One miner, thirty-nine-year-old Thomas Lake, was known to have died of lung cancer in 1949. Augustus Pike, who was only twenty-seven, may well have died of cancer in 1946. Patrick Rennie, who died in 1951, was believed to have been suffering from stomach cancer. Two more lung cancer cases were confirmed in 1952.7 In 1953, the number of confirmed lung cancer cases doubled, to four. In 1954, the year Dr. Walsh took charge of the new hospital, there were two more cases.
In July 1955, Michael Quirke, who as a young man gave up his job on a deep-sea diving tender to work at Black Duck mine, was told he had lung cancer. He had been working underground for twenty-two years. He died two months later, in September, at the age of fifty-one. He was one of two lung cancer deaths officially recorded that year. The other was Robert Pike, who had worked underground for seventeen years and was only thirty-six when he died. New cases continued to appear at the rate of two or three a year.
An autopsy on one of the miners who had died in 1953 revealed that he had tuberculosis aggravated by silicosis (or vice versa), and that he had developed lung cancer that proved fatal. The provincial workers’ compensation board dismissed a claim on grounds that the cancer couldn’t have been caused by conditions in the workplace. Lung cancer at the time was usually attributed to smoking or radiation in mines producing uranium. Fluorspar was definitely not radioactive.
But by 1956, Dr. Walsh realized that no matter where the cancer originated, it was a serious problem. There had been six deaths from the disease in the two years since his arrival. It was a small town. That was a lot. All the victims had worked as miners. They had also all been smokers, and the world was waking up to the link between tobacco and cancer. But six deaths in two years? In a place the size of St. Lawrence?
Everybody smoked in those days, and there was lung cancer everywhere. The incidence of lung cancer in Canada in 1931 was 3 cases per 100,000 people. By 1961, it had risen eightfold—to 24.6 per 100,000. But even in the context of that shocking trend, there was something tragically unusual about St. Lawrence.
Maybe it was time to move on from the discussions about dust and silicosis. Maybe it was time for a broader epidemiological investigation.
BY 1958, another federal official was on the scene. His name was Dr. A.J. deVilliers, and he was another expert in the field of workplace health and safety. Official interest was now acute. But it was still too soon for action. The situation in St. Lawrence called for new studies, including an expanded air-quality analysis with more precise measurements, epidemiological and clinical investigations, laboratory studies.
St. Lawrence was a puzzle. It was a perplexing challenge for scientists and doctors. Politicians and public servants were waiting nervously on the sidelines. Nobody wanted this thing to turn out to be what it was beginning to look like. A scandal. No one wanted to be in the spotlight if or when the search for answers moved from causes to responsibility.
Mine managers offered reassurance by minimizing what was happening, attributing illness to causes over which they had no control, blaming agitators for cultivating controversy.
Inside the puzzle, men were withering and dying. Families were growing frantic.
Dr. deVilliers had first visited St. Lawrence as part of an earlier Windish dust survey. He’d met Dr. Walsh, who told him then about the unusual trend of cancer deaths among miners. Now he was back, and one of his main objectives was to find out what was causing all the cancer. Might there be something in the dust? Radiation, perhaps? The worst of the dust came from the granite in which the fluorspar was embedded. Perhaps there should be a closer look at the composition of the surrounding rock.
Like Jack Windish, Dr. deVilliers was facing one practical problem—his investigations would, for the most part, be limited to the Alcan operation, Newfluor’s Director mine. As of June 1957, most of Iron Springs was flooded. Blue Beach was a pile of rubble. Black Duck, where many of the sick miners had started out, had been abandoned many years earlier—in late 1941.
