In case you are wondering, Frank Slide was a deadly rockslide not a slide found in a playground. The town of Frank, Alberta was built at the base of Turtle Mountain. People from the town mined coal in the mountain for a living. At 4:10 am on April 29 1903, 82 million tonnes of rock slid down from Turtle Mountain onto the town of Frank. The town was home to about six hundred people. That morning one hundred sleeping people were in the path of the rockslide. It is thought that seventy of those people were killed, while twenty three of those people, mostly children, survived the disaster.
For a few months before the slide, miners reported that wooden beams in the mine were cracking as the mountain shifted. When the mountain came down that April morning, seventeen miners were trapped inside the mine and were able, after fourteen hours of hard work, to dig out and escape. That would be scary!
All the people were forced to leave the town until the mountain was stable again. When they were allowed back, the people of Frank reopened the mine. The old mine was closed in 1913. Now the site is the home of the Frank Slide Interpretive Centre. You can go there to visit and take a tour of the site of this famous Alberta disaster.
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