“I remember my maternal grandfather - he drank Corby’s Whiskey and he liked to drink his beer. He would sit in a rocking chair and chew tobacco, with a spittoon there, and on the table, there beside him was a picture of John L. Lewis, the original union leader who formed the United Mine Workers. It was not a picture of Jesus Christ; it was a picture of John L. Lewis. He was to coal miners in Pennsylvania what Ginger Goodwin was to coal miners in British Columbia. As the immigrants came through and Lewis started fighting for their rights, both safety and labour, he got the ‘god’ status.

Both my grandfathers and my dad were union members so I have an appreciation for unions and how it all started.

You have to have an understanding of the whole picture, and I think that in my career some of that understanding has enhanced my ability to manage. I know how it got there, I do not agree how it is, but I do know how it got there.

“The mines were operated by coal barons, very similar to what was found on Vancouver Island, but the mining company had their own police force, jail, and company store. So, you worked for the company and the company paid you, but they owned the store and provided all the support services, so you gave the money right back to them.

As a Miner's Son

“My dad fought in WW II, and when he came back from the war he went right into the mine, so his whole life and career were in mining. He mined from 1946 to about 1999; he retired when he was seventy two years old. He has over fifty years mining experience. As a kid growing up, I can remember my dad worked a lot; he was always out, and always working. The wages were fair, but they were not anything outstanding; mine wages have come a long way since then, in Canada and the States.

“Sometimes, if my brother and I wanted recreation with our dad, we would go with him to the mine. On Sunday it was a ritual that we would go around and check all the mine fans and all the electrical installations. Dad would check in with the mine and there would be miners underground doing whatever kind of work they were doing, so my life in and around the mines and shops started before I was ten years old. Whenever it was stormy it was important to check all the fan shafts that the ventilation was on and the power was not knocked out, because there were miners underground and it was a very gassy mine.

“A mine only has a finite life; it does not matter whether it is a coal mine like Quinsam or hard rock like Myra or whatever. You hope a mine has a life of forty or fifty years, but sometimes it is only five years, it all depends upon the market conditions and the reserve. I remember in 1967, after the mine he worked in shut down, my dad had to travel because he had to actually go and find a mine where he could work.

My Life in Mining

“My grandfathers and then my father went into the mine, and then I went in myself, and I am not going to say my father got me my job, but his reputation did. When I hire a man’s son, or nephew, or cousin, or whatever, I not only do that man a favour, I hold him responsible. You are a good person and all the rest, and I am going to hire your son, but if he is a screw up I am going to blame you.
 
“When I started there in 1974, probably seventy percent of the work force was fifty-five years of age or older. It is the same at Quinsam, right now. It goes in cycles, and we are in a cycle now where there is this big gap from nobody going into the mines between 1990 and 1995, for the most part. Now Quinsam has got these guys from eighteen to thirty, and there is this gap from thirty to forty five, and then you have got the forty-five to sixty miners, and we older ones are just getting ready for, hopefully green pastures!

“There is a gesture that I believe is universal in the world of coal mining, which instantly declares a strike: the deliberate dumping out of a miner’s drinking water. I can still remember my first day working. I was an eighteen-year-old kid, I showed up and only knew a couple of people. I walked into the room, and there are a bunch of baskets hanging, similar to what it is at Quinsam, and you drop your basket, take your clothes off, and put your mining clothes on. I can remember dropping the basket, putting everything on and coming out of the little wooden shower facility. There were benches set up outside, and there was a track that came out of the portal, and there was electrical equipment that would take you underground. There was this little Italian guy named Cordero, I remember him very well, and another guy named Fazio, he was the general superintendent, and he was a big guy. The little guy was the chairman of the Occupational Health and Safety Commission, and he walked up to the big guy and said to him, right in front of everybody, ‘I found this can of paint underground yesterday, and it says FLAMMABLE MATERIAL. You are not allowed to take that paint underground.’ And the big Italian guy said, ‘You cannot tell me what to do!’  It got going back and forth, with swearing at each other ‘You big this…’ ‘You little this…’ We all had lunch buckets; the bottom you put your water in and the top you put your food in. They were yelling at each other with eighty guys standing around, and the little guy just took his bucket, lifted the food part off it, dumped his water, and eighty guys dumped their water, and we were on strike! That was my first day, and I was thinking ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ The strike only lasted one day, but that was the deal, all somebody had to do was dump his water bucket out and that was it.

