42.

THE daughters of radon appear briefly as ionized particles when radon gas, a product of uranium, breaks down. They stick to microscopic specks of dust and moisture. Inhaled, they are capable of destroying human tissue. Radon daughters “rip up any body cells in their path . . . like bolts of lightning striking a house.”¹³ But where were these deadly radon daughters coming from? The answer wasn’t far away.

As long ago as 1948, a geologist’s report on mineral deposits in the St. Lawrence area described significant alpha radioactivity and “radiogenic heat” coming from the local rock.¹⁴ It seems that nobody took special note of that observation at the time.

Later studies of the geology would confirm that the local granite, which hosts so much fluorspar, is also unusually rich in uranium.¹⁵ Jack Windish, alerted to the high incidence of lung cancer among St. Lawrence miners, had logically looked for uranium in or around the fluorspar. But he couldn’t find it. He’d tested the ore coming from the mine. There was no evidence of radioactivity. There had to be another source. He would discover it was all around him and over him and under his feet, running down his neck, leaking into his boots.

The figurative bolts of lightning were coming from the water.

The Director mine was a veritable Niagara Falls of water—its pumps struggled to discharge up to three thousand gallons per minute from the workings.

Cracks and fissures in the granite carried surface water great distances, and as it passed through uranium along the way, the water picked up radon gas. As the water-borne radon reached the open spaces of the mine, it released its “progeny,” the infamous cancer-causing daughters.

The continuous pumping of water, without which there could be no mining, seemed to have created a deadly loop of radioactivity—a cyclical flow from rainfall and surface water sources, through uranium-bearing granite, into the drifts and stopes where miners worked, to be pumped back out again. And then the cycle would repeat itself—surface water returning through uranium, back again to where the men were working. Pumped out, only to begin the journey back.

Windish and his associate Dr. deVilliers would find in their early studies that radon transported in this way produced radioactivity readings that were between two and a half and ten times above safe working levels. The villains were finally identified, but like the dust, they had already done their damage. And it would take another year to come up with a response.

In late 1959, Windish reported his findings to the companies and to health officials in St. John’s. Because the Director mine had been his main focus, Alcan officials scrambled to head off an anticipated backlash. Newfluor miners were dying, but almost all of them had worked for the St. Lawrence Corporation before moving to the Director mine. From Alcan’s point of view, it was hardly fair that the fortuitous timing of Seibert’s corporate misfortune left Alcan to face the public and political backlash all by itself.

The company immediately began planning better ventilation, but the Alcan medical director, Dr. Frank Brent, also sought political cover—a commitment from the provincial minister of health, James McGrath, that the company would get advance notice of any public statements from the government of Newfoundland.

In the meantime, Alcan seemed to be getting mixed messages from the federal experts, Windish and deVilliers. Windish, who was actually taking measurements where he could in the mines, was candid in his reporting—he had found radiation readings (radon daughters) up to nearly 200 times the maximum allowable levels for a safe workplace, albeit in an unused section of the Director mine. In that same area, he’d recorded a radon gas measurement that was 133 times the suggested safe working level. In that abandoned section, the air was so thin, he said, he was unable to light a match. (At the Ottawa briefing where he made this observation, there was a sceptical reaction.¹⁶ Someone suggested, perhaps facetiously, that maybe there was something wrong with the matches he was trying to light.)

Dr. deVilliers had already offered reassurances, at another meeting weeks earlier, that “reported concentrations of radon are not remarkable.”¹⁷ It was acknowledged that in most working areas, radiation readings were sometimes above safe working levels but mostly at or below the standard. When asked about the standard and what he understood to be the practical meaning of the “maximum allowable concentration” for radon in a workplace, deVilliers replied that “it represents a concentration to which a man can be exposed for an eight-hour shift throughout the year, year after year.”

Alcan and the bureaucrats seemed to be reassured. But in just a matter of months, political circumstances would raise the temperature of the conversation about the reality of working in the St. Lawrence mines year after year after year.

ON March 1, 1960, the radiation menace could no longer be denied. Joey Smallwood, who had been dismissive, now had to act, and he called a meeting for a full discussion of the Windish radiation findings. All the principals were there: politicians, union leaders and Alcan officials. The health minister, James McGrath, later prepared a summary of the findings, and it was a masterful example of transparency and creative obfuscation.¹⁸

The main points, however, were clear: St. Lawrence miners had a high incidence of lung cancer that couldn’t be explained by dust conditions in the mines, and the levels of radiation “were much higher than the permissible limits.”

