CANADA: Underground Runaway

In the sooty town of Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia there was cheer one morning last week. The Princess Colliery, owned by Dominion Steel & Coal Corp. Ltd., had announced that it was putting on extra shifts so that the miners could earn something for Christmas. Shops broke out with holiday decorations and Sydney Mines was festive. But the cheer lasted only a day.

The Princess mine, one of the oldest in the Cape Breton area, was opened in 1867. So many tons have been gouged from its insides that the main shaft now runs nearly two miles out under the salty waters of Sydney Harbor, more than 1,000 feet below the surface. In the early morning, as a clammy fog began to blow off the harbor, grizzled old colliers and young shavers, eager to put pick to coal again, tramped to the mine mouth. There they stepped aboard the “cage,” a rickety elevator which dropped them 700 feet to the mine-deep, starting point of the sloping shaft which runs out under the sea. To reach their diggings the miners boarded a “rake,” a string of small narrow, flat cars fitted with wooden benches, which are let down the ten-degree slope by a wrist-thick steel cable.

The first 200 miners to reach the mine-deep were lowered to the end of the shaft and the cars were reeled back to the starting point. Some 250 more miners scrambled on the 26 little cars and started down the slope. Suddenly there came a cannon-like crack—the cable had snapped off about 1,000 feet behind the last car. “She’s running away!” shouted one collier.

Those who sensed quickly what had happened rolled off the cars. Frozen to their seats with shock and fear, the others held on until it was too late. Faster, faster, faster rolled the rake, rocking crazily as it gathered speed. Panic-stricken miners flung themselves over the side. Some were bounced off the bedrock walls, hurled under the wheels of the rear cars as they whizzed past. A few miners grabbed at a heavy, covered power line which ran along the roof of the low shaft and hung on, knees pulled high to clear the rows of seats, until the rake hurtled by into the blackness. Crazed with fear, men forgot the first rule of the rake-rider and jumped to their feet. They were decapitated by the jagged hunks of coal sticking out of the shaft roof. Halfway down the shaft the whole rig left the tracks and piled up with a crash heard at the mine mouth a mile away.

At the pit head the company siren was already wailing. Before long hundreds of miners’ wives and children, thankful for the prospect of a Christmas pay check an hour before, stood frozen-faced at the mine entrance. Toll: 21 dead, 32 critically injured, not one of the 250 unhurt. It was the worst mine disaster in Nova Scotia since 1918. In Sydney Mines some shop-keepers took down the Christmas decorations from their windows.