Like most people in the world, I followed the recent saga of “would he / wouldn’t he”, “will it work / will it not work”, “is this the end of the world / do we have more time”. I speak, of course, about President Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities with ground penetrating monster bombs. There have been positive preliminary assessments of bomb damage, but the truth is that no one really knows except the poor guy who was sent to climb over the muck pile and see what things looked like deep in the centrifuge galleries. And he is not allowed to talk. If he is even alive.
In the logical absence of an accurate damage assessment, what most impresses me is how easily I was sucked into believing that the pictures of the six holes were the entry points into the underground chambers. Six little holes, two bombs per hole… Wow!!
It turns out that the little holes were the ventilation raises (minus the fans) that were used to blow fresh air into the underground workings. This is a bit embarrassing because I considered myself to be a bit of an expert on “blowing sh#t up”. This was a serious miss on my part.
Early on, I had wondered where the ventilation raises were because they would have been the most obvious entry into the underground workings, but they may have been offset from the centrifuge galleries which likely had blast doors installed for just such an eventuality. I hope the Americans had some detailed plans of the underground workings.
The missing fans on the top of the ventilation raises strongly suggests that the bombs exploded into a void and the concussive air wave moved up the ventilation raises and blew the vent fans right off their foundations. I wrote to the US Army asking for larger scale plans to see where the fans came down. That would have been a sight to see.
The point to all this is that, being old and prone to reflecting on my life so that I can bore my grandchildren to tears with stories that only make me giggle, I remembered a bunch of funny – well, funny after the passage of time - blasting stories.
As a much younger man I visited Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and by lying and crying got a job in what was then the Mt. Charlotte gold mine. This underground mine has since been removed by an enormous open pit mine, but it was a real going concern in 1974. My shift crew would take an elevator (cage) to the 500-meter level of the mine and then pile on to a 35-tonne truck to drop another 200 meters lower in the mine. With miners hanging on to whatever holds they could find, the truck drove at a relatively high speed on a circular ramp creating centrifugal forces that started peeling fingers off the handholds. Releasing your grip was instant death as I assessed the situation and I was both appalled and scared the first time down the ramp. After that it was just a lot of fun. Australians are really on to something with their safety culture philosophy of “she’ll be right, mate”.
When we got off the truck we were told to find the wall of the mine and stick very close to it. The atmosphere was a smog of engine exhaust and water vapour from the constant drip of water. The trick was to know where your workplace was and to make a mad dash through the fog to the other side of a fifteen meter wide area while the lights and roar of loaders and trucks roaring by disoriented even the most experienced. I was partnered with a young Australian miner who yelled at me to follow him and then disappeared into the smog. With a pounding heart, I set off at a full run and found him about ten feet from me leaning against the wall on the far side. He then led me to our workplace which was a new spiral ramp descending from the working level we had just run across. Once we started down the ramp the noise and smog abated considerably, and my heart started to slow down.
My new role in life was to be a “powder monkey” meaning I was to help my young boss load explosives into holes drilled into the rock. At the end of the shift, we would initiate the blast, and the next crew would remove the rock and start the process again. It sounded like fun to me. And it was fun. My boss used a large diesel machine to drill the three-meter-long holes, and I changed the bits for him from time to time. When the holes were drilled, he backed the machine away from the face where the holes were drilled and then we loaded them with sticks of nitroglycerine as a primer and a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil (ANFO) as the blasting agent. An electric initiator with a five-meter lead of wire was pushed into the nitroglycerine so it was important to ensure the plastic sheath on the wire did not get scraped in the hole as the ANFO was loaded. When all the explosives were loaded, the ends of the wires were brought together and connected to a larger lead wire which would take the electricity from the blast machine to the explosives when it came time to initiate the blast.
My partner in all this was a young guy not much different in age than me and we had an interesting conversation about life and other small stuff. I told him about Canada, and he told me about how singularly successful he was every weekend with the “sheilas”. Kalgoorlie in those long-forgotten days was famous for its sheilas who were mostly to be purchased, given the rather wild west nature of the town. My boss was tight-lipped about the economic nature of his sexual conquests and seemed to resent my bringing the topic up. Nevertheless, we got along well, and I was appreciative of his patience in teaching me how the job was to be done.
When the shift was almost over, we packed up our things and, at his instruction, I slowly walked up the middle of the ramp while unrolling the blasting wire. He carried the blasting machine and stayed close to the wall. It is important to point out that underground mines do not have lights other than the cap lamps that all miners wear. So, I was shrouded in darkness with a little spot of light in front of my feet as we walked up the ramp. I could see my partner’s light but little else. I certainly didn’t see him connect the blasting wire and press the button on the blasting machine.
