Editorial: Sullivan tragedy grips the East Kootenays

Asphyxia’s gentle death has haunted miners since the first tunnel was dug deep into a mountainside thousands of years ago, and it continues with us to present times, usually in the primitive artisanal mining camps of the Third World.

Think for a moment of southern Ecuador’s small, chaotic Nambija high-grade gold camp in the late 1990s. Mined by pre-Columbian tribes and Spanish conquistadors, Nambija was rediscovered in 1980 and swiftly descended upon by 25,000 artisanals.

By the mid 1990s, the 3,000 miners who had stayed on were making their living in a giant anthill made up of 120 km of narrow tunnels accessible from 800 surface openings. Because they were using oxygen-consuming lighting and little ventilation, these poor wretches were too-often dying of asphyxiation at the ends of their tunnels, their blue bodies hanging off ropes from the walls and falling down the sides of the stopes.

Placer Dome’s entrance into the Nambija camp with junior Canuc Resources in 1997 brought with it some hope that a big, modern mining company’s know-how and financial muscle could unite the camp, boost productivity and dramatically improve safety conditions for the locals. (However, the two foreign companies eventually gave up and left.)

So often then, asphyxiation — outside of catastrophic fires — is a job hazard associated with the crudest of mining in far-off places.

That’s what made the deaths in mid-May of four workers by asphyxiation at Teck Cominco‘s (TEK.B-T) closed Sullivan mine in the small town of Kimberley, B.C., so shocking: it happened right here at home, long after the mining stopped, and at a mine site owned by one of the world’s best operators.

The four killed were: environmental contractor Doug Erickson, 48; Teck Cominco employee Bob Newcombe, 49; and paramedics Kim Weitzel, 44, and Shawn Currier, 21.

It’s such a strange story: Investigators believe Erickson was overcome by oxygen-deficient air on May 15 while he carried out routine, monthly environmental sampling of a well inside a small shed on the decommissioned Sullivan mine site. The shed is located at the toe of a reclaimed mine-waste dump, and had been there for four years with no problems.

Erickson’s partner, worried that he hadn’t returned from work, prompted a search for him. On May 17, alone, Newcombe entered the deadly shed to discover Erickson’s lifeless body slumped in a pool of water. He phoned for emergency help.

It’s not clear, but apparently the first two emergency responders, Weitzel and Currier, arrived on the scene, met Newcombe and the three entered the shed without masks and died from asphyxiation. Finally, local firemen with proper breathing apparatus arrived to pull all four bodies into the open air.

We know air can lose its oxygen to chemical reactions with surrounding rock and to rotting organic matter, but it will be months before provincial investigators better understand what caused so much heavy, oxygen-deficient air to pool inside the shed’s enclosed space.

The first impression is that there was a sudden release of bad air from a collapsing air pocket inside the mine-waste dump that fed directly into the shed.

But what is certain right now is that proper monitoring and ventilation can negate any of these problems, and all workers and emergency personnel active at a decommissioned mine site must be made aware of these hazards, as a rare as they thankfully are.

On May 29, more than 2,000 people, including some 1,000 RCMP, paramedics, firemen and other emergency services workers from around Canada and the U.S., gathered in Kimberley for a memorial service for the fallen four. The service included a 1.8-km procession through town led by pipers and two ambulances draped in black cloth.

In attendance were B.C.’s lieutenant-governor Iona Campagnolo and minister of state for mining Bill Bennett, who vowed that “we will get to the bottom of this terrible tragedy, and do whatever has to be done to ensure it never happens again.”

The Sullivan lead-zinc mine was one of the grand old dames of Canadian mining, and only closed in December 2001 after 92 years of operation. In that time, at least 73 lives were lost in mining accidents, or about four victims every five years. What a shame this terrible math has continued into Sullivan’s deceptively tranquil reclamation phase.