Nova Scotia (48 page)

   
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.