One of the first people Dr. deVilliers informed of the worrisome lung cancer problem in St. Lawrence was Dr. Frank Brent, Alcan’s chief medical officer. Brent was shocked, and in late October 1957, he visited St. Lawrence to personally evaluate the situation. A few months later, in mid-February 1958, he briefed Alcan’s head office in a detailed account of what he saw as a potential crisis. It looked bad, he reported, but all the observational and anecdotal information available had to be corroborated now that Alcan was exposed.8 There would have to be statistical analyses of mortality figures, more intensive dust measurement, animal tests on carcinogenicity and more precise analyses of air quality for evidence of radioactivity. Alcan’s managers weren’t about to jump to conclusions that might have incriminated them while Walter Seibert and his corporation sat darkly on the sidelines.
IT WAS genuinely mysterious. There was nothing about fluorspar that might explain a link to lung cancer. And yet miners were dying in unusual numbers from the disease. A comparison with similar communities in Newfoundland revealed that the incidence of death from lung cancer in St. Lawrence was twenty-nine times what was expected in a community that size.9
Like federal officials in the early fifties when Dr. Pepper called for a study of dust, Alcan managers at first resisted Dr. Brent’s suggestion that there should be measurements to confirm the existence and the nature of radioactivity. Radon was a well-established cause of lung cancer among uranium miners. Radon gas had a short half-life, measured in minutes, and was known to quickly break down into cancer-causing “daughters” that circulated in the air. But Alcan wasn’t mining uranium, and Dr. Brent was no expert on radiation. His judgement would require intensive validation—and time.
Time, however, had become an existential problem for miners in St. Lawrence. Men who had worked underground, or even in the mill, now felt exposed. People in town were conscious of the pervasive dust that gusted through the place during dry weather. There were fluorspar stockpiles near the harbour. The dusty roads were made from mine waste.
Maybe the dust was radioactive. The experts checked. It wasn’t.
Dr. Brent finally urged health officials in the provincial government to officially ask Ottawa to launch a cancer-focused epidemiological study of the whole mine environment. And soon after that, Jack Windish was sampling the air for radiation.
By 1958, Alcan seemed to be in little doubt about what was coming down the turnpike. Dr. Brent was close enough to the reality that he could almost smell approaching controversy. It was time to factor optics into future planning—dying miners, cancer, careless corporations, bad ventilation, “radon daughters.”
He instructed Alcan’s man in town, Rupert Wiseman, then the manager of the Newfluor mine, to do what was necessary to counter the appearance that the company had been callous in its response to the evolving situation. It was time for anticipatory damage management. There could no longer be any doubt that radiation was, at the very least, a factor in the rising roll call of death among the men who had worked at mining fluorspar. But the puzzling continued. Radiation was killing miners, but fluorspar wasn’t radioactive.
The sense of urgency was growing, but soon there would be a new distraction. Miners were dying, but the St. Lawrence Corporation also seemed to be on its deathbed.
41.
AS OF June 6, 1957, it was clear: the corporation was in rough shape, seriously ill. But it wasn’t dead. Not yet. Donald Poynter’s football-playing instinct kicked in again. The team was trailing badly, but there was still time on the clock. Seibert’s call and his order to shut down just amounted to a tactical time out.
Poynter continued to make plans to save the game on the ground, mining and finding markets for fluorspar. Let Walter Seibert deal with the governments of Newfoundland and Canada. He could make the case for public assistance to overcome what he saw as unfair competition from outside—mostly from Mexico, where production costs were lower than in St. Lawrence. Donald would stick to his game, doing what he was good at. Let Seibert do the
bullshit part, manipulating other big shots.
In St. John’s, however, the Smallwood government seemed to have already given up on the Seibert operation. There were discreet inquiries to potential buyers, and the provincial economist even suggested that the ministry of mines take over.10
For Seibert, one answer to his problems was protection in the form of a hefty tariff to squelch the low-cost imports from Mexico. It would take a federal government initiative, but he wanted Smallwood’s backing in requesting it. The Canadian tariff on a ton of imported fluorspar should be ten dollars, he proposed.
In January 1958, the Canadian tariff board agreed to conduct an inquiry to determine whether Seibert’s company deserved such provocative support. There would be a public hearing in Ottawa in May.
