Odds ‘n’ sods: Always watch out!

During the 1970s I worked at the Geco copper mine in Manitouwadge, Ont. With 650 employees, it was about half the size of a big diamond mine in Canada today.

One year we were informed our mine had won the John T. Ryan safety award. This meant it was one of the safest mines in Canada! There had not been a fatal injury at our mine in more than 10 years, since the first shaft was sunk.

For some reason, during the next two years after that award, we had three fatalities.

Because I was a draftsman in the engineering department, I always got the job of measuring up the accident scene and making a drawing for an inquiry. It would show things like “the machine was here, the rock was there and the body was found here.” The body would be gone but there was usually still blood around.

I will always remember the first one: Terry Thompson. I knew him quite well – when I decided to get married, I sold him my Mustang.

It always seemed that these accidents were caused by a combination of several factors. Sometimes the machine wasn’t working right but would be used anyway. Sometimes conditions weren’t perfect, but by taking a shortcut the job could be done. It always seemed to me that the fatality was unnecessary.

For years I puzzled over what might have caused these things. I think that what may have happened is that after we won the safety award, people got the idea that they were working in a safe place. If you’re working in a safe place, you don’t need to watch out all the time. But in a mine, you always need to watch out, because you never know when something might happen. It might be something you don’t even know about – stress in the rock you can’t see, or effects from work going on in a different area.

I remember our mine manager Jack Graham used to say, “A miner has two jobs to do: First, he must make his workplace safe to work in. Then he must go ahead and do the work. This is why a miner is paid more than a construction worker or a factory worker.”

This is a story I tell to our mine training students here in Yellowknife. I tell them that when they are working in a mine, whether it’s open pit or underground, they must “always watch out!”

– The author is a retired mining technician living in Yellowknife, NWT.