Working in the Mines - Summers 1948/49/50

Chapter III At Work in the Mines

  

  


Murray Mine, Sudbury(left) and bunkhouse by the mineshaft, Noranda (right)

What's it like in a mine? 

The mines I worked in (Murray Mine in Sudbury and Noranda Mine) are called drift mines. Think of a high rise office building with many floors with corridors leading off from the elevator and leading to rooms where people work, In a mine its the same but the elevator takes you down instead of up and when you get to your level the drifts (corridors/tunnels) lead to the places where the men work. The mines I worked in were much bigger than any office building. I recall working over a kilometre and a half down in the Murray mine (that's a depth equal to three times the height of the CN tower) and the network of tunnels could go on for miles so you sometimes took a train to the cave where you work. For your interest the deepest mines in Canada take men down over two kilometres and the deepest is in South Africa at just under four kilometres.  

The minerals in these mines included mainly nickel and copper but with small amounts of gold, platinum and other precious metals. When you shone your lamp on the walls you could vividly see the colourful veins of these minerals and chunks lying on the ground. It was referred to as "fools gold" because the chunks looked just like gold nuggets. We would encourage newcomers with visions of great wealth to fill their lunch bucket with them and some did.  In reality it is just a pyrite mineral and worthless before being melted down in the furnaces of the company's smelter. 

Here is a picture of me black and sweaty after a day's work.

As a place to work mines are dark, dirty, and dangerous and the farther down you go the hotter, more humid and unhealthy the air gets. Years ago miners took canaries in cages with them because if there wasn't enough oxygen in the air the canaries would be the first to die and the miners had time to leave, Its always night down there and if your lamp goes out its just black; there is no moon to guide you. And when you are deep in the mine your sweat soaks you from the Caribbean temperatures. I drank at least three litres of water a day and took salt tablets to avoid dehydration. As for danger the wall and part of the loose rock ceiling in my work area collapsed one day and luckily we were working on the other side of the cave or I would have been crushed or killed. Two young miner a few days later stepped to the side of the drift as a train approached and fell down an ore pass (a hole where the ore is dumped before being carried to the surface). Every seasoned miner can tell you stories about friends who had died or severely injured in terrible accidents such as being,trapped in a cave in, suffocated in an airless pocket. or having a wall collapse on them. Also many miners had their health destroyed and their lives shortened by silicosis, a terrible lung disease caused by breathing in the rock dust in the air. 

The Big Hole:I could read blueprints so I was selected over more seasoned miners to work in a large cavern where the ore was delivered by train to be dropped down a hole that went to the bottom of the mine. A big crushing station  was at the bottom where the ore was broken up into smaller pieces before being raised to the surface. This hole was at the 2200 foot level and dropped to the crushing station another 1600 feet (or about the height of the CN tower). In other words I was fastened to safety harness and had to scramble part way down the hole to feed feeding drilling rods and bits and later dynamite to the men working the drills to widen the hole. Once I slipped and dropped a drill rod down the hole - just imagine the clanging noise that sounded just like a church bell as it gradually faded in the distance down the great distance to the bottom of that hole.  I am terrified of heights but because it was so black I didn't have any fear of falling. At lunch time we would toss rocks down the hole just to listen to that sound fading in the distance.

Music: It was a great cavern and I got into the habit of bringing my chromatic harmonica with me to play at lunch time as we sat there with our lunch buckets. the roar of the drills had stopped and there was a silence only broken by the constant dripping of underground water.  It was like playing in a cathedral and the sound reverberating off those walls made the harmonica sound like a pipe organ.  I remember playing songs like "Peg O of my Heart, Blue Moon, Stardust and my terrible versions of parts of the William Tell Overture and Rhapsody in Blue" The men sure liked it and soon asked me to play some of their favourite sing-a-long songs, so we all got into singing as well.