Clearly Ottawa was not enthusiastic, and it would not have helped Walter Seibert’s cause that his company’s union nemesis, Aloysius Turpin, was again leading the St. Lawrence miners—and expressing his animosity towards the corporation in a letter to the local federal MP. “We the people are fed up with the St. Lawrence Corporation of Newfoundland Ltd.,” he wrote, “and at times feeling you are only fighting a battle for Siebert [sic], who’s not, after all, worth fighting for.”11
On February 5, 1958, Premier Smallwood sent a brief, sharp telegram to Walter Seibert, saying he was “considerably disturbed by the prolonged inactivity” at the corporation mines in St. Lawrence. People were being forced to leave town. More than 250 jobs were melting away. “Come and see me,” Smallwood wrote.12
Seibert showed up, as instructed, to meet the premier and members of the provincial cabinet on February 19, 1958, but he was unapologetic—the shutdown was not his fault. He’d warned Smallwood in December 1955 that he was facing problems. Now he desperately needed help. He could put fifty to seventy-five miners back to work if the government would agree to buy $250,000 worth of fluorspar and stockpile it for future sale back to the corporation.
The provincial economist was convinced that the corporation had a larger problem—St. Lawrence fluorspar was being marketed at twice the cost of product coming out of Mexico, and wages weren’t the only cause. The government would likely not have any more success unloading high-cost fluorspar, no matter how long it was kept in reserve. They probably wouldn’t recover their money no matter whom they sold it to. The economist had doubts that the corporation would ever again be in a position to fulfill its end of the bargain Seibert was proposing.
American mining operations had higher wages, the economist pointed out, and still had lower overall production costs. One significant problem was Seibert’s inability to cultivate goodwill among his workers—“persistent, though generally unwitting, passive resistance among miners” was part of his dilemma.
But with Walter, situations were never quite as simple as they might seem after rational analysis by scientists and economists and public servants. Seibert had deals with the US government, details of which would have been surprising to most people in Newfoundland. There was that refinery, for instance, named after the little town on the Burin but located in Delaware. There was the secret deal to supply fluorspar from St. Lawrence for use in the creation of an atomic bomb. With Walter, there were deals and then deals within deals. Like wheels within wheels—brilliant, as long as they were turning.
In 1955, he had quietly bought controlling interest in a Mexican fluorspar mine—money he could have spent to improve productivity in Newfoundland. Now he was admitting he couldn’t even sell cheap Mexican fluorspar in Canada.
The only hope for St. Lawrence was to raise a barrier against all foreign competition—including his own Mexican operation.
Walter had obviously concluded that his move into Mexico, a good idea early on, had since turned into a big miscalculation—that North American steelmakers had formed durable relationships with other Mexican suppliers while he was enjoying his sweetheart status with the US government.
He was ready to bail out of Mexico, perhaps, return to square one—the dream of a “fluorspar empire” in Newfoundland.
Whatever his motivation, the tariff was a non-starter. Almost all the affected parties—especially the steel companies—were opposed. A tariff was a bad idea. And because it would also affect American producers, it would result in retaliation. Alcan sold a lot of stuff in the United States and Mexico. Alcan was against the tariff.
And in the end, the federal government was against it too. Analysts on the tariff board couldn’t find a single point in Seibert’s arguments with which they could agree, and in September, they advised the federal minister of finance that the tariff Seibert wanted was unwarranted and would probably cause significant harm to Alcan and the Canadian economy.
It seemed to be game over for the St. Lawrence Corporation. But Donald Poynter still wasn’t ready to give up.
Now he was fighting for survival on two fronts. The growing pile of evidence that his mining operations, and Alcan’s, were probably the cause of illness and death for many of his neighbours was too much to concede, so he continued to resist it. If there was radiation in the mines, he said dismissively, improved ventilation would surely “blow those nasty little radiation bugs out to sea,” and everyone could safely get on with the more important task of mining.
