The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #115567 Message #2475849
Posted By: pdq
25-Oct-08 - 11:24 AM
Thread Name: Folklore: Springhill Mine Disaster
Subject: RE: Folklore: Springhill Mine Disaster
'Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster,'
By Melissa Fay Greene
Fatalism come true: Surreality surrounds Springhill, Nova Scotia, mining disaster of 1958
Sunday, March 30, 2003
By Roger K. Miller
One of the most striking things about coal miners and their families is the streak of fatalism that runs through their lives, the feeling that the work is an accident waiting to happen. So it was with the coal miners of Springhill, Nova Scotia, when disaster came, not for the first time, on Oct. 23, 1958.
Melissa Fay Greene proved herself a skilled hand at compelling nonfiction in "Praying for Sheetrock" and "The Temple Bombing." She continues her success with this story of how 174 men on the afternoon shift that day went into the No. 2 mine at Springhill, and only 99 came out alive, the last of them eight days later.
It was the longest that men underground had ever survived in a mine disaster.
But then, Springhill was coal country and no stranger to coal superlatives. It sat on an "underground palace of coal," the finest soft coal in Canada, and its No. 2 slope was the deepest coal mine in the world. The first coal miners union in North America was founded in Springhill in 1879.
Disasters figured prominently in its past. In 1956, 39 men died in the companion No. 4 mine. One hundred twenty-five men and boys died in the Great Springhill Explosion of 1891.
It's enough to make miners edgy, waiting for that "bump," the sound of shifting rock. It makes them especially edgy when the engineers tinker with the mines, as they had been doing to No. 2.
"They're going to kill us" with their renovations, one miner said. Another said, "The old-timers know, they know it's coming."
Still another said, "If you hear a bump, you're all right, eh?" The 174 men did not have time to hear the bump that came that October day -- though it rocked every building on the surface and was felt by ships at sea -- and heaved upward the rock floor on three levels of the mine.
Aside from several written and news radio sources, Greene has based her book on her interviews and those conducted by others in 1958-60 and in 1993. Thus, gaps in the record, rather than any deficiencies in the writing, contribute to an incomplete feel in the description of the early stages of the miners' entrapment.
However, this impression diminishes and the tension increases as she gets further into the desperate days underground. Then, when she tells the stories of each survivor's recovery, the narrative opens up, like the petals of a flower.
It is almost as if the men's being above ground affected her perspective.
The author, who focuses on two groups of survivors, captures some of the agony of their waiting, raging with thirst in utter darkness for rescue or, what seems increasingly likely, death. Most painful to read is their inability to help a miner whose arm was pinned. They must listen as he begs them to cut off his arm, to his hallucinations about waterfalls, to his dying.
She also captures the anguish of the waiting families, the media swirl and the insensitivity of some press and clergy. One matter she doesn't detail is the fate of coal mining afterward.
Adding insult to injury, the survivors were unemployed when the mine was closed after the cave-in.
There is a kind of sideshow to the catastrophe. An eager-beaver tourism official for Georgia had the bright idea of inviting the survivors and their families to a vacation on the state's Jekyll Island, seeing the possibility of great publicity.
What he did not reckon with was the racism of the governor, Marvin Griffin, a raving segregationist. One of the miners was black, and the attempts to keep the Canadians -- all friends, naturally -- "amicably" segregated during their common vacation were at once ludicrous, pathetic, enraging and surreal.
Even so, they managed to have a good time on the vacation, the only one that many of them would ever take. Somehow it is a fitting cap to the story that these people -- whose existences were always constrained by circumstances, manipulated by others and subject to daily peril -- were able to snatch pleasure out of the jaws of stupidity.
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Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a freelance writer and reviewer for several publications.