The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  Dr. deVilliers had already offered reassurances, at another meeting weeks earlier, that “reported concentrations of radon are not remarkable.”17 It was acknowledged that in most working areas, radiation readings were sometimes above safe working levels but mostly at or below the standard. When asked about the standard and what he understood to be the practical meaning of the “maximum allowable concentration” for radon in a workplace, deVilliers replied that “it represents a concentration to which a man can be exposed for an eight-hour shift throughout the year, year after year.”

  Alcan and the bureaucrats seemed to be reassured. But in just a matter of months, political circumstances would raise the temperature of the conversation about the reality of working in the St. Lawrence mines year after year after year.

  ON March 1, 1960, the radiation menace could no longer be denied. Joey Smallwood, who had been dismissive, now had to act, and he called a meeting for a full discussion of the Windish radiation findings. All the principals were there: politicians, union leaders and Alcan officials. The health minister, James McGrath, later prepared a summary of the findings, and it was a masterful example of transparency and creative obfuscation.18

  The main points, however, were clear: St. Lawrence miners had a high incidence of lung cancer that couldn’t be explained by dust conditions in the mines, and the levels of radiation “were much higher than the permissible limits.”

  The minister hastily pointed out that the highest readings were in unused sections of the Director mine, but even so, miners were working in areas where radiation was frequently beyond permissible limits. That had to be corrected. “We have been advised . . . that comparatively simple methods of ventilation can bring the concentration down out of the danger zone . . . [and] render the mine safe.”

  It was, perhaps, an unintended concession that for many years, the St. Lawrence mines had been terribly unsafe, and that hundreds of men had worked for decades in lethal concentrations of dust and radiation that could easily have been remedied.

  The minister insisted that “it cannot yet be regarded scientifically proved that the high incidence of cancer and the presence of hazardous radiation are directly effect and cause,” but the obvious “coincidence” definitely justified further studies of the problem.

  The miners weren’t prepared to wait for scientific proof. The St. Lawrence story became—at least for a short while—a public scandal. The St. John’s media ran articles about cancer and radiation, and the underlying role of poor ventilation in the mines. The union pulled all its underground members off the job—at the time, Poynter had managed to put twenty-two miners back to work, filling his “pocketful” of orders from the United States. Al Turpin—who knew about the problem from earlier briefings by Windish—now declared that nobody would go back underground until the ventilation issue had been solved.

  And it was solved—in just a few weeks—but not before an unusual display of defensive denial by the Alcan manager, Rupert Wiseman. The walkout by the miners, he fumed in a press release, wasn’t so much a response to the perils in the workplace as a radical reaction to “a distortion of the facts by the press.”

  Whatever. On April 2, just a month after the decisive meeting with Smallwood, and after a few weeks of proper ventilation, Jack Windish took new readings and found that radiation in both the Director and the smaller corporation mines had miraculously dropped back to safe working levels or better.

  On April 5, miners started heading back to work.

  IT WAS all so simple—in a matter of months, the companies had achieved, under the threat of scandal, what common sense had instructed decades earlier. Mine safety must include the air that miners breathe. Company and government officials had spent years blaming respiratory problems caused by dust on tuberculosis, which wasn’t anybody’s fault. But they couldn’t duck the radon lightning bolt. Windish had spelled it out clearly, and the fast remediation in the spring of 1960 proved his point: the high radon readings were directly caused by poor or nonexistent mechanical ventilation. And that was the fault of management.

  The St. Lawrence mines were, overnight, considerably safer. But for a rising number of St. Lawrence miners, many of whom did not yet know that they were doomed, it was all too late.

  BY early April, public interest in the peculiarities of mortality in the St. Lawrence area had faded once again. The priority now, as had always been the case, was employment—and the prospect that the corporation was failing would soon become the primary concern in both St. Lawrence and St. John’s.

  In 1964, the British Journal of Industrial Medicine published a lengthy technical review of the St. Lawrence situation by Windish and deVilliers. There was no pussyfooting here, in a discussion among peers. Their paper was dense with complicated detail, but the conclusions made for a depressing summary of the thirty-year history of the radiation problem.

  The death rate among men between twenty and sixty-four in St. Lawrence was well over twice that in nearby Grand Bank, and more than triple the death rate in that age group for all of Newfoundland. Meanwhile, Windish and deVilliers reported, “The death rates for St. Lawrence females in the age group ‘all ages’ are significantly lower than those for Newfoundland, which, in turn, are lower than those for Grand Bank.”19

  Lung cancer in St. Lawrence afflicted mostly men, all of whom had been miners. The review in the British journal raised the real possibility that there had been an “appreciable under-diagnosis” of lung cancer deaths prior to 1951 because of an absence of post-mortem examinations of people who were believed to have died from tuberculosis.

  The obvious conclusion, based on comparisons with the levels of fatal lung cancer among uranium miners in various parts of the world, including the United States and South Africa, was that the fluorspar miners of St. Lawrence had been working in a far more dangerous environment. And the tragic consequences were only starting to appear.