By mid-1959, his determination to sell St. Lawrence fluorspar seemed to bear encouraging results. The corporation had found new openings to sell metallurgical-grade fluorspar to Canadian steel companies. For all Seibert’s mismanagement, St. Lawrence fluorspar was still top quality. With Poynter’s aggressive mining and salesmanship, Seibert seemed to have recovered some small but steady markets in the United States.
Poynter had restarted production in several small St. Lawrence mines and had high hopes for the future. In 1960, he went to New York and returned with a “pocket full” of orders. The Hay Pook mine was up and running once again.
But Donald Poynter’s energetic optimism was being overshadowed by the relentless progress of a killer stalking his community.
42.
THE daughters of radon appear briefly as ionized particles when radon gas, a product of uranium, breaks down. They stick to microscopic specks of dust and moisture. Inhaled, they are capable of destroying human tissue. Radon daughters “rip up any body cells in their path . . . like bolts of lightning striking a house.”13 But where were these deadly radon daughters coming from? The answer wasn’t far away.
As long ago as 1948, a geologist’s report on mineral deposits in the St. Lawrence area described significant alpha radioactivity and “radiogenic heat” coming from the local rock.14 It seems that nobody took special note of that observation at the time.
Later studies of the geology would confirm that the local granite, which hosts so much fluorspar, is also unusually rich in uranium.15 Jack Windish, alerted to the high incidence of lung cancer among St. Lawrence miners, had logically looked for uranium in or around the fluorspar. But he couldn’t find it. He’d tested the ore coming from the mine. There was no evidence of radioactivity. There had to be another source. He would discover it was all around him and over him and under his feet, running down his neck, leaking into his boots.
The figurative bolts of lightning were coming from the water.
The Director mine was a veritable Niagara Falls of water—its pumps struggled to discharge up to three thousand gallons per minute from the workings.
Cracks and fissures in the granite carried surface water great distances, and as it passed through uranium along the way, the water picked up radon gas. As the water-borne radon reached the open spaces of the mine, it released its “progeny,” the infamous cancer-causing daughters.
The continuous pumping of water, without which there could be no mining, seemed to have created a deadly loop of radioactivity—a cyclical flow from rainfall and surface water sources, through uranium-bearing granite, into the drifts and stopes where miners worked, to be pumped back out again. And then the cycle would repeat itself—surface water returning through uranium
, back again to where the men were working. Pumped out, only to begin the journey back.
Windish and his associate Dr. deVilliers would find in their early studies that radon transported in this way produced radioactivity readings that were between two and a half and ten times above safe working levels. The villains were finally identified, but like the dust, they had already done their damage. And it would take another year to come up with a response.
In late 1959, Windish reported his findings to the companies and to health officials in St. John’s. Because the Director mine had been his main focus, Alcan officials scrambled to head off an anticipated backlash. Newfluor miners were dying, but almost all of them had worked for the St. Lawrence Corporation before moving to the Director mine. From Alcan’s point of view, it was hardly fair that the fortuitous timing of Seibert’s corporate misfortune left Alcan to face the public and political backlash all by itself.
The company immediately began planning better ventilation, but the Alcan medical director, Dr. Frank Brent, also sought political cover—a commitment from the provincial minister of health, James McGrath, that the company would get advance notice of any public statements from the government of Newfoundland.
In the meantime, Alcan seemed to be getting mixed messages from the federal experts, Windish and deVilliers. Windish, who was actually taking measurements where he could in the mines, was candid in his reporting—he had found radiation readings (radon daughters) up to nearly 200 times the maximum allowable levels for a safe workplace, albeit in an unused section of the Director mine. In that same area, he’d recorded a radon gas measurement that was 133 times the suggested safe working level. In that abandoned section, the air was so thin, he said, he was unable to light a match. (At the Ottawa briefing where he made this observation, there was a sceptical reaction.16 Someone suggested, perhaps facetiously, that maybe there was something wrong with the matches he was trying to light.)
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