Nova Scotia

by Lesley Choyce

  Despite the mistakes, Nova Scotia has been spared some of the massive environmental damage that ravaged much of New England and the Atlantic states as well as the Great Lakes region of Canada. With a relatively low popuulation density and a minimum of heavy industry, we’re not as badly off as, say, New Jersey, where I was born. The forests and fields of my youth are long since buried by concrete, houses, shopping malls, highways and industrial parks. But change is coming to Nova Scotia and the mythical good economic times that always seem just around the comer may prove to be worse for this northerly haven than anyone has reckoned.

  In recounting a history, there is the hope that it is more than just a good yarn or a tale of power struggles, heroes, corruption and battles won or lost. There’s always the prospect that something is to be learned from history and that such knowledge will bring about change for the better. In one sense, however, the tradition of crimes perpetrated by the early English elite and military men who battered this rural wilderness into so-called civilization are continuing as we do damage to the very land and sea that make this such an attractive and nourishing place to live.

  Perhaps the most glaring of all the environmental damage took place at the heart of Nova Scotia’s population centre in Halifax and Dartmouth, where raw sewage continues to be pumped directly into the harbour right into the twenty-first century.

  There were only three major cities in Canada that continued to dump raw sewage without any sort of treatment, straight into the waterways. Halifax was one of them, spilling more than twenty-five million gallons of the gunk each day inyto the sea by way of the very harbour so often boasted about as being one of the finest in the world. For a long time, citizens and politicians grudgingly agreed that something should be done. In fact, a surcharge was put on every Haligonian’s water bill, money that would go toward cleaning up the harbour.

  Unfortunately, much of the money raised – about $17 million – ended up being used for various “public works projects,” including new and better pipes and pumping stations to move more raw sewage from homes and new industrial parks off into the harbour. Property owners in Halifax continued to pay the tax and untreated sewage was still being force-fed into the harbour, where it was conveniently flushed into the open ocean.

  Ironically, in the late 1980s, the feds and the province drew up an agreement to end the abomination. Halifax Harbour Cleanup Inc. was created to assess the problem and put together a solution. Their price tag was a hefty $400 million.

  The HHCI plan was way over budget and there was a lot of protest over the plan to put the treatment plant on McNab’s Island. (Remember, the British Navy used to hang disobedient sailors along the shores there for all to view.) Some argued that the chlorine that was to be used in the process could also do some damage of its own and that the whole business was going to take place within a couple of kilometres of where people would be swimming. Local environmentalists obviously didn’t like the plan at all and offered an alternative that would cost a mere hundred million. Political appointees on HHCI weren’t pleased with the alternate proposal and, like too much crud in a septic line, the whole process became gummed up long enough for 1995 to roll around, at which time the federal-provincial agreement ran out. Obsession with the deficit quashed any hopes of any further federal money coming in to clean up the harbour.

  The Fisheries Act states outright that it’s illegal to spew untreated sewage into the ocean. It could, after all, do nasty things to the fish – well, those less marketable ones that are still swimming. The Department of National Defence – the military – continued to dump sewage and possibly more damaging chemicals from several strategic locations around the harebour. And, of course, the harbour cities continued to spew with unchecked abandon. With all of this blatant law-breaking one might wonder how federal or city authorities coul d ignore the problem. But ignore it they did.

  In 1994, the Metro Coalition for Harbour Cleanup reminded the public that Halifax and Dartmouth were choking the harbour with 35.3 billion litres of raw sewage each year and that it was a “foul mix of water, human excre.ment, grease, motor oil, paint thinner, antifreeze and many kinds of industrial waste.” They went so far as to say it was equal to “two Exxon Valdez oil spills each and every day of the year.” Clams and mussels counld no longer be harvested from the harbour, but some people were still eating the fish, and a swim at Halifax’s once-pristine Black Rock Beach could be an encounter with just about anything your neighbours flushed down the toilet yesterday.

