MURDER: Unravelling events at the Giant mine

The Giant mine resumed operation Sept. 25 after Royal Oak Mines (TSE) received approval to reopen from the Northwest Territories mine safety inspector. The company expected to achieve full production at the mine within a week of startup.

Meanwhile, federal Labour Minister Marcel Danis has appointed Donald Munroe and Vincent Ready as a mediation team to settle the 4-month-old strike. The mine reopened late Friday evening after Royal Oak had conducted an extensive search for explosive devices. Security changes include bulkheading unused mine openings and posting round-the-clock guards at operating entrances.

Yellowknife RCMP are treating the Sept. 18 explosion as a multiple homicide and are continuing their investigation with no charges yet laid. The mine was shut down after the underground blast which killed nine miners. On that fatal Friday morning at 8:45, George Samardija was working underground at the Giant mine when he heard an explosion. He couldn’t tell where the blast came from as the sound rumbled around the mine’s workings. Although such explosions are common in a mine, he decided to inform his shift boss, who immediately called around.

At the same time, Samardija’s partners, Henry and Serge, took a loki, an electrical locomotive used to haul cars underground, down the 750 drift, heading off to gather muck.

The shift boss called back Samardija to say no crews had been blasting. A few minutes later, Henry and Serge returned with strange news. They told Samardija that the doors to the mine’s main air vent, the B shaft, had been damaged and the 750 drift was blocked by an unmoving loki. Above the loki, the water and air pipes running along the drift’s ceiling had ruptured. Pressurized air and water blew everywhere.

“We can’t get through,” Henry told Samardija. “The way is blocked.” A call was made to shut off the air and water pipes. With Henry and Serge, Samardija travelled down 750 drift on a loki to investigate. When they came upon the loki blocking the way 2,080 ft. from the C-shaft elevator, Samardija saw it was largely undamaged. But past the loki, he saw a man-car had been hurled from the track and obliterated, as had most of the men inside.

“Everything was in pieces,” Samardija says. “It was hard to see the bodies. I got sick to my stomach.”

At once, Serge took off running. Samardija also turned back. Next on the scene were mine maintenance worker Jim O’Neil and shift boss Keith Murray, who had come to the 750 drift to check out the report about B shaft’s damaged doors.

O’Neil, 32, was one of 40 men who had defied his union to return to work. “I went back to work on principle,” he says. “We didn’t believe in the strike.”

O’Neil says the union had been hijacked by a group of radicals, who only wanted to destroy the mine’s owner, Royal Oak Mines (TSE).

In late May, when O’Neil initially broke with the union, he received death threats just as he was to appear on Yellowknife’s CBC Radio to speak his mind. “From there on life was chaotic,” he says. “I went home that night and we loaded the rifles and we waited.”

On the advice of the RCMP, O’Neil left town for northern Alberta for a few days. He later worked another job for a month. In early August, he and his best friend Chris Neill decided to cross the picket line.

That night, someone painted “Scab” on the garage door of O’Neil’s new $265,000 home. Since then, O’Neil has set up floodlights and a video camera in his yard to protect himself, his wife and their baby girl. O’Neil believes he is high on a union hit list.

On the morning of the catastrophe, as he and Keith Murray made their way along 750 drift to the B shaft, O’Neil saw the light on Serge’s helmet approaching fast.

“He looked shaken,” O’Neil recalls. “He just kept on running. Obviously there was something traumatic going on.”

At the B shaft vent, the big steel doors were bent and twisted, blown inwards. The long steel bolts holding the door frame into place had been peeled out of the wall.

As soon as O’Neil saw the blast site for himself he says he knew it was “premeditated murder with a bomb.”

As do about 100 other union mine workers, O’Neil has his blasting ticket. He says explosives just don’t go off in a mine after falling from a truck or tram. They must be detonated.

To rig an explosion, the miners use 22-kg bags of Amex (a mix of diesel fuel and fertilizer) and water-gel stick powder, which is set off by a blasting cap and B-line, an orange-colored, shoelace-thick detonating cord. “We don’t have dynamite underground,” O’Neil says. “We don’t have the kind of explosives that just explode. It takes an explosion to make an explosion. Only the bottom of the man-car’s steel frame was intact. Along with the bodies, it was blown to the ride side of the tracks.

A moment later, the shift boss, Don Moroz, arrived. He told O’Neil and Murray the names of the men who were on the man-car. Among them was Chris Neill, O’Neil’s best friend.

Some speculate that if the volatile labor dispute between Royal Oak and the union had been settled earlier, the nine men would still be alive. The union’s distaste for Royal Oak is a direct result of the good times the union had under the mine’s previous owners in the 1980s.

Both Falconbridge and Pamour of Australia were excellent employers, says striking miner Max Dillman, who has worked 13 years at Giant. “The men were treated like men,” Dillman says. “It just seemed like if you showed up for work and kept a clean record you were never hassled.” The average salary at Giant is near $80,000, with some men making more than $100,000. While the money was always great, it was the small touches that seemed to endear the two corporations to the miners: the company Christmas party for the children, the silver tray a worker received after 10 years’ service, or the fishing reel awarded after three months without a safety violation.

