“I was an underground miner; drilling, blasting, mucking, bolting and timbering until one fateful day in March of 1977. On night shift, on the 14th at 8:50 pm, a Monday, the shift boss had just gone through my workplace, a big cave called a stope. I worked there alone as was the practice, with only the light from the battery operated miner’s lamp, because there was only enough work for one man. I was moving broken rock into a millhole going down to the next level below where a trammer would pull it out of a chute for transport to the shaft.

“All of a sudden, the heads of the long steel bolts, the thickness of a finger, that were reinforcing the walls of the stope snapped off like bullets and a big section of the wall where I was standing came off like an avalanche and I was in it. My first thought was – now I die. Interestingly, there was no panic! When the big pile of rocks came to a stop, I was buried in it up to my waist. The light on my helmet was still on and I realized then, that it was just by the grace of God that I was still alive. I did not shout for help because I knew nobody would hear me. At lunch time the trammer came to check on me and that is when I was found. He rang the alarm and my rescue started.

“Just the very Friday before a stope miner was killed by rock fall; he too was working alone. That day the company decided that all stope miners working alone must be checked on three times a shift not just before and after lunch. That is what saved me because my shiftboss would not have come back until near the end of the shift and that would have been too late. They started digging me out, put me on a stretcher, took me to the surface and moved me by company ambulance to the hospital in Campbell River. It was a one and a half hour ride in excruciating pain. They could not call the helicopter since it was night time.
 
“X-rays and immediate surgery followed. It was discovered that I suffered a multiple fractured pelvis and the urethra was severed by the broken bones inside. A supra-pubic catheter was installed to drain the massive internal bleeding. I was in intensive care for three days and then was flown to the Victoria General Hospital for further treatment. The doctor attending to me on the night of the accident told me later that he did not think I would survive. It is by the grace of God that I lived! I was off work for a whole year and a week. For a full month I was on my back and told I might never walk again. Eventually, as my condition improved I was taken home by ambulance to fully recuperate, all the way from Victoria.  Miracuously, I am walking again.

“One year there was a mother bear with two cubs the size of shoe boxes, right by the entrance to the mine parking lot over by the grassy patches and maple trees on the hillside. My workplace was located half a kilometer before the office building where we arrived by bus each shift. Therefore, when I walked from the office to the backfill plant and back, I had to walk right past the bear family. At first I felt uneasy, but mother bear never acted threatening. Sometimes she made a certain sound and the cubs would climb up the maple trees. Other times I knew they were already up there by the way she looked up into the trees. Remarkably, she was never hostile.

“Another year, a mother bear with a single cub was feeding daily on the grassy slope right behind the backfill plant. At that time the yard was being cemented and forklifts and other noisy mixers were being operated by the mine crew. But even that did not seem to bother mama bear. I have video footage to prove it!

“I loved that job, just for the fact that I got to see all the wildlife. The bears came out in April, stayed all spring and moved to a higher elevation in the summer heat. They came back down in the fall until it was time to turn in for the winter.

“You hear a lot of negative stories about mining that are not true. For example, do you know that plants actually grow in the backfill that is supposed to be so poisinous, even underground? When miners eat their lunches and drop apple and orange seeds, they sprout and grow. They have no color because without sun they have no chlorophyl. But grow they do! It is amazing!

“What is backfill? It is ground rock. In a stope the miner drills and blasts the metal-bearing rock called ore. That rock is transported to a jaw-crusher at the bottom of the shaft to break it into smaller sized pieces for hauling to the surface. On the surface it travels on a conveyor belt to the mill where it gets crushed even finer and ends up eventually as sand in a slurry. Through a flotation process with chemicals the metal is separated as a foam. The rock, or sand slurry, is pumped through six inch lines to holding tanks at the backfill plant.

The operator, I was one of them, takes the slurry, adds cement and sends it back underground through a network of six inch lines to the stopes where it came from. That serves two purposes and is like getting two flies with one swat.

“When you look at the park, the mine site is just the area of a little pin prick. It is not doing any harm and is a huge benefit to the local economy. We need to have mines. Years ago companies were careless and just took; they devestated the landscape. Today they are more environmentally sensitive and the government makes sure that everything is done right, especially in a provincial park. I want to say it again: Mining is compatible with nature and a huge benefit to the local economy!

“I hope they go on mining for a long time yet!

“After twenty-eight years at the mine, I retired in 2002 at the age sixty-three. In all those years, I rode the shift bus to and from the mine, a distance several times to the moon and back, at 175 kms a day.”