Heroism of '58 Springhill Disaster (very long)

[Howard]

The other day while researching a disasters project I'm working on I came
across a story written by Canadian writer Frank Rasky about the 1958 coal
mine disaster in Springhill, Nova Scotia.
The following is an edited and cut-down excerpt of the story from Rasky's
1961 book Great Canadian Disasters.
It's kind of long (3,800 words) and I do risk copyright problems but the
story of the miner's stoic courage and the heroism of the rescuers is so
impressive that I thought it should be shared with people who aren't ever
likely to find the book outside a few Canadian library shelves.
It's also fine depiction of the gritty atitudes of working people in Canada
(and perhaps throughout the world) 40 years ago ­ a strength that one hopes
endures today. Kings are toppled, presidents ousted and regimes overthrown,
and all the while the workin' stiff carries on.
Hope you enjoy this story by Harry Rasky. Parts of it brought tears of
admiration to my eyes for those amazing miners of Springhill. - hm

Trapped in the Springhill Coal Mine
By Frank Rasky

A raw chill drizzle was spitting on the pit head of North America's deepest
coal mine at Springhill, Nova Scotia, on the evening of November 6, 1958.
It was then the draegermen carried up into the wash of yellow light the
last body of the
Springhill coal mine disaster.
Ninety-nine survived. Some had been entombed in blackness more than two
miles down for as long as nine days. Many of them ate bark, sucked coal,
and drank their own urine, they exchanged wisecracks and they prayed, until
they were brought up.
Seventy-five died. Some of these were killed immediately, when the
air-pressure-triggered earthquake that miners call a bump rumbled through
Cumberland's No. 2 shaft. It ripped the roof, crumbled timbers, and crushed
men like ants. Others died slowly, gripped between rocks, choking on blue
methane gas; wearing their fingers to stumps as they futilely tried to claw
through their stone coffin.
It was Springhill's 14 days of death.
Springhill might be described as a main street with a cemetery at one end
and a mine at the other. A Coal Miners' Memorial commemorates the 125
Springhill miners who died during the first explosion in Cumberland's No. I
shaft, on February 21, 1891.
The Cumberland mine had suffered 453 bumps that took more than six hundred
lives.
On November 1, 1956, a gas explosion at Cumberland's No. 4 colliery killed
39 miners; 88 were rescued after being buried alive for three and a half
days.
...
On Thursday, October 23, 1958, a surge of hot air squeezed hard on the
seven-foot high tunnels miles below. With a thunderous roar the blast
heaved up the earth, buckled timbers, caved in roofs like accordions.
Miners were catapulted up in the air, some of the decapitating themselves
with their own picks to fall back headless in a black sea of coal dust.
...
Even before the earth had stopped shaking, the company's own crew of 20
rescue draegermen were racing toward the pit head. Within 15 minutes,
company officials were phoning to have extra draegermen flown to the scene.
...
The draegermen ­ so named because of the German-made, 45-pound oxygen
equipment, the invention of Alexander Bernhard Draeger, that was fastened
on their backs ­ worked with a kind of steady fury. The tunnels were so
packed with tons of debris that the units of five draegermen, linked
together by a rope, had to crawl along on their bellies like burrowing
moles, inch by agonizing inch. They barely had room enough to dig with
small spades. They'd pull out the rubble, drag in timbers, then
painstakingly shore up the area they'd just dug out.
The draegermen could only blink in distress as they ferreted out the corpse
of an old friend.
After the draegermen had cleared passages to rid the caverns of gas, brave
teams of "barefaced"rescuers, entered the tunnels, pluckily groping in the
choking coal dust without oxygen masks.
...
"I saw one body without its head," gasped barefaced rescuer Joe Tabor, as
he crawled out flat on his stomach. "Another was without arms. I saw a leg
cut off and Iying in the fallen rocks, like a doll's. But I'm going back
in, as soon as I get rid of these clothes with the terrible stink of death
clinging to'em. I'm going back, because I got two brothers trapped in there
somewhere."