“One experience I remember underground, when I was about nineteen or twenty years old, was working a double shift on night shift; it was about two o’clock in the morning. We were in an area of an underground mine, similar mining to what we do at Quinsam, secondary mining or pillar retreat. There is a place where we dump the coal and a place where we mine the coal. The roof was not caving the way it should, and if the roof does not cave the way it should, it exerts weight or pressure back over what they call the pillars, or your mining area. This mine was a few hundred feet deep and so, instead of the roof caving, the weight was pushing the pillars into the ground, or the floor. What we ended up having was an area around the pillars that was pushing up, or heaving. I can remember it was heaving about five inches an hour; it was significant how quickly it was coming up. So, we were trying to mine as quickly as we could, trying to get this roof to break, or to cave. We had to take the floor out to make sure we had enough height, because everything else was squeezing shut around us. I can remember it was like two o’clock in the morning, on a double shift, and I was dragging, sitting at the feeder on a shuttle car, and I looked at the roofline going from the feeder to where the miner was cutting coal. It looked like somebody had shot an arrow down through the roof, like it had split right down the roof; it started to dribble and started to open up. I was just a young guy and I had never seen anything like that before, and it was making noises and it was cracking, and the whole night the whole area was making noises. I can remember the supervisor said, ‘Okay, turn the machine around; everybody, we have got to get out.’ They turned the machine around - it was cutting the coal at the face, and we were able to get it turned around. It was squeezing so fast, it was coming up and squeezing in, they were cutting their way back out to get that machine out. We lost a lot; we lost a feeder – and when I say lost I mean it just pushed down and caved on top of it. That was a heck of an experience, as a young guy, just to see that and try to get a feel for that.

“There were a few of us young guys, just in our teens, and we would go to the edge of what they called the cave-line where we would mine the coal and we would set some roof timbers, and it would cave, same as it would do at Quinsam. The earth would be making noise, the timbers would be cracking and breaking, and we just knew the roof was caving. We would set three breaker timbers right at the edge of what we called the gob, and the supervisor would go up and lean on these timbers with his arms crossed, all relaxed, and the roof would be caving and we would all be running. We would be back a hundred feet, and would say, ‘That dumb SOB, what is he doing?!’ The roof would cave, there would be is this cloud of dust, and you would not see anything for like fifteen minutes. It would start to clear and there he would be, standing up against the timber with his arms crossed. He would say, ‘What are you all worried about? It is not going to break past here.’ Hell, we would be running for a couple hundred feet! That goes back to the supervisor being a crucial guy, knowing how things worked.

Coming to Quinsam

“I came to Canada in July 1996, and I was here for three or four months; I ended up going back to work for the company I had left before I came up, and then I came back again in March of 1997. I moved my family twice across, from country to country in about an eight month period. My wife was six months pregnant when she moved up here, and I took her back in her ninth month; we had a two-year-old daughter and a dog, and we traveled back and forth!

“I came back to Quinsam in March 1998, and there were two hundred and fifty employees. Of course, with markets and all the rest, we ended up having to downsize for several different reasons, a lot of that had to do with finances. I have  had my lows here, some real lows in my personal career, and also my highs. We had a bad accident here in 1998; two miners got covered up in 1998. Actually, it was three - one guy came out. How that ever happened – how he ever got out – you do not question it…. by the grace of God….It was just an unbelievable twenty-five hours. That was the low of my career, and I think for the mine, but I think we have had some real highs here too. We have been able to turn some things around, we have been able to hire some young people and really flip some things around. I say it is a high in my career, but it has been a team effort, many people have pitched in and we have been able to lift ourselves to a different level. I do not care whether I work here or whether I work in the midwest, I have a real passion for the company I work for, and a passion for the employees. I will stand up and defend them in any case, and they have done a good job.

“Yeah, there are definite lows, there is no doubt about it. You do not ever want to experience that, but it takes an experience, to really be able to talk about it. It is even like that with the company going under creditor protection. I think you can go get an MBA, or you can go get a Business Classification, or whatever, but until you have been there and you have done that you just do not know. The experience is its own education. It is an education when Friday comes along and the payroll person comes to you and says, ‘We do not have money to pay people. What are we going to do?’ You congregate in a room, get on a phone, and call one of your suppliers, to see if they will pay up front. You know, we did a whole bunch of those kinds of things, but it was a real learning experience. We went around and went through drawers of different desks and pulled out pencils and pens, that is maybe two or three months of supplies.

