) asked me if I’d like to became the Spare Shift Boss for the crew.

I didn’t think on it that long, having made up my mind in an instant, but I did ask, “Why me?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, but, I’ve been working my way down the seniority list, asking everyone in turn, and so far, everyone has turned me down. Nobody is interested. You’re last on the list.”

“That’s quite a vote of confidence in my qualifications,” I joked.

John laughed. “Actually, I think you’d be good at it,” he said, “but I had go down the seniority list. Do you want it?”

Joe sat looking on, his gaze bouncing between John and me.

“Sure,” I said.

After John left, Joe asked me, “Why do you want to do that? You just passed all your hoists.”

“Think about it,” I said. “How many shifters have we had over the last few years. Some were good, some not so good. John’s one of the good ones, but he’s only temporary. Think about it; who, or what will we get next.”

So, I was about be become a spare supervisor.

Mining Games, Part 6, The Hoist

Upwards and onwards. I was asked if I wanted to train on the hoist. I accepted. Why not? Clean air. Quiet rooms. An end to toil.

But we were short on hoist men, so I was fast tracked. It usually takes six months to train someone on the hoist. I was given two. Not a problem, you’d think if you’ve ever seen a hoist room. There are buttons and monitors and a single gear stick that can be manipulated either up or down. Simple. Not so. There are laws, lots of them, a book of them, and not a short book by any means, and you have to know them all. There are daily safeties and break checks to perform and be logged. There are weeklies. There are monthlies. There are annuals. And you have to know them all.

There are bell calls to memorize: call signals for levels, and the far more important universal shaft signals to remember:
1 bell—stop
1 bell—raise cage
1-2 bells—chair cage
2 bells—lower cage
3 bells—cage in motion
3-3-1—raise cage slowly
3-3-2—lower cage slowly
4 bells—blasting
5 bells—release cage to hoist
9 bells—emergency

If the signals are given from the counterweight side, they mean the same, but the motion is reverse for the hoist man.

And there is a fine touch on that stick that needs mastering. Have you ever driven stick and had to inch uphill? Did the car roll back a little before the clutch engaged? That better never happen when operating the hoist. You could kill someone. Oh, by the way, almost every time that hoist is in motion, there are lives at stake. There may be someone right under it on a platform. Someone’s fingers or arms may be in jeopardy. And twice a shift, there are only about a hundred lives resting on your fingertips. I’ve known competent guys crack under the strain while training and step away, saying they can’t do the job.

Oh, and by the way, there are different types of hoists, too. There are bucket hoists (sinking hoists); friction hoists; double drum, double clutch hoists. Double clutch requires rebalancing when skipping from different horizons to take the stretch out of the ropes. Too much information? Too bad. Learn it or lose it. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

And I had two months to master 2 Hoist. I had to read the Green Book (the Ontario Mining Act) daily, memorizing all those laws. And I had to develop a feel for that stick, first with the skips, then the auxiliary cage, then the main cage. My palms were sweaty the first time I lowered that double deck cage into the depths of the shaft, over one hundred souls aboard. They were my charge. They were my responsibility. They were my most precious cargo. They were my friends.

I had to give them a smooth ride. Engage that stick too fast and they’d drop like a stone, weightless for a moment, their stomachs lurching in their guts. Slow them too quickly and they’d weigh a ton, each of them, their knees pressing into their chins. Stop too quickly and the cage would bob up and down like a yo-yo, tossing them around like rag dolls clutching at each other for purchase and balance.

And I’d hear about it too. My cage tender would call me up with a “What the FUCK!” And rightly so.
But once you got a feel for it, it was a piece of cake. I’d watch them herd in on the main cage monitor. I’d watch the top deck cage door pulled down like the guillotine it was. I’d see and hear the shaft signals rung. 3-3-1. I repeated it back. I’d engage the hoist, raising it, watching that sickening height between the decks drift by as the bottom deck rose up to the deck floor, all those guys too close to its open hole, all the while. I’d hear the expected signal, ONE bell, as the magnet level indicator light snapped on, its red eye hot and brilliant on my console. The bottom deck guillotine door would crash silently open, and the last of my charges would flow into the cage. All the boys in, the door would crash down, the cage tender’s arm would reach out, and he’d signal for 4600. I’d repeat them, he’d signal TWO bells, and I’d repeat them. I’d wait two seconds for his arm to retreat back behind the door and safety, and then I’d engage the stick, ever so gently at first, then with a logarithmically heavier hand as it gained ever greater speed, until it topped out at 300 feet per minute, the preprogrammed max speed for the main cage, nothing as fast as the 3000 feet per minute the skips travelled at. That would be the last I’d see him and it until the cage rose to surface again. Down in the depths, there were no cameras. There were bells. The same bells cage and hoist used for as long as there were cages and hoists.

I kept a watchful eye on the depth meter, slowing the decent ever so slightly between 4400 and 4600 (there was no 4500, there were no odd numbered shaft stations, just 800, 1200, 1600, 2000, etc., 4000, 4200, and such to 5000), inching the final feet until I heard the single bell for me to stop the cage, just as my level light indicated that the cage had reached the level magnet, my hand on the stick throughout. It had better be; it’s the law. Don’t talk to me while the cage is in motion and my hand is on the stick. You better not. It’s the law. There’s a sign in the hoist room that reminds you not to, too.

Distract me and I might miss the level. Slow them too fast, stop them too quickly and they’d bounce and I’d hear, “What the fuck!” Give them a perfect ride and I’d never hear anything of it.

Why would I? It might be my job to give them the prefect ride, but the cage tender was the important one, the most important person in the Mine, as far as the boys were concerned. Everyone knew the cage tender. Everyone said “hi” to him at the mall, on the street, wherever they met him, baffling him, because he’d likely recognize one in ten of the well-wishers.

“Who’s that?” his wife would ask.

“No clue,” he’d say.

I know. I was that cage tender, once.

Once I was in the hoist, I was a ghost, a spirit up on high who everyone knew existed, but nobody ever saw, a mythical being, The Hoist Man.