“It shows you’re appreciated,” says Rick Cassidy, the union’s vice-president. “It makes way for better relations.”

In all his years at the mine, Dillman says he didn’t grieve one thing through the union because he thought he was treated well.

Says another striking miner, Conrad Lisoway: “When people in town asked you where you worked, you said, `Giant,’ and you said it with pride.” The mine generates $15-17 million in spinoff revenue every year in Yellowknife, a city of 15,000 perched atop the rocky shore of Great Slave Lake. The mine makes up almost 20% of the local economy.

There had been a strike in 1980 under Falconbridge, but no replacement workers were brought in. When the miners stood up to the RCMP, escorting in oil trucks to Giant, a settlement was soon reached, with wages skyrocketing. The miners say they worked hard for the two companies, taking out 15,000 oz. of gold in August, 1990, a record.

The workers were also close, a family, the union miners say, pulled together by the ever-present danger of working underground.

From the day Giant opened in 1948 to the start of the strike, 16 people had died in accidents.

In 1990, Pamour went broke. The bank took over in August. In November, a new group, Margaret Witte’s Royal Oak, bought Giant for $33 million, a pittance compared with the $200 million Pamour had paid Falconbridge for the mine in 1987.

The union’s Cassidy believes Witte set out from the start to break the union, a strategy that led to the use of replacement workers this summer. “What we need out of this is an anti-scab law,” he says. “The use of scabs tears up friendships and communities.”

Striking miner Dillman sees the strike as a test case for Canada. “If they break this union, every union across Canada will go down.”

The hard feelings began a few months after the November, 1990, takeover when Royal Oak introduced the STEP system, a program in which a worker takes “steps” toward getting fired by violating safety rules, showing up late, being insubordinate or not performing on the job. If a miner takes seven steps, he is let go.

“Everybody hated it,” Cassidy says, claiming that if a man was late three minutes he took a step, even if he hadn’t been late in years. Under Falconbridge and Pamour very few men were fired, Cassidy says. Under Royal Oak, 13 men were let go in a year.

Other changes came as well, says Lisoway, all of them with the bottom line in mind.

While many mine workers had trouble with Royal Oak, a number of union members understood the new way of doing business. O’Neil says Royal Oak’s approach was to cut down on accidents and costs.

“An employee could miss two days a week and it wasn’t a problem with Falconbridge,” he says. “Nobody used to get fired from Giant.” Since laziness went largely unpunished, O’Neil says, some miners stopped performing or worse. O’Neil says he has seen a man pull the wiring out of his mine vehicle’s engine so he could slack off while the mechanic repaired the motor. “They would do anything to avoid work, one way or another.” At union meetings during contract negotiations, O’Neil says, workers who disagreed with the union were shouted down by the malcontents. Samardija says he tried to speak out against a strike but nobody listened. “As a matter of fact the union executive told me, `Are you trying to split the union?’ I said, `No, you’re doing a good enough job.'”

In the summer edition of the union newsletter, Fool’s Gold, union leader Bill Schram said the workers went on strike May 23 to maintain their hard-earned benefits and fight for improved safety conditions and job protection. Of the six major gold mines in the Territories, Giant mine has the worst safety record, says John Quirke, deputy minister of safety and public services.

Those are the kind of facts that Lisoway, cites when he says, “The people who crossed the picket line lost their dignity.”

But O’Neil says Royal Oak’s offer, which would have seen the miners take wage and benefit cuts, was good for the times — gold prices were down, labor was plentiful.

When he met the replacement workers, his belief that the union was out of touch was confirmed.

“Most of these guys have been out of work for two years. You hear the same story from each one of the guys. They’re all from Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick.”

“Whoever thinks the strike was right is an idiot,” Samardija says. “In this economic situation the contract was not bad. There were a few cuts, but you would not notice it.”

Two weeks before the strike began, John Werner, the mine’s general manager, received a bomb threat at home. Violence began and escalated after the union walked off the job.

First came threats and obscenities, next came rock-throwing. A police officer was beaten with a baseball bat. Power poles were knocked down, shutting off the lights both at the mine and in Yellowknife.

On June 14, the RCMP riot squad used tear gas and batons on 200 strike supporters in a battle at the gate. Pinkerton’s security guards were brought in.

Ralph Sinke, Pinkerton’s security chief, called the mine site “Fort Apache.” A striking miner called it “Royal Oaka.”

Forty-two miners were fired for their activities on the line and insubordination.

In July, as Marcel Danis refused a request from the territorial government to introduce back-to-work legislation, the explosions started. First a satellite dish near the mine was damaged, then an air shaft in the mine. And then came the fatal explosion at 750 level.

Northwest Territories Government Leader Nellie Cournoyea had no jurisdiction over the strike. She says the people who did in Ottawa ignored her repeated calls for help.

“You get treated as though it’s only what you can take out of the North, rather than what you can give,” Cournoyea says.

— The Edmonton Journal,