The Speares

Living the life in Gravenhurst



Springhill


Previously Springhill Mines



We're off to Springhill Mines, the iconic hometown of Anne Murray. Like so many interesting places it doesn't have its own airport, so we'll have to land a little further on. But today's story is not about airports, and it's not about Anne Murray. It's about coal.

For some, since it is found underground, coal contains the malign spirits of the dead. This is easily proven. If you cook game over a fire made of coal it will acquire a strong and foul taste. No one would ever use such a fire inside their dwellings; in the far past many entire families died in their sleep with no explanation other than the black rocks in their fire. For this reason there is a strong taboo against burning the black rock and so it is mainly used to make a black pigment, or it can be carved into animals, perhaps in the shape of the spirits trapped within.


For others, coal is a valuable resource which literally fueled the industrial revolution. It is also evidence of a vast mat of floating vegetation on the nearly global ocean that existed prior to and during the Genesis flood, some 4,300 years ago. When this vast mat of vegetation, mixed with some clays, was buried, it turned into the coal we know today.


Still others hold that the coalification of plant materials started as long as 350 million years ago, during the Carboniferous (coal bearing) period, and continues to this day. In their minds, some of today's peat will eventually turn into coal, but not for many, many years.

Whichever view is correct, it is certainly true that there are many grades of coal. The poorest form, peat, is simply organic material that has been denied its chance to compost by the removal of oxygen, usually from being submerged in water and then covered with sediment. While many cultures use peat as a source of heat, it is poorly suited to that use if there is an alternative. Its flame is long and smoky.


If peat has been buried sufficiently deep for a sufficiently long time, it will compact into lignite. Lignite is dark brown in colour and still contains identifiable plant matter. It crumbles easily and cannot be shipped. Also it burns poorly, though much better than peat.

Over time, if lignite has been buried deeply enough to experience greater pressures, it will compress even more into bituminous, or soft, coal. This is a fairly common coal which can be found at reasonable depths, or even at the surface where erosion has cut into a seam.

But the very best coal is anthracite. This is bituminous coal that has been subjected to the intense pressures and heat to be found very deep in the earth.
It is so compact that it is shiny, and may be as much as 97% carbon. It is somewhat rare, owing to the depths at which it is found. And that makes it valuable. And that makes miners dig deep. The number 2 mine shaft in Springhill, Nova Scotia, for instance, is 14,300 feet long, descending over 4,000 feet into the earth. Where the anthracite is.



On the evening of October 23rd, 1958, at 7:00 P.M., there was a bump in number 2. A bump is an underground tremor, caused when the earth attempts to move around and fill in the holes left by mining.
Oddly, they only occur in Springhill and certain parts of Kentucky, due to the unique layers of water, coal and mountains to be found in these areas. But in the Springhill Mine, at least, they were an entirely common occurrence, something like a new house settling on its foundations. The seven o'clock bump was ignored; it wasn't as if a bump was anything serious, after all. But the mines had been in operation for almost ninety years on that October evening; serious things had happened there before. There were ghosts in its past.


When Europeans first started settling on the Cobequid Mountains in Cumberland County they found that coal was so common you could literally dig it up in your own backyard. There were holes everywhere, and more than one driveway disappeared overnight when a long forgotten and shallow mine collapsed under it. But it wasn't until 1870, when the railway came, that the commercial mining of coal became a viable proposition. That proved to be so successful that the little town of Springhill Mines was incorporated in 1889, and two years later, the Cumberland Coal and Railway Company was pulling anthracite from their collieries a little bit outside town.


The mine had a connecting tunnel between the Number 1 and 2 collieries at the 1,300 foot level. And it was covered in coal dust, an unavoidable by-product of coal mining operations. Coal dust is highly flammable; explosive in fact. All it needs is a careless spark or flame, and a good shake to get it airborne. Luckily, coal dust, by its very nature, settles onto the floor where it can't get air, and great pains would be taken to keep the candles, oil lamps and carbide lamps essential to the work of mining well away from this dust layer. But the problem is that coal mines are susceptible to firedamp; a mixture of methane and other gases which are highly flammable and do not settle to the floor. A firedamp explosion will create a shockwave that can easily create and ignite a cloud of coal dust.
This may or may not have been the cause, which was never determined. But the fact is that the connecting tunnel blew up at about 12:30 P.M. on Saturday, February 21st, 1891, killing 125 miners, some as young as ten years old.