...
When dawn broke on Friday, the throng at the pit head was swollen by more
than two hundred reporters, photographers, and TV cameramen. The Salvation
Army had set up tents in the bleak, swirling mist near the shaft, and the
draegermen paused in their around-the-clock shift to gulp cups of hot
cocoa.
The spotlight was chiefly focused on the mine's tag-board. It was the
program of this grim stage play. As each trapped miner was brought to the
surface, his numbered brass tag was removed from the wooden board. The
gesture showed he was alive.
By noon Friday, 81 "live" tags had been removed from the board. Day passed
into night, and the draegermen brought up into the melancholy rain only the
bodies of the dead.
General Manager Harold Gordon offered only "the vaguest glimmer of hope"
that any miner might yet be found alive. With tears in his eyes and his
voice breaking, he announced to reporters in even stronger language: "I
regret very much, but I consider there is no hope for any man."
...
On the sixth day, Wednesday, newspapermen had given up hope for the 69
still entombed. They began to leave for other stories. But the draegermen
continued to work around the clock in crews of seven, chewing tobacco to
keep the hot coal dust out of their throats, wearily kneeling, wiggling on
their bellies down a yard-high, shoulder-wide passage-way. They hacked
through rubble at a painful one foot per hour. They used hacksaws, chipper
picks and their bare hands, and sent rock shale back through the tunnel in
buckets passed from man to man.
...
Then at 2 p.m. the first miracle at Springhill happened. Blair Phillips,
the mine's chief surveyor, was testing for gas at the 13,000-foot level. He
heard a faint, muffled call sounding from the broken end of a pipe sticking
from the rubble. "Men alive?" yelled Phillips through the pipe, and heard
an answering croak from Gorley Kempt.
"Get us some water, you guys!" hollered Kempt. "There are twelve of us here."
There were, indeed, 12 of them there, separated from their rescuers by a
60-foot block of solid rock. They had spent six days locked in a
four-foot-high and 50-foot-wide cul de sac. And it was a harrowing ordeal
they had to describe, after the draegermen worked feverishly for the next
12 hours to blast out a parallel tunnel and deliver them from their sealed
tomb.
Bowsie Maddison was among the entombed 12. The blast had bounced him up in
the air, and landed him in the crushed tunnel. The first thing he did, when
he found himself seated with the groans of dying men around him, was to
pour some water on his face. He mistakenly thought that this would protect
him from breathing any seepage of gas.
However, three of the present 12 had survived the 1956 disaster ­ Hugh
Guthro, Joe Holloway, amd Joe McDonald. They advised Maddison not to waste
water that way. Anyhow, fresh air seemed to be entering from crevices in
the wall. "Better save our lamp power, too," said Eldred Lowther. "They's
only last ten hours."
Maddison, gingerly groping in the darkness, his head bumping the jagged
rocky roof, kept feeling for the man next to him ­ "to make sure I wasn't
alone," he said later. "When I would feel he was there, I would know a
human being was still with me. And it was comforting to know that both of
us were still alive."
...
At least six corpses were strewn amid the rocks, and when Wilfred Hunter
reached up, he was aghast to find a leg and entrails embedded in the roof.
"I looked close, and I swore it was the body of my twin-brother, Frank," he
said. "I withdrew my hand mighty quickly."
Gorley Kempt, acknowledged leader of the 12, a handsome bushy-haired miner
of 37, advised his buddies to form a chain of hands as they cautiously
explored the cavern. He crawled over to a dead miner and took his lamp. "I
felt bad to take it off him, but we used to eat together, so I knew he
wouldn't mind."
Larry Leadbetter, at 22 the youngest of the captives, later recalled,
"Gorley Kempt says, 'you'll have to go back where you was and get your
water can.' I didn't want any part of where I was. But he says, 'You got to
get her.' So I dusted in and got her, and dusted back."
...
Harold Brine, 26, found a couple of stale cheese sandwiches on one body and
a partly filled can of water on another. "I just figured my time wasn't
up," he said. "We had a pick, an axe, and a maul and we tore into the wall.
