Calculated Risk: Greed, Politics, and the Westray Tragedy

Duncan McDowall is a professor of history at Carleton University and the
author of Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank.

The underground mining of coal brings out one of the most primal
anxieties in our civilization. One thinks of George Orwell’s brilliant
essay “Down the Mine” and its evocation of the claustrophobia,
noise, and dust that surround the men who moil for coal. Canadian singer
Rita MacNeil has more recently arrived at the same conclusion as Orwell
in her powerful hymn to the “Working Man”: “God, I never again
will go down underground.”

Men have been mining coal in Nova Scotia since the beginning of the
19th century. They have also been dying down the mine. They die because
the industry in which they work is in reality a form of gambling—on
markets, on geology, and on life. On May 8, 1992, one such gamble went
disastrously wrong: 26 men died in a holocaust of methane gas and coal
dust in the Westray Mine under Plymouth, N.S. They did so mining the
Foord seam, a coal vein notorious for its geological faults, its gas
buildup, and its unpredictability. In the sorrow and outrage that
followed, one question emerged again and again: why were men put at such
risk? What makes Calculated Risk such an excellent book—in fact, it
was runner-up in this year’s National Business Book Award—is that it
does not rush to judgment. The Westray tragedy had “no single
culprit”; it was instead “the culmination of a series of political,
corporate, and engineering decisions” that capitalized on a miners’
culture that habituated men to risk if it meant employment.

The legacy of the tragedy is heartwrenching: the widows of Plymouth,
N.S.; a community deprived of its mainstay of employment. Jobb
nonetheless resists the temptation of adopting an accusatory tone. He
intertwines his narrative with eloquent personal histories of the men
who died and of their families, some of whom have been mining for four
generations. The vital centre of the book lies in the ambiguous
intersection of the symbiotic ambition of provincial and federal
politicians and the forceful promoter of the mine, Cliff Frame of
Curragh Resources. Desperate for regional economic development and
trusting of new advances in mining technology, Nova Scotia politicians
were quick converts to Frame’s ambitions for the project. Ottawa
joined the chorus, contributing loan guarantees. Hearing such tidings,
the community responded enthusiastically. Indeed, one of the sad ironies
of the tragedy was the eagerness of much of the local citizenry to see
the mine re-opened. Somewhere in the gray zones between these various
sponsors of the Westray project, considerations of safety were set
aside. Only federal bureaucrats (perhaps the only heroes of this book,
besides the dead miners) reviewing the project raised an alarm; but
their qualms did little to slow the political and corporate scramble to
the coalface.

Jobb leaves us knowing that there is deep guilt in these sorry events,
but also knowing that apportioning such guilt will require the wisdom of
Solomon. This is investigative journalism as it should be: meticulously
researched, judiciously reported, and enthrallingly written.