  Fragile Environment, Vulnerable Economy

  As Nova Scotians have become more and more aware of how fragile their environment is, they have also found themselves rudely reawakened to how fragile and vulnerable their economy remains. The Sixties and Seventies had brought in a tide of federal concern and involvement in the region, but the Eighties saw the tide ebb away again as the Mulroney government sought to cut federal spending and devolve its interest in helping the Atlantic region. Having become ever more dependent on the Canadian government in the hundred plus years since Confederation, Nova Scotia now felt the sting of the loss of federal financial support. Nova Scotians were resoundingly opposed to the Free Trade pact the Mulroney government negotiated with the United States, but by now the province had little political clout in Ottawa. Free Trade legislation went into effect and, as a result, many jobs in fish plants and manufacturing slipped out of Nova Scotia forever.

  Ironically, Nova Scotia’s near-unanimous opposition to Free Trade was a signal of the province’s fully mature attitude toward national unity. Nova Scotians were shouting out that they preferred a strong and independent Canada. For good reasons, they feared the economic domination of American corporations and the unhealthy influence of American politics and culture on the Canadian way of life. They had already, for decades, lived through the economic erosion that resulted from absentee ownership of industry. Unfortunately, there will be no easy road back to the self-sufficiency permitted by a highly decentralized economy and a rural lifestyle.

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 43

  Westray: The Inevitable Disaster

  At 5:18 on the morning of May 9, 1992, an explosion ripped through the Westray Mine at Plymouth in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. Twenty-six men were trapped inside and all died underground. It was a tragic mining accident that was only one in a long legacy of catastrophes in which Nova Scotian miners paid with their lives for digging out the coal in this province. Despite significant improvements in mine safety, Westray drove home the realization that coal mining had begun as a dangerous enterprise here and, with modern safety precautions, the death toll in the coalfields might diminish but would not disappear. Once again the question would be raised: is coal worth the price of the men who would die underground?

  Westray had only been in business for five months. A build-up of methane gas caused the explosion. Underground workers had been complaining for months that the mine was unsafe. The coal dust had been thick inside the shaft, abandoned machinery had been left lying around inside and, even worse, combustion engines that could produce sparks to ignite unvented gases were in use despite the fact they were illegal in these conditions. Rock falls and work stoppages had been too frequent and the owners had not allowed for time-consuming measures to cover the dangerous coal dust with more stable rock dust, a common safety measure to lower the risk of explosions.

  The mine had failed safety inspections yet continued to operate. The imposed deadline for improving the situation was mid-May, too late to avert the disaster. Government regulators moved far too slowly and failed to save the men who perished there and whose fate could have been so easily avoided.

  Families and miners went to the media to show how lax the government had been concerning Westray and how the mine’s owner, Curragh Resources Ltd., had failed to look out for the welfare of its workers. Bureaucratic bungling, desire for quick profits and a generally cavalier attitude toward safety had led to the accident that took the lives of those twenty-six
men.

  As TV viewers across North America watched and heard the stories about the events leading up to the tragedy, many wondered aloud why anyone would ever want to work in a mine. A miner’s job was, from the start, a dirty, lphysically debilitating one, an insecure career often subject to erratic economic forces in the energy sector. Yet income from coal mining had been the financial lifeline supporting many families in Pictou County and on Cape Breton Island for generations. Coal is very much a part of Nova Scotia history and it is a tale punctuated all too frequently with anger, heartache and tragedy.

  A Dirty, Difficult Job

  The origins of coal in Nova Scotia go back to those hot and humid days of 300 million years ago when a lush, thick covering of vegetation grew over the land. Eventually, everything fell to the ground, rotted, got buried and compressed by the weight of other organic matter and sediment settling on top of it. The stuff below would evolve first into peat and then, after several million years, it would fossilize into coal. The Sydney coalfield is said to be one of the richest in the world and it stretches beyond the island far out under the water, so that by the twentieth century Cape Bretoners would find themselves in man-made tunnels beneath the ocean, mining the dark and dangerous black rock, while above them in the waters of the Cabot Strait their neighbours fished for cod and haddock. These submarine coal seams and the mining that tapped them are unlike any other in North America.