But is was no go. It was 85 degrees, simmering hot, and after a while the
smell of the dead was awful. We hollered ­ God, how we hollered! ­ but all
we got back was our own weak, spooky echo. So then we decided we'd have to
wait and stay with her."

Crouched in their low-ceiled catacomb, which wouldn't allow them to sit up
straight, the men took stock. Eldred Lowther, a sober fellow of 46, with
five children, estimated they had less than two cups of water collected
from the canteens of the dead. He found a tiny Aspirin bottle that held two
ounces of water, and doled it around.
"That has to do us for six hours," he warned. "Just one sip apiece."
...
Caleb Rushon , 35, a religious man who sang in the Methodist choir, later
recalled, "I told my buddies I'd keep track of the time with my luminous
watch. Since we had no moon or sun down in our hell, we'd scratch marks on
the wall to show the days. She's pretty good, that watch of mine. Nothing
stopped her. I guessed she was blessed by the same Higher Power I was sure
would save us."
Hugh Guthro, 31, father of two children, recalled, "That first day, we told
every corny joke we'd ever heard. Nobody laughed much at the cracks, like,
'Hey, Billy boy, you won't get paid for sitting out this shfft. But the
idea was to keep the conversation kind of light, and not talk about what we
were really thinking ­ possible death."
They particularly tried to avoid talk about their families, since all were
fathers.
But Levi Milley, 47, remembered, "When Caleb Rushton said it was nine in
the morning, I thought, 'Well, my sixteen-year-old Judy is off to high
school.' Then I remembered there probably wouldn't be any school, because
of us."
...
On the second day Bowsie Maddison, a Baptist Church choir-singer,
encouraged the others to join in hymn-singing. "I got Caleb Rushton to sing
a duet with me on "Stranger of Galilee" and "Abide with Me". If that didn't
cheer them up, I'd sing them some of my own love ballads. It was kind of
eerie, hearing them sweet tunes in that dungeon."
...
On Sunday, all the men began to pray aloud. "I prayed real hard," said
Kempt, "and I'm not usually a praying man."
His praying caused Hugh Guthro to remember something. "It suddenly flashed
on me that one of the guys had hung a carrot on the tunnel wall. It was a
joke, you see, because one of the miners had the nickname of 'Bunny'. I
stumbled along the wall until I found it. The others all blessed that joke
as I shared the precious carrot with them.
...
By Tuesday, all their water was gone and their lamp batteries were
exhausted, plunging them in darkness; and they finished nibbling all the
stale sandwiches collected from dead miners' lunchboxes. 'We always said
grace after our crumbs," said the devout Bowman.
Their eyes smarted in the stale air, and they groggily scrambled around in
offshoots of the cavern. They smelled gas, which was like the burning of
rubber, and sour sweat, and they thought they saw darting, elusive flashes
of yellow light like tbe phosphorescent creatures that inhabit the deep sea

"Look at that glow," said Joey Holloway. "It's almost bright in here."
"Once in a while, you stumbled into a real doozy of a pocket of gas," said
Levi Milley. "You could tell, because it turned your bones clammy in the
pitch blackness."
...
Maddison kept brooding over whether or not he'd paid his last insurance
premium and whether his wife Solange, in case of his death, would be able
to get by. To ward off the agony of his thirst swollen tongue, he started
talking about odd things that came into bis mind ­ dart-throwing, the
Montreal Canadiens hockey team.
Lowther noticed that beside him Harold Brine hadn't moved in quite a while.
Lowther reached over and touched him.
"I'm awake," said Brine. "I was thinking about a nice juicy steak."
"You shouldn't think of that," Lowther scolded. "Let's think instead about
banging away at the pipes."
...
Young Leadbetter tried to stifle his sobs. "My grandfather was killed in
this mine nearly thirty-five years ago," he said chokingly. "Now it's me.
My two-year-old will never remember that she had a father."
...
