How One of the World's Deepest Coal Mines Crushed Its Own Miners: Springhill, Nova Scotia
Vanished Canada
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Springhill's No. 2 colliery followed a coal seam that did not lie flat. It pitched downhill, so the mine could not be a shaft - it had to be a slope, driven down along the coal, a little further every year. By 1958 that slope ran something in the order of 14,200 feet, and at the far end of it men were cutting coal more than 4,000 feet below the surface of Nova Scotia. Nobody set out to build one of the deepest coal mines in the world. They kept following a seam that kept going down.
Depth like that buys coal nobody else can reach, and it charges for it in a currency shallow mines never have to pay. The bill came due three times, and not the same way twice.
On 21 February 1891, at about half past twelve, accumulated coal dust exploded through the No. 1 and No. 2 collieries, which were joined underground at the 1,300-foot level. 125 were killed, 17 of them under sixteen years of age, in a town of about 4,800 people. On 1 November 1956 at 5:07 in the afternoon, cars loaded with fine coal dust broke away from a train in the No. 4 mine, ran back down the slope, derailed and struck a power line. The arc lit the dust they had been hauling out for safety. The royal commission recorded 39 dead. 88 men were brought out alive.
And on the evening of 23 October 1958, the mine did something most people outside the coalfields have never heard of. It bumped.
A bump is not fire and it is not gas. It is what happens when the pillars of coal left standing to hold the roof are finally crushed by the weight of rock above them, and the floor and the roof of a working come together. Nothing burns, there is no warning, and there is nothing to escape along, because the way out has just closed. 174 men were underground and 75 were killed - some accounts say 74. Depth caused it: the deeper the seam, the greater the load.
Then the rescue. Draegermen and barefaced miners dug by hand through a fall of rock 160 feet thick, stopping every few feet to listen. On 29 October a faint tapping came back along a pipe, and at 2:25 in the morning on 30 October the tunnel broke through to twelve men alive. Seven more were found on 1 November, nine days after the bump. The CBC was broadcasting live from the No. 2 pithead while it happened, and that footage is still in its archive. Springhill is widely called the first major international news event covered live on television - this video examines exactly what that claim can and cannot support. One of the survivors, Maurice Ruddick, was named Canada's Citizen of the Year for 1958. When the Governor of Georgia invited the survivors to Jekyll Island, Ruddick, the only Black man among them, was housed separately in a trailer, on a separate beach, at separate ceremonies.
Mining ended in the early 1970s. The pumps stopped and the workings filled with roughly 4,000,000 cubic metres of groundwater sitting at a steady 18C, because deep rock is warm rock. Since the late 1980s that water has been pumped up through heat pumps to heat and cool a community centre, a fire hall, part of a college campus and the businesses of the industrial park. The same depth that crushed the pillars is the reason the water never freezes.
What you'll learn
Why pitching seams forced a slope instead of a shaft, and how that made Springhill one of the deepest coal mines in the world
What a bump actually is, and why it is a completely different disaster from the 1891 and 1956 dust explosions
The documented record of 1891, 1956 and 1958 - the tolls, the breakthrough at 2:25 am and the nine days underground
How flooded workings at 18C came to heat and cool the buildings of the town above them
Educational and historical content.
Key sources
Nova Scotia Archives, Men in the Mines: Disasters in the Mines
Parks Canada, Springhill Coal Mining National Historic Site of Canada
Report of the Royal Commission on the No. 4 mine explosion, Springhill, 1 November 1956
CBC Digital Archives, live coverage from the Springhill No. 2 pithead, 1958
National Film Board of Canada, The 1958 Springhill Mine Disaster
and other sources
#history #Canada #Springhill #NovaScotia #coalmining
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How One of the World's Deepest Coal Mines Crushed Its Own Miners: Springhill, Nova Scotia
Vanished Canada
84 views
Springhill's No. 2 colliery followed a coal seam that did not lie flat. It pitched downhill, so the mine could not be a shaft - it had to be a slope, driven down along the coal, a little further every year. By 1958 that slope ran something in the order of 14,200 feet, and at the far end of it men were cutting coal more than 4,000 feet below the surface of Nova Scotia. Nobody set out to build one of the deepest coal mines in the world. They kept following a seam that kept going down.
Depth like that buys coal nobody else can reach, and it charges for it in a currency shallow mines never have to pay. The bill came due three times, and not the same way twice.
On 21 February 1891, at about half past twelve, accumulated coal dust exploded through the No. 1 and No. 2 collieries, which were joined underground at the 1,300-foot level. 125 were killed, 17 of them under sixteen years of age, in a town of about 4,800 people. On 1 November 1956 at 5:07 in the afternoon, cars loaded with fine coal dust broke away from a train in the No. 4 mine, ran back down the slope, derailed and struck a power line. The arc lit the dust they had been hauling out for safety. The royal commission recorded 39 dead. 88 men were brought out alive.
And on the evening of 23 October 1958, the mine did something most people outside the coalfields have never heard of. It bumped.
A bump is not fire and it is not gas. It is what happens when the pillars of coal left standing to hold the roof are finally crushed by the weight of rock above them, and the floor and the roof of a working come together. Nothing burns, there is no warning, and there is nothing to escape along, because the way out has just closed. 174 men were underground and 75 were killed - some accounts say 74. Depth caused it: the deeper the seam, the greater the load.
Then the rescue. Draegermen and barefaced miners dug by hand through a fall of rock 160 feet thick, stopping every few feet to listen. On 29 October a faint tapping came back along a pipe, and at 2:25 in the morning on 30 October the tunnel broke through to twelve men alive. Seven more were found on 1 November, nine days after the bump. The CBC was broadcasting live from the No. 2 pithead while it happened, and that footage is still in its archive. Springhill is widely called the first major international news event covered live on television - this video examines exactly what that claim can and cannot support. One of the survivors, Maurice Ruddick, was named Canada's Citizen of the Year for 1958. When the Governor of Georgia invited the survivors to Jekyll Island, Ruddick, the only Black man among them, was housed separately in a trailer, on a separate beach, at separate ceremonies.
Mining ended in the early 1970s. The pumps stopped and the workings filled with roughly 4,000,000 cubic metres of groundwater sitting at a steady 18C, because deep rock is warm rock. Since the late 1980s that water has been pumped up through heat pumps to heat and cool a community centre, a fire hall, part of a college campus and the businesses of the industrial park. The same depth that crushed the pillars is the reason the water never freezes.
What you'll learn
Why pitching seams forced a slope instead of a shaft, and how that made Springhill one of the deepest coal mines in the world
What a bump actually is, and why it is a completely different disaster from the 1891 and 1956 dust explosions
The documented record of 1891, 1956 and 1958 - the tolls, the breakthrough at 2:25 am and the nine days underground
How flooded workings at 18C came to heat and cool the buildings of the town above them
Educational and historical content.
Key sources
Nova Scotia Archives, Men in the Mines: Disasters in the Mines
Parks Canada, Springhill Coal Mining National Historic Site of Canada
Report of the Royal Commission on the No. 4 mine explosion, Springhill, 1 November 1956
CBC Digital Archives, live coverage from the Springhill No. 2 pithead, 1958
National Film Board of Canada, The 1958 Springhill Mine Disaster
and other sources
#history #Canada #Springhill #NovaScotia #coalmining