Amazing Medical Stories (14 page)

I was digging at the coalface of the old Syndicate Mine in Springhill when the lights suddenly flashed out. Total darkness enveloped me, and for a second I panicked until I heard retired miner Blaine Hayden chuckling. He was our guide at the Miners' Museum in Springhill and was giving us a little taste of what trapped miners had experienced in past disasters. Except for the portion of the Syndicate Mine used by the museum, the mines in this small eastern Canadian community are now all closed. Although mining employed up to a thousand people at its peak, many are not sad to see the end of an industry that claimed the lives of over four hundred people through the years. The Syndicate Mine, shut down in 1970, was the last to close. Ironically, it claimed the life of the town's last mining victim when a resident working an illegal “bootleg” mine found himself emerging into the Syndicate's shaft. Sliding down a steep incline, he ran into a two-thousand-volt generator, and somehow his finger entered a minute hole, the only uninsulated portion of equipment. He was electrocuted.

Springhill has had three major mining disasters, explained Dr. R. Arnold Burden. Burden (not related to me) is a retired local family doctor who entered the mines to provide medical care during the last two. The first major disaster was the explosion of 1891, set off by an explosive charge used to loosen coal. One hundred and twenty-one people perished, including seventeen boys under seventeen years of age. The hero was young Danny Robertson, who, although badly burned himself, saved the life of twelve-year-old Willie Terris by carrying the child out of the pit to safety.

The explosion of 1956 was triggered by coal cars in the Number Two
Mine. On a cold night in January, the cars broke loose and slid down a steep incline, shearing a high-tension cable. The sparks ignited the highly inflammable coal dust. One of my own patients, John Pashkoski, was an eyewitness to the fireball that demolished the bankhead building, rising hundreds of feet into the air and killing five people on the surface.

Dr. Burden described how eerily masked draegermen — rescuers equipped with a breathing apparatus invented by Alexander Draeger — first entered the mine. Various toxic gases, which miners call “black-damp,” “whitedamp” and “afterdamp,” filled the mine. Most deadly was “after-damp,” or carbon monoxide, which is created after an explosion (hence the name). Following the draegermen came the “bare-faced” rescuers, including the doctor, who braved mine gases without protective gear. He had worked in the mines to help put himself through medical school and knew his way around as well as anyone. Dr. Burden noted that many of the victims showed the bright red lips of carbon monoxide poisoning. At one point he was overcome by gas himself and was briefly unconscious. Later a mine engineer by the name of Haslam approached Arnold Burden and showed him a note: “EVACUATE THE MINE WITH ALL POSSIBLE HASTE.” Concentrations of explosive gas exceeding nineteen per cent had been detected. At twenty per cent the entire mine could explode, killing everyone in it, and the resulting fireball would kill many more at the surface. Fortunately the gases never quite reached this level.

The hero of the 1956 disaster was Deputy Overman Conrad “Con” Embree. Trapped with forty-six others and in danger of asphyxiation, he had the bright idea of cutting holes in a compressed air hose used to operate mine equipment. Hacking openings at one-foot intervals, each miner had enough fresh air to survive. Three of their number were dispatched to find help. This they did by “leapfrogging” up from one mine level to the next, tapping into compressed air at each interval. A lack of compressed air at the forty-six-hundred-foot level almost killed them. All told, thirty-nine men died and eighty-eight were rescued. This was to be neither the last nor the worst disaster the town would suffer before the end of the decade.

The Springhill “Bump” of October 23, 1958, rivetted world attention. Number Two Mine was one of the oldest and deepest in North America. When coal is removed from a seam, tension builds up in the hard rock

A helicopter evacuates a victim of the 1958 Springhill Bump, one of the worst mine disasters of the twentieth century.
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strata which overlie the mine, and the deeper the mine the greater the tension. Every once in a while this energy is released as an earthquakelike tremor called a “bump.” Bumps were quite common at Springhill, especially in the Number Two Mine, and were usually quite mild. Not so this autumn evening. At 8:06 p.m. a massive bump occurred; it was felt over a fifteen-mile radius and registered on seismographs across eastern Canada. One hundred and seventy-four men were working in the mine. In many places the bump literally compressed the floor of the tunnel into the ceiling, and men were crushed like insects between two bricks. Arnold Burden told me that the locations of buried bodies were often identified by the trickle of blood oozing from between the collapsed areas of tunnels. Once again Dr. Burden entered the disaster area. Luckily this time, in the absence of an explosion, there was no highly poisonous “afterdamp.”
A trapped miner by the name of Leon Melanson was found partially buried. The leg of another miner was thought to be jammed under his chin, impeding rescue operations, and Dr. Burden was asked to amputate it. Arnold declined, and his suspicions were confirmed when subsequent digging revealed it was the man's own leg twisted into an “impossible” position by the force of the bump.

