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By John Kinnear
According to Deputy Chief Inspector R. B. Bonar, it travelled
4,400 feet in just three seconds, the equivalent of 996 miles per
hour. That was the speed of the blast as it hit. the twenty-two
coal miners entering the Balmer North mine at Michel on 3 April,
1967. With the blast came all sorts of debris from deep inside
the mine. Power cables, timbers, chunks of coal and rock,
conveyor belting and a toxic cloud of smoke and gases belched
from the deadly entry and rolled out across the Michel Creek
valley. Flying debris from the wooden structures outside the
mine entrance hit the conductors of the 66,000-volt power line
immediately below the mine. The time of the blast was exactly
3:59 p.m.a fact determined by the electrical fault that was
registered at the Elko generating station when the debris hit
the power line. The Michel miners just starting afternoon shift
had literally climbed into the wrong end of a gun barrel and
fate had pulled the trigger at the other end.
This disaster struck at the Michel-Natal-Sparwood community
only nine days after a tragic car crash had taken the lives of
seven local residents. An already numbed community was then
forced to endure the pain that Coal Creek, Springhill,
Hillcrest, Nanaimo, Bellevue and a host of other mining
communities had suffered in the past. It was the event that
every mother or wife of a coal miner lived in dread of: the day
when the miner does not come home from the mine. Usually the
mines claimed their victims one or two at a timea cave-in here,
a bump there. Always hidden in the back of the minds of the
miners and their families was the thought that it had been a
while since the last accident and the question of who would be
claimed next.
Balmer North had opened just a year earlier and was one of a
new generation of coal mines, using powerful "mechanical miners"
capable of cutting ten tons of coal in sixty seconds. The
mechanization was part of a modern approach to mining that was
slowly replacing the conventional miner and his air pick with
new-age coal-cutting machines and conveyor belts. While some
were surprised that such a loss of life could occur in a modern
mine like Balmer, others were not. There had been complaints
there about dangerous dust levels despite rock dusting, a
process which is supposed to render the coal dust incombustible.
While testing of rock dusted zones revealed that those areas had
been neutralized, there was an inherent problem in transporting
the coal. Because of the friability and dustiness of the coal
being carried by conveyor belt, a ready source of coal dust was
always present in the belt roadways despite the rock dusting.
As in most western Canadian coal mines, there was also the
threat of a gas build-up where ventilation could not dissipate
it properly. Underground coal mining usually involves a
complicated ventilation plan where fresh air is directed past
inactive areas to the active ones. Air is forced up and down,
over and under passageways and sometimes, as at Balmer,
additional smaller fans inside are required to pull the air into
the "face" where the men are working. With mechanical miners,
coal is mined so fast that gas released from the coal can build
up rather quickly. The official opinion offered later by R. B.
Bonar, the Deputy Chief Inspector of Mines was that "the
short-circuiting of the air from No. 1 entry to the lower roads
wherein the continuous miner and shuttle car were working
allowed gas to accumulate in the gob area." (The gob is a mining
term that refers to a pillared area that has caved in as the
mining retreats away from it.)
Bonar went on to say that in all probability a fall of rock
in the gob caused an incendiary spark or sparks that ignited the
gas in the gob, which in turn initiated the coal-dust explosion.
Dusty, gassy mines can indeed be a lot like a loaded shotgun.
With one spark (the hammer strikes the bullet), the gas ignites
(the bullet's primer explodes), the gas flares and causes the
coal dust to explode (the gunpowder goes off) and a horrendous
flash rips through the mine carrying all sorts of debris with it
(the bullet charges down the barrel).

This article titled "The Balmer Mine Disaster of 1967" by
John Kinnear is reprinted from The Forgotten Side of the Border: British
Columbia's Elk Valley and the Crowsnest Pass, edited by Wayne
Norton and Naomi Miller (Kamloops, BC: Plateau Press,
1998). The Heritage Community Foundation and the Year of
the Coal Miner Consortium thanks the author and publisher for
permission to reprint this material.
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