Over the years, more collieries were dug, all of them deep. On November 1st, 1956, a mine train was hauling coal up from the depths of Number 4 colliery, on a track with a pitch of as much as 25 degrees, which is 2 degrees steeper than the steepest road in Canada. The floor was covered with coal dust, as all floors were. But then two things happened: a particularly heavy flow of ventilation air burst into the shaft, causing the coal dust to swirl around. And then, for whatever reason, several cars broke loose from the main train and careened down the steep tracks. They were stopped at the 5,500 foot level when they derailed and slammed into a power line.


The resulting explosion was somewhat modest at depths, but as it roared up the shaft and found fresher air it turned into a huge blast, completely levelling everything at ground level, including five workers at the pit head. Underground, 127 miners were trapped at the 6,100 foot level. 88 were rescued by Drägermen, rescue miners wearing breathing equipment, as well as a number of barefaced miners, with no equipment. Rescue efforts then had to be abandoned, because the shaft was on fire. The Number 4 and 2 collieries were sealed to put out the flames, and in January of 1957 teams could reach the bodies of the remaining 39 miners, which had been moldering in the heat for over two months. There were special airtight aluminum coffins for the purpose.

So these events would have been what the miners would have considered to be serious, on the evening of October 23rd, 1958, at 7:00 P.M, when there was a minor bump in the Number 2 shaft of the Springhill mine, as they worked at the 14,300 foot level, digging coal. They would have been inordinately careful about coal dust. But they wouldn't have been worrying about bumps.

Ten men had in fact died in Number 2 over the years due to bumps; but mining was inherently dangerous, so the loss of a miner here and there would have been expected. The mining technique originally used to extract coal was referred to as "room and pillar", or "roof and pillar", whereby a coal seam was excavated to make a giant chamber, or room, but leaving pillars of coal every few meters to support the roof. This technique was susceptible to a sort of chain reaction bump, where an entire room could collapse, often with miners in it. So the engineers went to the "long wall retreating" technique, in which a road tunnel was created to the end of the seam, and then the entire seam was mined, perhaps 4 km in length and 400 meters across, backwards. As the bubble of safety in which the miners worked retreated, the empty chamber that was no longer required would collapse in stages, with no one in it, and relieve the pressure that could have built up and resulted in a larger bump. A much safer procedure that completely did away with dangerous bumps. Unless, of course, the roof fails to collapse in stages for some reason.


On October 23rd, 1958, at 8:06, about an hour after the first bump in the number 2 shaft at the Springhill Mine, there was a second, much larger one. This bump was due to a huge section of roof in the current seam collapsing all at once. The three shockwaves generated by this event were felt on the surface for miles in every direction. No one had to call for rescue teams. They showed up immediately and entered the Number 2 colliery looking for survivors.

At the 13,400 foot level one of the rescue teams encountered the first wave of survivors limping to the surface. 400 feet later the ceiling was collapsed and what tunnels as there were contained lethal and explosive gas. Nonetheless, the Drägers continued working, and by 4:00 A.M there were 75 survivors on the surface.

Teams of miners from all over joined the rescue effort, and on the morning of October 29th, contact was established with 12 miners at the other end of a 160 foot section of collapsed roof. A tunnel was dug and they were rescued a day later. A few days after that, another group was found alive. There were no more survivors. 174 miners went to work on the evening of 23 October, 1958; 99 went home.

Today, the Springhill mines are full of water. And that water is always a perfect 18 degrees Celsius. Perfect for heating your buildings in the winter and cooling them in the summer. And perfect for burying the ghosts of the past.