Gorley Kempt kept licking his dry lips. He was sure his tongue had swollen
to double its normal size, "thick and fuzzy like a wad of fat", and he kept
thinking of the vanilla ice-cream cone he'd bought at a grocery store on
McGee Street just before the shift. Then he began wondering if it was cold
above. He'd just bought anti-freeze for his car, as well as a length of
rubber hose for its radiator. He now began to worry whether he'd ever be
able to pay back the $1.45 he owed Springhill Auto Supplies.
...
On Wednesday, hunger gnawed fiercely, and their thirst seemed unendurable.
Joseph McDonald, prostrate with a broken leg and hip, recalled, "We chewed
the bark which we stripped off the timbers used to shore up the roof. We
moistened our throats with drops of our own urine. What else could we do?
The pain from my leg was agonizing. When my leg was moved, I could hear my
bones, sounding like a bag of broken glass. I kept praying, using my
fingers for a rosary."
...
Then, at two o'clock, the indestructible Gorley Kempt crawled to a six-inch
ventilator pipe jutting from the rock, and delivered his miraculously timed
shout.
He heard the rescuer's faint, answering call coming from the other end of
the pipe, 60 feet away.
"For God's sake, come and get us!" hollered Kempt.
...
Inside, the trapped 12 slapped one anothers backs exultantly. Outside, the
shout went up, "There's life in the mine!"
Mobs surged to the pit head, oblivious of the drenching rain, and the gloom
was changed to a bedlam of honking horns and clanging church bells.
The hard-bitten draegermen worked in a frenzy, and they wept unashamedly,
tears cutting grooves through the coal dust that made odd masks of their
faces.
The rescue team shoved a copper tube through the ventilator pipe, and
poured down water, hot coffee, then soup.
...
An exchange of happy obscenities flowed through the pipe. Rescuer George
Scott yelled instructions with a burr-tongued accent. Harold Brine hollered
back: "Take the marbles out of your mouth and talk English."
Gorley Kempt's old buddy, Gunner Reese, shouted down the pipe, "How you
getting on, Gorley?"
"Pretty good," replied Kempt amiably. "How's your love Iife, Gunner?"
'We've got some soup," said Reese. 'You guys want soup?"
Kempt, who hadn't eaten a meal since Friday, answered dryly, "It all
depends. What flavour of soup is it?"
Joseph McDonald kept urging the diggers on. "I know those fellows," he
said. "They'll just keep digging like madmen. Them's the babies I give
thanks to ­ the barefaced men."
...
By 4:30 Thursday morning, six days and eight hours after they had been
entombed, the last of the 12 survivors made the long joy-ride to the
surface, dragged in wire-mesh stretchers. They were in a jaunty mood. As
they approached the surface, one of the survivors asked, "What's the noise
up there outside?"
"Those are people cheering you," he was told.
"Oh, that's dandy," he said. "I thought it was bill collectors waiting for us."
Gaunt from having lost 10 pounds each, the men were declared amazingly fit
at Springhill Hospital. Wilfred Hunter was flown by Navy helicopter to
Halffax, where surgeons amputated his left leg between the hip and the
knee.
...
Two days later, on Saturday morning, the electrifying news of Springhill's
second miracle was flashed across Canada.
Wilfred Hunter's twin brother, Frank, was not actually embedded in the roof
as a corpse, as Wilfred thought he'd seen him. Frank was very much alive;
one of seven miners entombed for nine days in another pocket at the
13,000-foot level. All of them had survived by sucking on coal for water
and gnawing on the bark from the spruce pit props.
Their salvation came when barefaced rescuer Vernon Barry heard "a faint
scratching, like a mouse, then a moan." It was from Barney Martin, who had
been pinned, face downward in a praying position, in a stone grave six feet
long and three feet deep. His nostrils almost plugged with coal dust, his
lips swollen like a Ubangi's, he had spent 200 hours without any food and
all alone in his stone tomb, trying to scratch his way to freedom.
His fingernails were worn down past the flesh of his fingertips, which were
rubbed to a bloody pulp. He had just strength to whisper, "God must have
saved this little hole for me."