“Before I came to Campbell River I worked in the Wabash Mine in Southern Illinois. It was a small, family-run type of operation, which is very similar to Quinsam.  In Canada, you get people from many different countries coming to work in the coal mines; in the U.S. it was people from a lot of different states. There are issues here with people from different countries, I mean everybody brings their own way of doing things, and you end up finding your own niche, and that is what the people at Quinsam have been able to do. It was the same thing in the States with miners from Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Mexico, and Colorado.

“One thing I have noticed – miners are miners. It does not matter if they are miners in Campbell River, Tennessee, or Pennsylvania, they are the same breed. 

“There are mines, and I think it is consistent in the hard rock industry, where the cap lamp they carry has text messaging, so right on that lamp is a read-out that beeps or says something like, ‘communicate with so-and-so, he is trying to contact you.’ So you know some of that is happening, more so in the hard rock side than the coal, but only because it has taken a lengthier approval process to get equipment that is not going to cause an ignition in a poor environment.

“At Quinsam we have a cable that runs throughout the mine and we can have radio contact from the underground to the surface. Frankly, I have been at my house talking with the Quinsam underground by radio! Underground, you have to be within 200 feet of that line to get the communication. You may not get communication if there is a pillar in the way; it has to be line of sight, so that is part of the issue. Another part of the issue around communications is that if the cable gets destroyed by an ignition, explosion or fire, or something detaches the cable, you have lost that communication. They are talking about antennae underground but technology is not there yet.

“My position now is chief operating officer and general manager. As chief operating officer, I am more involved in the expansion mode of the corporation - which are expansion plans for Quinsam and how Quinsam plays a role in the long-term future of the Hillsborough Corporation. I am also overseeing the project in Crosscreek, Tennessee, which is now underground mining. We currently have two or three projects we are looking at; one is on the Oklahoma/Arkansas border, one has possibility in Alaska, and then we have our own properties that we control in northeastern BC, up around Tumbler Ridge, which have the potential to be underground mines. We have quite a bit on the go when it comes to Quinsam Coal and the others!

“My job now is to try to blend cultures between places like Tennessee and Quinsam - to try to take the best of what we have and the best of what they have and bring the two together, while keeping them separate. Because of my background, working for twenty-some-odd years in the States and ten years in Canada, I think the transition may be easier for me than for someone just stepping into it with no knowledge or experience, because it is a cultural thing and I have experienced both sides. As I have said before, miners are miners; it is the cultures they live in that make a difference. Trying to bring those groups together and trying to bring new projects online is keeping things pretty busy. 

“We rock-dust, and rock-dusting has multi purposes. Safety is the real reason we put it on, but it is also for illumination because the rock dust is white, and when you put your light on white it is brighter than putting it on black. Rock dusting also deters explosions. A combination of methane gas and coal dust propagates an explosion; an explosion builds on itself and follows forward as far as it can, as long as it gets fuel. If a mine is well rock-dusted, an explosion will stay in a central area and will not carry throughout the mine.

“From time to time, there is a lot of water underground in the mine. We have had incidents where guys have had to wade out in water up to their necks to retrieve a pump and come out all soaking wet and have to go dry out! At Quinsam the amount of water is very dependent on the season and how much rainfall we get. If we get 100 mm of rain, our pumps are working at full capacity. We continue to upgrade our pumping system because a mine is like a sponge. Quinsam is a shallow mine, when you talk about going underground; it is not extremely deep. In the type of mining we do, there are a lot of cracks and fractures, although you may not see them on the surface, so when it rains, the water gets in and works its way into the mine. In June, July, and August we hardly do any pumping at all, unlike the winter and spring months, we have seen quite a bit of water down there.

“I like what I am doing now; I like my job. There is some flexibility in my job, I get to meet a lot of people, do different things, to set my own schedule, for the most part I have to be self-motivated, so have to be results-driven. I think it is the most satisfying job I have ever had. The other thing is though, that I do not go underground every day, but I feel most comfortable when I do; I find a comfort level when I get back there, and really see what is going on. I guess missing that is a part of managing, though. Another part of managing is being able to depend on your people to have the knowledge of how it all works. I am not an engineer but I can relate to the guy who roof boards because I have roof boarded in my life. I can relate to this guy as well as I can relate to a CEO. There are some things I do not demand of a miner, because I can understand his reasons for doing things the way he has; I can see that consistency is more productive than speed.

What I have seen in my experience is that it is all about rhythm. Life is about rhythm, and mining is about rhythm. You have to go to work and you have to enjoy what you are doing.”