The minister hastily pointed out that the highest readings were in unused sections of the Director mine, but even so, miners were working in areas where radiation was frequently beyond permissible limits. That had to be corrected. “We have been advised . . . that comparatively simple methods of ventilation can bring the concentration down out of the danger zone . . . [and] render the mine safe.”

It was, perhaps, an unintended concession that for many years, the St. Lawrence mines had been terribly unsafe, and that hundreds of men had worked for decades in lethal concentrations of dust and radiation that could easily have been remedied.

The minister insisted that “it cannot yet be regarded scientifically proved that the high incidence of cancer and the presence of hazardous radiation are directly effect and cause,” but the obvious “coincidence” definitely justified further studies of the problem.

The miners weren’t prepared to wait for scientific proof. The St. Lawrence story became—at least for a short while—a public scandal. The St. John’s media ran articles about cancer and radiation, and the underlying role of poor ventilation in the mines. The union pulled all its underground members off the job—at the time, Poynter had managed to put twenty-two miners back to work, filling his “pocketful” of orders from the United States. Al Turpin—who knew about the problem from earlier briefings by Windish—now declared that nobody would go back underground until the ventilation issue had been solved.

And it was solved—in just a few weeks—but not before an unusual display of defensive denial by the Alcan manager, Rupert Wiseman. The walkout by the miners, he fumed in a press release, wasn’t so much a response to the perils in the workplace as a radical reaction to “a distortion of the facts by the press.”

Whatever. On April 2, just a month after the decisive meeting with Smallwood, and after a few weeks of proper ventilation, Jack Windish took new readings and found that radiation in both the Director and the smaller corporation mines had miraculously dropped back to safe working levels or better.

On April 5, miners started heading back to work.

IT WAS all so simple—in a matter of months, the companies had achieved, under the threat of scandal, what common sense had instructed decades earlier. Mine safety must include the air that miners breathe. Company and government officials had spent years blaming respiratory problems caused by dust on tuberculosis, which wasn’t anybody’s fault. But they couldn’t duck the radon lightning bolt. Windish had spelled it out clearly, and the fast remediation in the spring of 1960 proved his point: the high radon readings were directly caused by poor or nonexistent mechanical ventilation. And that was the fault of management.

The St. Lawrence mines were, overnight, considerably safer. But for a rising number of St. Lawrence miners, many of whom did not yet know that they were doomed, it was all too late.

BY early April, public interest in the peculiarities of mortality in the St. Lawrence area had faded once again. The priority now, as had always been the case, was employment—and the prospect that the corporation was failing would soon become the primary concern in both St. Lawrence and St. John’s.

In 1964, the British Journal of Industrial Medicine published a lengthy technical review of the St. Lawrence situation by Windish and deVilliers. There was no pussyfooting here, in a discussion among peers. Their paper was dense with complicated detail, but the conclusions made for a depressing summary of the thirty-year history of the radiation problem.

The death rate among men between twenty and sixty-four in St. Lawrence was well over twice that in nearby Grand Bank, and more than triple the death rate in that age group for all of Newfoundland. Meanwhile, Windish and deVilliers reported, “The death rates for St. Lawrence females in the age group ‘all ages’ are significantly lower than those for Newfoundland, which, in turn, are lower than those for Grand Bank.”¹⁹

Lung cancer in St. Lawrence afflicted mostly men, all of whom had been miners. The review in the British journal raised the real possibility that there had been an “appreciable under-diagnosis” of lung cancer deaths prior to 1951 because of an absence of post-mortem examinations of people who were believed to have died from tuberculosis.

The obvious conclusion, based on comparisons with the levels of fatal lung cancer among uranium miners in various parts of the world, including the United States and South Africa, was that the fluorspar miners of St. Lawrence had been working in a far more dangerous environment. And the tragic consequences were only starting to appear.

That distant, dire analysis would have excited widespread comment among a readership limited to professionals in the field of occupational health—but it didn’t seem to register where it really mattered, in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland. Certainly not right away. But it surely would, and when it did, it would be plain-spoken, from the heart of long experience, from a man who had been a miner with direct and dramatic experience with death. His name was Rennie Slaney.