...
The rescuers thrust through the rockjammed tunnel 75 feet away from Barry
and found six others still alive. The man responsible for keeping their
spirits high was Maurice Ruddick. Putting aside his own longing for his
family, he had sung to his trapped comrades all those nine days.
It was Maurice who had thought of celebrating the 29th birthday of Garnet
Clarke with an underground birthday party the previous Monday. He'd broken
their last stale meat-loaf sandwich into squares, and poured their last
water into equal sips in a wine-bottle cap, and led them in crooning,
"Happy birthday, dear Garnet Clarke, happy birthday to you."
When the draegermen broke through to their grotto, Ruddick greeted his
rescuers cheerfully: "Give me a drink of water and I'll sing you a song."
...
One of the men in the pocket didn't make it. Percy Rector, 55, died in the
depths of the earth in agony because his mates didn't have a knife. Two
heavy timbers had snapped shut like a giant trap on his arm. For five days,
his comrades listened in numb horror to his cries.
"Please cut my arm off, boys," he pleaded. "O, God ­ O, merciful heavens ­
take my arm and let me go!"
"Even if we thought the shock wouldn't kill you, Percy, we couldn't help
you," one of them comforted him. 'We have no knife."
"Fellows, forgive me for causing you this trouble," Percy would apologize.
Then he would moan imploringly again, "O Lord, have mercy! Rip my arm off."

God had mercy on Tuesday when Percy Rector finally died.
...
The other entombed men spent the nine days dreaming.
"All the time," recalled Douglas Jewkes, a wiry little man of thirty-seven,
"I dreamed of drinking 7 Up. I could imagine myself falling into a whole
well of 7 Up. I thought, if I ever get out of here alive, I'll buy ten
cases of 7 Up, and lap it up."
Herbert Pepperdine recalled, "I kept dreaming of a quart of whisky and a
big Popsicle. I thought, dying of thirst would be a horrible way to go. I
had a terrible despair for water. If someone had come up to me with a
gallon of water and said, 'Drink this and die in ten minutes,' I'd have
drained it down and wouldn't have cared."
Currie Smith said, "We crawled into holes, touching each other. I'm glad we
recorded our names with chalk on the broken timbers, and that we kept
calling out our names after our lamps went dead. Just to remind us we were
still alive and breathing."
Even Maurice Ruddick had his moments of pessimism. "I often thought four of
my twelve children were so young, they'd never remember me if I went ­
Leah, Jesse, Iris and Ktinka. Twice I broke down and cried quietly in the
darkness. Still, I made sure nobody knew. It might have broken the dam and
started the others leaking and moping with the eyes."
...
The men emerged from the pit head, their red-rimmed eyes shielded against
the glare of the TV klieg lights.
"Those lights!" muttered one survivor, blinking and staring. "They look
like angels coming from heaven!"
When Doug Jewkes was carried out on a stretcher, his brothers, Roy and
Bobby, patted him on the shoulder. Doug Jewkes said to Bobby, "My pit boots
are awful heavy, boy. Would you take them off for me?"
Bobby Jewkes took off his brother's boots and flung them as far down into
the mine slope as he could. "You'll never be needing those again," he
vowed. (As a fitting ending to his dream of drinking 7 Up. Doug Jewkes was
offered ­ and took ­ a job in the warehouse of the Toronto branch of the 7
Up Company.)
...
To the nearly 400 men who risked their lives to free the seemingly doomed
miners went the medal of the Royal Canadian Humane Association ­ the first
time the award was given to a group. To the same men went a special gold
medal from the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission. It was the second instance of
a group award by the Hero Commission; the other went to the heroes at the
sinking of the Titanic in 1912.
...
Postscript: The Springhill mine closed. A Canadian government prison was
built on the site.
Today the town remains a tourist attraction because of its history of mine
disaster and the heroics of the Springhill miners and rescuers; and for the
contemporary museum marking the accomplishments of one of its other famous
citizens ­ singer Anne Murray. - hm