Other medical help came in the form of two young surgeons from Halifax. Dr. Charles Graham and Dr. Garth Vaughan flew in by military helicopter, bringing a load of drugs and supplies to assist the injured. Their landing field was the local ball field, lit by the headlights of cars belonging to the RCMP and the townsfolk. When they heard there were miners still trapped, they also entered the melee in the pit to render assistance.

Press coverage of “The Bump” was massive, and aid poured in amounting to millions of dollars. Hope of finding more survivors had just about been abandoned when world attention was again galvanized by the discovery of some men trapped at the thirteen-thousand-foot level. By chance a team of rescuers had walked past a broken six-inch pipe and heard a distant voice crying, “There are twelve of us in here!”

They were imprisoned behind eighty-three feet of solid coal and were suffering from hunger and dehydration. A smaller pipe was threaded through, and water and soup were pumped in. Rescuers took only fourteen hours to tunnel through to the trapped men, a task which normally would have taken several days. The last victims rescued were another group of seven, also at the thirteen-thousand-foot level. They had been reduced to drinking their own urine by the time they were freed, eight and a half days after “The Bump.” One of these men, Maurice Ruddick, became known as the “The Singing Miner” when he told rescuers that if they gave him a drink, he'd sing them a song. A talented vocalist, he had been crooning to keep up the spirits of his fellows. The rescuers joked that Workmen's Compensation had sent them specially to find Maurice since the agency would be bankrupt if it had to look after his twelve children. One of his daughters, Sylvia, was once a patient of mine, and she, too, sings beautifully. Another miner told reporters he craved nothing so much as a 7-Up during his ordeal. The company sent him and the other miners a truckload of the beverage.

Maurice Ruddick, “The Singing Miner,” enjoys a smoke in his hospital bed after his rescue from the pits.
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Many of the injured miners were admitted to Springhill's All Saints Hospital, and they were delighted when Prince Philip made a detour from an official visit to Ottawa to see them. Subsequently, Ed Sullivan invited Dr. Arnold Burden and two of the trapped miners, Gorley Kempt and Caleb Rushton, to be on his national television show. Less then twenty-four hours after leaving the mine, the exhausted trio found themselves in New York. They were gratified to see a Broadway theatre with the banner “More Men Alive” during the taxi ride to CBS studios. A bit worse for wear, they were loudly cheered by the audience when Sullivan introduced them. Springhill's rescuers were honoured with the Carnegie Medal for their courage, and the award now resides in the Springhill town hall. Dr. Burden later assisted the National Research Council of the Academy of
Sciences in Washington, D.C., in a disaster study entitled, “Individual and Group Behaviour in a Coal Mine Disaster,” which was published in 1960.

With the end of coal mining, the town of Springhill found itself in dire economic straits. A minimum-security prison now provides some employment. More recently, superstar singer Anne Murray, a Springhill native, helped inaugurate an annual music festival. I had a chance to speak briefly with Ms. Murray, whose father, Dr. Carson Murray, had attended miners in hospital during and after the disaster. Anne, a physical education graduate before her singing career took off, also has two brothers who practise internal medicine in Maritime Canada.

Visitors to Springhill should be sure to take a tour of the Syndicate Mine to get a first-hand taste of the town's history. Despite a past marred by tragedy, the Springhillers remain a warm and welcoming people.

George Burden

Stephen Weaver's story is fascinating, not only because it involves an amazing con job, but also because of the public outcry that his masquerade provoked.

The tale began to unfold early in 1979, when Weaver, a thirty-four-year-old American, contacted Dr. M.R. MacDonald, the registrar of the Provincial Medical Board (PMB) in Nova Scotia. Identifying himself as “Dr. Stephen Weaver,” he informed the registrar that he wished to discuss the possibility of establishing a medical practice in Lockeport. Weaver told Dr. MacDonald that he had recently been in touch with the Alberta Medical Association (AMA) and had learned that the small fishing community of seven hundred was in desperate need of a family doctor. He stated that he was anxious to be the physician who came to its rescue.

When questioned about his medical credentials, Weaver assured Dr. MacDonald that he had graduated from the University of North Dakota Medical School and had done a rotating internship at the University of Rochester Hospital in Minnesota. He also said that he held a Minnesota medical licence and certification from the National Board of Medical Examiners. Dr. MacDonald told “Dr.” Weaver that his credentials appeared to be sound and added that there should be no reason why the young physician couldn't set up a family practice in town if he was able to meet the provincial medical board's criteria and satisfied the requirements of immigration authorities and Lockeport officials.

Dr. MacDonald apparently thought little more about that brief conversation until he began to hear about a young American doctor with a very busy medical practice in Lockeport, and disturbing calls began to arrive at the PMB office, requesting licensing information on the new physician.

“Doc” Weaver in his office.
SHELBURNE COUNTY MUSEUM