  That distant, dire analysis would have excited widespread comment among a readership limited to professionals in the field of occupational health—but it didn’t seem to register where it really mattered, in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland. Certainly not right away. But it surely would, and when it did, it would be plain-spoken, from the heart of long experience, from a man who had been a miner with direct and dramatic experience with death. His name was Rennie Slaney.

  43.

  DONALD Poynter revived the Hay Pook mine in 1960. He also had plans to reopen the Hare’s Ears mine. He was confident that the high-quality ore from Hare’s Ears would win new customers in the American steel industry. The government of Newfoundland had offered a $200,000 loan guarantee, but it had tight strings attached—evidence that senior government officials finally had serious doubts about the competence, and perhaps even the integrity, of Walter Seibert.

  Walter turned the offer down.

  There’s a telling document among the Smallwood papers in an archive at Memorial University of Newfoundland. It’s undated and unsigned. It’s stamped “Confidential,” and it presents an unflattering portrait of the St. Lawrence Corporation and its owner. “Almost any handyman can build a lean-to,” it begins, “add more lean-tos to it, put a couple of more lean-tos on top of it and call it a house. But it is not a house for all it may be called one. At best, it is a crude shelter. In the same way, a bunch of holes dug into the ground all over the place does not constitute a mine, even though it may be called a mine at St. Lawrence. It is at best extensive diggings.”20

  The anonymous author continues: “From observation and from report, I have come to the conclusion that the construction of the fluorspar ‘mines’ of the St. Lawrence Corporation initially involved only the application of the ingenuity of handymen and the financial outlay of a lean-to . . . Moreover, during the twenty-odd years that these diggings have been expanding there is no visible evidence that anything was done to them by way of engineering design.” The policy was “to improvise until there was nothing left to improvise with, and then purchase the cheapest
possible make-do to keep things going a little longer.”

  The document then sets out twelve steps that should have been followed, including the preparation of a master plan and the employment of “a qualified accountant . . . from the start.” This observation would have stung Walter Seibert, who was an accountant by profession.

  It must be admitted that mines are constructed to make a profit for the owner more than for any other reason. In view of the fact that the St. Lawrence Corporation’s operations at St. Lawrence undoubtedly returned a profit for their owner for many years, then the question may well be asked what does it matter whether these diggings were ingenious improvisations or engineered excavations?

  The answer is that as soon as an abnormal combination of circumstances, particularly favourable to the owner, disappeared, the operations collapsed flat, the deposits only partly exhausted, and the normal demand for fluorspar greater than ever.

  The author noted approvingly “the availability of several superbly ingenious men who were prepared to devote their all to an adventure, and who did just that by going to St. Lawrence in the 1930s.” However, “the owner of the deposits was a man with a reputed fanatical devotion to profit,” which resulted in many of the problems that were then threatening the existence of the venture.

  There is, in the five-page document, no reference to mine ventilation or to health, to silicosis or to cancer. It is, all in all, a lament for lost political and economic opportunities.

  The writing has the flair and the journalistic tone, not to mention the wit, to suggest it could have been written by Smallwood himself. The reference to “superbly ingenious men” could reflect the fact that Dr. Warren Smith, the first manager of Black Duck and later boss at Newfluor, and Donald Poynter, who had a warm relationship with the premier, were both well respected among government officials in St. John’s and Ottawa.

  Whether Joey Smallwood actually penned this vivid document is beside the point—he obviously agreed with it and valued it enough to preserve it among his private papers for posterity.

  ON Friday, June 9, 1961, Donald Poynter took another phone call from the United States. On the line this time was Johanna Seibert, Walter’s wife. The message was brief: her husband had suffered a massive brain hemorrhage the day before and had died shortly afterwards in St. Mary’s Hospital, in Hoboken, New Jersey.

  Poynter put the phone down, shaken. He was in his office. He had known Walter Seibert for more than thirty years. Their mothers had introduced them, encouraged them to work together. He and Seibert had become business partners on the strength of promises and a handshake, an arrangement that had never been formalized. He took a deep breath, then walked home to break the news to his wife, Florence Etchegary Poynter.

  His son Thomas Poynter recalls that his father “was visibly upset. The wind was clearly taken out of his sails for the moment. I don’t think there was any indication that Seibert was ill.”

  Walter Seibert was, legally, the sole owner of the St. Lawrence Corporation and several other related enterprises in Canada and the United States. The future of the corporation—and now that of its senior employee, Donald Poynter—was suddenly, unexpectedly under a darker cloud than just a day earlier, when the challenge had been simple by comparison: reopen mines, find buyers for fluorspar. Donald Poynter had been confident that both objectives, while difficult, were doable. But what now?

  The Seibert family, Johanna and her three sons, visited St. Lawrence to evaluate their mining operations. It quickly became obvious to Poynter that they had no interest in hanging on to them—they would soon be up for sale.

  It also became clear that the family had no intention of honouring Walter’s informal promises that Donald would one day be a full partner and would own a substantial block of shares in the corporation. Poynter’s plans to reopen one of the idle mines were abruptly shelved.