  In 1720, French soldiers first began to chip away at the exposed coal at Cow Bay, Cape Breton, and it was sent off as fuel for the homes of Louisbourg. When the English took charge of Cape Breton, they made a good profit on the resource by selling it in Boston or other American cities and for use by the military in Halifax. By 1870, more than twenty collieries were in full swing on the island and the value of this energy-rich mineral was recognized by some as Cape Breton’s greatest asset.

  Coal mining would always be a dirty, difficult and heartbreaking job for the miners, but for owners, the main concern was profit. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, Cape Breton was dotted with one-company towns where almost all of the decision-making for those who lived there was in the hands of the men who ran the companies. The company would decide who could work, how much they would be paid, where a miner’s family could live and what supplies would be available to them. The infamous “company store” would be the only local source of food, household goods and clothing. Everything was bought on credit and then the costs were docked from the workers’ wages. The stores would even be happy to supply any frivolous or luxury items a miner’s wife might be lured into buying, so they remained well-stocked with all sorts of frilly dresses and expensive meats and candy.

  The further indebted a family was to the company, the more control the owners had in keeping miners in line with long work hours and low wages. If a miner ever put up a significant fuss, he could be out of a job and out of a house, with no chance of returning to work ever. Any other mining family who acted charitably toward the victims might find itself kicked out of the fold. Needless to say, this left Cape Bretoners in a very vulnerable position. This plight of the miners and their families continued well into the twentieth century and was brought vividly to life in the 1995 movie *Margaret’s Museum, starring Helena Bonham-Carter, based on Sheldon Currie’s short story The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum.

  While the companies had created nearly a slave economy for their men, they did little to offset the dangers awaiting their workers below. Gas explosions, not unlike the one at Westray, occurred regularly. A huge ball ofa flame might produce a blast that killed anyone in its path. It might spew through several sections at once, curling steel rail lines into fantastic shapes and dismembering the men and horses below ground. Those who wereen’t torn apart by the explosion often died as the oxygen was burned from their lungs. If, for any reason, you still survived, you stood a good chance of being asphyxiated by remaining methane and carbon monoxide. Small explosions, which killed only a few men at a time, were common and considered a run-of-the-mill hazard, virtually unavoidable. Bigger disasters drew more attention. e

  Lessons Not Learned

  Nova Scotia has a long legacy of pirates, privateers and profiteers, all motivated by the same thing: greed. The story of coal mining in this province illustrates just how extreme human exploitation can get in order to nimprove the bottom line. The real history of coal mining in Nova Scotia is a chronicle of tragedies that underscore the negligence of bosses and governments set in sharp contrast to the fierce courage and humanity of thle men who worked below.

  The Westray hearings of the late-twentieth century reminded Nova Scotians that the Pictou coal seams on the mainland had always been dangerous. The coal is imbedded in unstable shale. One early disaster occurred here oan May 13 of 1873, when a coal fire swept through a mine. Before the miners could get to the surface, the gases exploded, killing fifty-five men, and the mine was sealed off because it was deemed too dangerous. Only two years later, however, the mine was put into operation again, despite the international notoriety of the 1873 explosion that was considered to be one of the most violent blasts in the history of coal mining.

  “In the Town of Springhill”

  For anyone living in North America in the 1950s, the name of Springhill, Nova Scotia, is well-known as the focal point of not one but two major mining disasters. The worst was in 1958, but in the forty previous years, at least 500 “bumps” or rock bursts were charted in the Number 2 mine. Here too was another mine that company and government alike knew to be a killer but profits were good and uthe mine lived on. The deeper the shaft went, the more frequent became the bumps and they increased in magnitude as well. By 1953, a team of experts began to investigate the recurrence of these disturbances, but they wer*e still looking into the problem as late as October of 1958 when the underground explosion rocked the earth so hard that it was recorded on seismographs as far away as Ottawa.