The reason I tell you this story is to point out my direct knowledge of the concussive effect of initiations of high explosives. I had no time to register the boom of the blast before being hit by a wall of air moving several tens of kilometers per hour that knocked me over and blew me rolling up the ramp for about twenty feet. My hard hat was goodness knows where, my cap lamp was out, and I could only imagine the scratches on hands and face. It was disorienting but for the raucous laughter of my erstwhile partner. As I lay regaining my senses, I gave serious consideration to murder as I was pretty sure my adrenalin would overcome any strength differences but then I heard the magic words and decided to stand down.
“She’ll be right, mate!”
It didn’t take too long for me to be able laugh when recalling this story because clearly, he had been bowled up a ramp in some sick initiation into the brotherhood of miners and it truly must have been funny to watch me bouncing up the ramp. Well… I too was now initiated, and it changed our partnership. For the better, I think.
My summer job before my sojourn in Australia was at an open pit mine on the Forty Mile River north of Dawson City in the Yukon. Again, my role was as a powder monkey although in Canada we go with the less prosaic “blaster’s helper”. I was on a three-man crew that worked six days per week during the summer to blast as much rock as possible before the frigid winters set in. The two guys who had to put up with me were both ten years or so older and very funny. It was a summer of mini-initiations.
I once relieved myself into a drill hole that had just been loaded with a few hundred kilograms of ANFO and one of my tutors screamed at me to run, which I dutifully did. It was a perfect case of orinus interruptus resulting in expanding wetness on my trouser legs. I stopped running when I heard the inevitable laughter and in considerable high dudgeon returned to confront my abusers. When asked what this was all about, my tutor asked how it was possible that I didn’t know that urine and ANFO could blow the world off its axis. And then he collapsed in another paroxysm of laughter.
In another incident that was decidedly not funny, we were to initiate a blast of perhaps 100 tonnes of ANFO using a tape fuse. The tape fuse is the stuff you see in western movies that blow up the mine tunnel and save the damsel. The burning rate of the fuse is measured in seconds per inch of fuse but is subject to considerable error. Is it ten seconds or fifteen seconds? The only way to find out is the light the fuse. We had enough fuse for a two-minute burn at which point the fuse would initiate a cord of high velocity explosive which would initiate primers in each hole and then the 100 tonnes of ANFO. Once lit, we got in the truck and started to drive out of the empty pit. As we were leaving the pit, we noticed someone working near one of the large loading shovels and in grave danger of the blast. Had he not been told when the blast would take place? Had he not heard the blast siren? The tutor who was driving asked how long since the fuse was lit.
“About 30 seconds.”
I was all for continuing out of the pit although my opinion remained unspoken as it was not solicited. Without a word the driver spun the truck around, stepped on the accelerator and raced back to the fuse. The floors of mining pits are not superhighways and bouncing across the floor had the two of us without a steering wheel to hang on to alternately conformed to the roof of the truck and pressed into the seat.
What if it had been one minute since we lit the fuse? This was not the first time I had assessed my life in the face of certain death and as described, not the first time I had wet my pants, but I can’t remember being quite as frightened as I was racing across the pit. It is funny but I do remember thinking,
“Well, we are going toward the blast so there will be no question of injuries. I will see the bright flash and then Jesus.”
When we arrived at the blast site, the driver jumped out of the truck before it bounced to a stop, ran to the fuse and cut it. I later learned all this from the other blaster as I couldn’t bring myself to bear witness to the bright flash. As it turned out there were about 20 seconds left on the fuse so there was never anything to worry about. One of my tutors actually said that. And then we all laughed the outrageous laughter of those with a surfeit of anxiety.
I was thinking of this not long ago and wondered, for the hundredth time, if I would have turned the truck around. I don’t think I would have, and I have always been immensely impressed with my tutor that he was willing to take a calculated risk with his own life (and mine but that was not his concern) to save the life of some dummy. I was present at the dressing down of said dummy and learned a lot about the elegance of well-ordered speech liberally sprinkled with a pantheon of vulgarities.
And to think that I had once planned on being a lawyer.
Always fun to read these stories (from the distance of history). Hope you are collecting these and preparing them for a book 😀.
Made me laugh. And it reminded me of a summer working for the Anaconda open pit copper mine in Yerington, NV. Good stories you wrote. And I want you to know that I am so persuaded of your strictness and self-control in refusing all temptations toward exaggeration that I rest comfortably in the knowledge that these events happened exactly as you have reported them.
Shafer