  Two of Seibert’s sons had actually lived and worked in St. Lawrence in the early fifties. They would undoubtedly have been aware of the looming tragedy of miners who had worked in corporation mines. To that point, because the corporation had been relatively inactive since 1957, Seibert had avoided the growing controversy about dust and radiation in his mines. He’d been unwavering in his focus on the business of selling fluorspar and making money from it. He had cleared a reported $10 million on his contract with the US government in the early fifties.

  Newfluor, so far, had been taking all the heat in the emerging controversy over miners’ health. And as of 1961, there would be new regulations that required rigorous radiation monitoring underground and even in surface facilities. There would be intense public scrutiny. Newfluor would be on the firing line for years to come. There was no way around that reality.

  There were many reasons, on the other hand, why the Seibert family would want to cut and run, and effectively avoid accountability for the industrial carnage that was directly attributable to Walter’s early scheme to make his fortune. The financial compensation owed to the dead and dying miners and their families would inevitably become a liability. The Seibert family had been handed, in Walter’s sudden death, a golden opportunity to avoid it.

  St. Lawrence Corporation assets were soon up for sale, but the same factors that had made the Seibert family reluctant to continue running the mines were also daunting for prospective buyers. Alcan was already in the middle of the mess. There was little downside to picking up the pieces of what was left of their old competitor. They had their eye, especially, on the Blue Beach property. The Smallwood government, reluctant to allow one company to have total control of the resource, discouraged the deal at first.21

  The search went on for more than three years, until finally the Seibert family asked Alcan to revive its original offer to buy the corporation assets. And this time, they did. Now they had the town of St. Lawrence, afraid that it could soon become a ghost town, onside, and the political objections quickly slipped away.

  Poynter, by now aware that he had been betrayed by the man he had long considered his partner, had to endure the additional indignity of working out the details of the sale to Alcan’s subsidiary, Newfluor. And on June 9, 1965, four years to the day from the fateful phone call from Mrs. Seibert, he watched the properties he had helped turn into mines pass over to the competition.

  Poynter by then had deep roots in St. Lawrence. His wife was born and raised there, part of the prominent Etchegary clan. His five children, with the exception of his eldest daughter, had all been born in Newfoundland, and all had become ardent Newfoundlanders. He might have returned to New Jersey, but instead he took a job in St. John’s as an adviser to the provincial government, which was where he ended his career.

  He would live out much of his remaining life in Newfoundland, in failing health, until July 26, 1976, when he suffered a heart attack during a holiday at a family retreat in Long Island, New York. He died four days later, surrounded by his wife and adult children.

  His final years were bitter. As his son Thomas, a Boston-based entrepreneur, remembers: “It was a difficult time in our house. My family’s notion, on the Poynter and the Etchegary sides, of keeping promises was strong. And the Seiberts broke it, again.”22

  The Seibert family, Thomas Poynter still believes, were “uncaring for the miners or the town. From the father to the wife to the sons, just nasty people who give capitalism a bad name.”

  IN 1965, the year the corporation died, lung cancer claimed the lives of eight more former miners in St. Lawrence, most of whom had started their careers in corporation mines.

  One of them was forty-five-year-old Arcule Slaney Jr., whose father, Rennie Slaney’s brother, also named Arcule, had died from “miners’ disease” eight years earlier.

  Nine

  Dying by Inches

  44.

  AND now they were dying quietly, one by one. The tragedies were personal, not public, not historical. It was understandable that no one seemed to notice—no one beyond the family or the edge of town.

  Four
thousand people died in a single storm off the coast of Newfoundland, and it’s hardly mentioned in the history books. Twenty-seven people died in the space of a few minutes in a tsunami. Hardly anyone remembers. Two hundred and three American sailors perished just outside St. Lawrence on a stormy day in 1942. Who, outside of Newfoundland, knows about it now?

  But Rennie Slaney couldn’t get it off his mind, that slow attrition in his town all through the fifties, maybe earlier, and now accelerating in the sixties. The number of his neighbours and family and friends dropping off. Men his age and much younger. There had been scientific analyses of dust, measurements of radiation, epidemiological surveys. Learned papers written and published far and wide for learned people.

  But it didn’t seem to register outside St. Lawrence as a human crisis. It didn’t come across as what he was seeing: the endless funeral procession winding through his town, day after day. Maybe that’s why there was so much dithering in St. John’s and Ottawa. They didn’t seem to get it, the personal dimensions of this puzzle. The puzzle lacked a personality.

  So maybe he should do something to wake up the big shots. After all, he felt some personal responsibility. He had been a boss. He remembered how he’d once offered assurances to the mine inspector from Ontario that the corporation would be driving ventilation shafts. For sure.

  That’s what he’d been told by Poynter. And Poynter had been told by Walter Seibert in New York that the money would be there. So why wouldn’t Rennie Slaney, the supervisor, assume that it was going to happen?

  But still, people who knew Rennie Slaney would know that he’d felt guilty when it didn’t happen when he said it would. And that he’d count this lapse among the causes of the misery that was playing out around him. The misery, in his mind, was personal and painful. The misery had names and faces. It had his brother’s face. And he knew he didn’t have to look too far into the future to see his own face.