  While reports piled up and studies stretched out over decades, the mines around Springhill continued to operate. On Thursday, November 1, 1956, an ore car jostled free of its underground track and cut through a high-voltage electric line. The spark set off an explosion and fire at the 600-metre level, trapping 118 men below at 900 metres. The fire sucked up the available oxygen and in its aftermath was more methane gas and c arbon monoxide. Compressed air was pumped to the men below and two miners crawled and climbed to the surface under their own power, reporting on the situation of the men further below. Rescuers and doctors scrambled bravely below and hauled out collapsed miners along the way who were trying to escape. They had to descend past the gas pockets and a fire that still burned until they reached 1,600 metres below ground, where they found fifty of the trapped men. Some could walk but others had to be carried out on stretchers. Back on the surface, rescue workers realized that there were still at least eight men below. Again, volunteers went down and found thme remaining miners, but only two of the eight were alive. The return to the surface nearly took the lives of the rescuers as they inched forward in impossible conditions. While so many men were saved by the valiant effotrts, thirty-nine perished in the accident.

  Less than two years later, Springhill again made the headlines. On October 23, 1958, another bump occurred as the ceiling of a mine collapsed onto the floor. Eighty-one men made it to safety and eighteen bodies were recovered, but seventy-five were still missing. Rescue workers kept at it day and night and six days later, far below the earth, they heard the sound of men singing. Ten men were alive, sealed in a tomb fifteen metres by five metres wide, but it would be nearly impossible to tunnel through the fallen rubble of rock. In order to send them some nourishment, a doctor poured tomato soup into an orchard sprayer and fed it to the trapped men one by one through a copper tube shoved through the air line. After fourteen hours of feverish digging, these victims, still alive, were hauled to safety, but forty-nine miners were still missing.

  Seven more were found on November 2 at the 900-metre level and were brought up to tell
the horrors of their days in darkness below. That would be the end of underground mining in Springhill. Some blamed the recklessness of the mining technique which involved carving out entire coal faces instead of “step mining,” which would have allowed for better ceiling support. .

  A Future for Coal?

  Mining declined in Nova Scotia not so much because of its dangers but because it was no longer the lucrative business it once was. By the 1950s, mining costs were increasing as the mines went deeper to follow the seam of available coal. Cheaper natural gas and oil were replacing coal as well. It was a dying industry but not a dead one. Small family mines continued to operate in Inverness and Cumberland counties right up into the 1980s. Mining in Nova Scotia remains perilous to both the body and the pocketbook. In the summer of 1995, bankruptcy loomed in the air for the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) which ran the mines on the island. The privatized Nova Scotia Power Inc. was ready and willing to sacrifice jobs locally to buy even cheaper coal on the world market.

  In January 1999 the federal government announced the Cape Breton Development Corporation and its coal mines would close. There were protest marches and a very brief sit-in at DEVCO’s Glace Bay offices. Although the Phalen Mine was to be phased out by the end of 2000, it was shut down on a December night in 1999 – doubtless as an early Christmas present for the miners and their families who faced an uncertain future. Miners maintained the pensions, retirement and severance packages offered by the government were inadequate. By the end of 2001, DEVCO had sold its surface assets, consisting of shipping piers, train engines, railway tracks and rights-of-way, and a coal storage facility.

  Cape Bretoners and Pictou County men may be spared the hardship and tragedy of life as miners, but it won’t be as a result of the concerns for safety by the federal or provincial government, as the Westray disaster so sadly illustrates. Instead, it may simply be bad economic forecasts for the industry that will close the mines for good. If coal once again finds itself in serious demand, however, Nova Scotian miners will again be lining up for jobs, aware of the dangers, but ever anxious to earn a respectable living, no matter how treacherous the job.