 

The Changing Room: When you arrive at the mine to start your shift you first enter a changing room where you take off all your clothes and then put on your work clothes that you take down from a hook where they have been hanging from your last shift to dry out the sweat.They are stiff like boards from the salt in your sweat. Once a week you took them home to a laundromat to wash for the following week.That clothing included long underwear, jeans, socks and a long work shirt to keep you body covered. From your locker you took out your special steel-toed boots, glasses, gloves and a metal helmet. On the way out to the lift a man handed you a battery to fasten to your belt which had a wire leading to a lamp fixed onto your helmet.

From the changing room you enter a steel cage which is like a big elevator - along with about 20 other men. It can be a long way down. The lowest level I worked at was 4500 feet down – that’s like three time the height of the CN Tower in Toronto. The farther down you go the hotter it gets and even if it is sub zero on the surface it can be like a hot day on a Caribbean beach at the lowest level. 

At the end of the day you returned covered in dust mixed with oil from the pneumatic drills.Your exposed parts of your body, like your face and neck, are black. It was everything in reverse in the changing room including taking a big communal shower where you had to scrub every part of your body before changing back into your street clothes. Some men didn.t shower and just washed their hands and face before going home. they had their shower once a week on Saturday night. I wonder how their wives and kids felt about that?

The Main Work that I did in the Mine

Before talking about my main work in the mine here is a picture of the Swedish inventor, Alfred Nobel who in 1846 invented dynamite and blasting caps. Many years later he made it into a gelatinous substance that looks just like Silly Putty. Those inventions made modern mining methods possible. The Nobel Prize was named after him.

Most of my time in both the Murray Mine and Noranda Mine was spent in a cave that you climbed up to on ladders from the tunnel below. Two men worked in the cave, a certified miner and his apprentice helper. I was the helper with a lot to learn. The equipment we used in the cave included:

• a large pneumatic drill that we lifted in place on a platform facing the wall we intended to drill in,
• A smaller plugger drill for breaking up some bigger rocks left after the big blast. 
• a pneumatic slusher machine that was used to drag the broken rocks after the blast from the wall to a hole that descended out of the cave
• long crow bars to pry away loose rocks from the walls and ceiling before starting work each shift
• shovels and sledgehammers to clean up after the work done by the equipment,
• and dynamite and blasting caps and fuses when we were ready for them. 

The cycle of work basically involved first entering and inspecting the cave to see it was safe and prying off any loose rock, then deciding where to drill the holes in the wall, usually about 12 of them each about 3 or more metres feet deep, then when the holes were drilled loading them with dynamite sticks and a blasting cap with wires going to a detonator and then going off shift. At midnight all the dynamite was exploded in the mine when the miners had gone home. The houses would shake in town and you would hear a muffled boom. When you returned to your cave you cautiously entered to inspect the results of the blast and after scaling the cave to make it safe again you used the slushing machine, pluggers and shovels to clear out the loose rock. Sometime we had to place some dynamite again on a big rock in the pile of rubble, set a fuse to it and go down to the tunnel to wait for the blast and the air to clear. 

Nine hours a day and a six day week, it was hard backbreaking manual work. Their were few miners that were able to keep working after age 55. I remember an older muscular miner I worked with who complained that I was to skinny to work along with him. For the first two or three days he was right about that, but being young I quickly picked up speed and within a week I was telling him to get off his ass when he wanted to rest. He was a nice man and we got along very well after that.

Attempts to answer questions asked by readers: 

• Wages - I recall it was about $1,13/hour for a 48 hour week. Certified miners earned about $1.23/hour which wasn't much more but they could earn an additional bonus for exceeding production quotas. It was enough to rent a place and support a small family. 
• Lunchroom - Just a cave on each level with a few benches and some water available.You were expected to pack your own lunch bucket.  Many men ate at their workplace.
• Toilets - You generally peed near where you worked or donated to the channel of acid water flowing by in the drift(tunnel). I don't remember much about the toilets but they were probably dry odorless chemical toilets commonly used in mines