www.nanaimobulletin.com
TUESDAY, MAY 1, 2012
VOL. 24, NO. 1
125 YEARS LATER: City shaken by explosion that remains Canada’s second-worst industrial accident
Mine blast rocked Nanaimo
T
BY TOBY GORMAN I THE NEWS BULLETIN
asant spring 887 in ered by two in quick sucthe throaty whistle at the ne. massive s below sea nown as n the city’s he result harge that ignited a pocket of coal bed gas released from a previous charge just minutes before. That pocket of gas served as the ignition to a massive amount of coal dust that was also released from the first charge. The second blast was coal dust igniting on other slopes as the explosion rocketed through the underground shafts for almost a kilometre, swallowing coal dust as it went, and the pressure blew burning timbers and rock out adjacent hoisting and venting shafts above ground. The wooden head frame, built high above the pit, caught fire and burned to the ground. It took seconds for men on the surface to realize the massive mine had caught fire, and at 5:55 p.m., the eerie wail of the mine’s steam whistle echoed through the community, sounding the alert to families just sitting down to dinner. At the time of the explosion, 156 men were working in the massive network of underground slopes. The 149 men who didn’t die directly from the fire or shockwave slowly succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning, some lasting as long as several hours, writing messages in the floor dust with their shovels before dying. One victim, John Stevens,
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Morden Mine restoration plan pitched to province BY CHRIS HAMLYN THE NEWS BULLETIN
TOBY GORMAN/THE NEWS BULLETIN
Nanaimo Museum curator David Hill-Turner, and research assistant Danijela Razman, document the grave site of James Lyons, 44, and his son, Michael Lyons, 16, at the cemetery at St. Peter’s Catholic Church Friday. Both Lyons were killed in the No. 1 Esplanade Mine disaster on May 3, 1887.
scratched out ‘13 hours after explosion, in deepest misery’ in white chalk. Samuel Myers, who organized Nanaimo’s first union – the Calvin Ewing Local Assembly 3017 of the Knights of Labour – was also among the dead. Fifty-three of the dead were Chinese labourers, many of whose names were unknown because Chinese workers weren’t employed directly by the mine, but outsourced from subcontractors who didn’t keep records. All workers in the mine were referred to by a number
when they were in the pits. Only seven men, all of them working in the mine’s engine room, escaped the inferno safely. One survivor, Jules Michael, later recalled, “I heard a sound like a heavy fall of rock ... and then I felt the wind coming from it up the slope. I said ‘My God! Boys! What is coming on us now?’” One rescuer, Samuel Hudson, was later overcome by afterdamp and died from its effects while looking for the bodies of his colleagues. Men fought the fire back from
the engine room in an effort to save the pumps that fed the shafts with 75,000 cubic feet of fresh air per minute in hopes some men would be found alive. After two weeks, the underground fire was finally extinguished, but search parties had given up any hope of finding survivors. It took until July before the last of the bodies could be recovered, though seven men remained unrecovered. The diagonal slope was flooded that summer and never used again. ◆ See ‘TRAGIC’ /7
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If the B.C. government wants to save the key components to Morden Colliery Provincial Historic Park, it has a short window of opportunity. That’s one message a Friends of Morden Mine Society delegation is pitching to Terry Lake, environment minister, Monday (May 7) in Victoria. Another is that government does not have to do it alone. The delegation, including society directors Eric Ricker, John Knappett and John Hofman, and Parksville-Qualicum Liberal MLA Ron Cantelon, hope to convince Lake of the urgency to repair Morden’s headframe and tipple, and discuss future development of the park. Acquired as a park in 1972, the Morden site features one of only two remaining coal mining headframes and tipples in North America. The other is in Muddy, Ill. Site preparation of the Morden Mine began 100 years ago and construction of the headframe started in 1913. “They decided to go with, for the times, a fancy way of building the headframe,” said Ricker. “The shaft at Morden was 600 feet, the deepest on Vancouver Island. That’s probably another reason they took the trouble to build such a sturdy rig to run the elevators.” After falling into a state of disrepair following the collapse of the coal mining industry, the property became a park thanks to the efforts of George Wilkinson, whose father was the inspector of mines in that area. ◆ See ‘PRESERVATION’ /6