R. Saunders - Underground and Radioactive

As I was changing in the Dry, I kept an eye out for Bill, half expecting him to come looking for me. Only the bosses would have been around when the rounds were set off, and there was the possibility that my extraordinary round had been, if not discovered then, heard even in the lunchroom. If so it would have left Bill and all the bosses wondering what the hell had just happened.

Bill never came looking for me, though, and, hoping against hope that my extra powder round had worked, I left for home.

The following day I came into the Dry and saw Hill already dressing, having just come off his shift. I didn’t have to go over to him because he came over to me. Oh shit, I thought. But suddenly a big smile broke out on his face. He said he couldn’t believe how much we had done the night before. OK, evidently my mega-round had worked well. Using my best “Well, Hill, we do what we can do” expression, I explained that yes, we had put in a good shift, as if to say, “What did you expect?”

At any rate Hill was very impressed that day. He told me they had spent the whole shift slushing and getting the chute pulled and still hadn’t gotten all the ore out.

While I could never get a motorman when I needed one, Hill had no problem doing so for reasons that I never fully understood. Maybe he was bribing motormen, but the chute kept getting pulled all day until they had sixty or more carloads with plenty more to pull.

When I saw what had happened in the stope, I could hardly believe it myself. The round had blasted through fourteen feet lengthwise and eight feet up. Not only that, but we had broken through into another timber stope not being mined at the time. Our huge blast had created one monumental muck pile and one monstrous, wide-open ballroom.

Hill said I would have to keep on filling the chute to make any space to set timber so we did. All night we filled that chute, getting another forty cars of ore out of there. That week we moved way up on the contract rate board in the Dry.

We had also created that ballroom, and it was a big, big hole. Breaking into the other stope had created some problems with ground support as well. We had not only had a giant hole in our own place but had caused some massive cave-ins in the other empty stope. All of that open space had to be supported somehow, so we needed timber and a lot of it.

Ballrooms were no fun to work in but sometimes a spectacular sight to see. They were unsupported ground above our heads from twenty to as high as a hundred feet. When I ran into a few of the larger ones during my wandering laborer days, I would be awestruck by the view.

Ballrooms were unpredictable. Occasionally they would sit empty for long periods of time and nothing happened, while in others slabs large and small regularly dropped from the back. When a monster slab fell, it would do so with a shuddering thump. The one thing every ballroom had in common was if it was not supported in some way, it would continue to cave in.

In our case we had several huge boulders of ore sitting out on the ballroom floor that we had to break up and send down the chute two hundred feet away. The only way to do that was by using powder.

If a slab was small enough, a stick or two of powder jammed beneath it or in a crevice would do the trick but for larger, slabs ten feet high or higher, that method had little effect. The only way to break them up was to drill a hole or two, pack them with powder, and blast—not a safe or easy task.

What I did next was probably the most dangerous work I ever intentionally undertook at Section 35.

I devised a plan whereby I would set up a drill in a relatively safe area with enough slack in the water and air hoses to reach the target boulder field on the ballroom floor. I estimated the distance to be around fifty to sixty feet. When everything was set, I would run out into the ballroom with the machine in hand, hoses dragging behind, and drill a six-foot hole in the boulder as quickly as possible, then run back for the safety of supported ground.

Those machines made an incredible racket, and my biggest fear was that the reverberations would kick something loose from above that could very well land on me. It was not an unreasonable fear, seeing as small slabs were falling regularly.

Art and I went ahead and readied the machine for drilling, making certain there was plenty of slack in the hoses to reach the designated boulder. I stood at the edge of the ballroom for quite some time examining the situation, eyeballing the exact location on the slab where I would drill. Very, very seldom during my time underground was I ever nervous, but standing there I was.

Knowing that thinking underground never came to much good, I double-checked that the air and water that the machine needed to operate were both on, then took off running across the ballroom for the largest boulder. When I came to it, I slapped that machine on full, guiding the steel by hand and steadying it with as much force as I could muster, and drilled a nice six-foot hole.

It was very fortunate that the slab was rather high-grade uranium ore, which tended to be fairly soft rock and easy to drill into. It took less than five minutes to complete, but it seemed a lot longer than that to me, being as exposed as I was.

Thankfully nothing came down from the back while I was drilling. Had anything been ready to fall, the blast I was about to set off would shake it loose. I readied enough powder to fill that six-foot hole and shoved a blasting cap and a fuse to hand light in it. Again sprinting out to the boulder, I rammed that powder into the hole using a tamping stick, lit the fuse, and got back out as fast as I could. With a lead time of three minutes or so, Art and I had plenty of time to get down the manway and wait for the explosive report at track level.

The resulting blast obliterated the target boulder with nothing further falling from the back. One down and several to go.

Over the course of the next few hours, I repeated the same process for the remaining boulders. Almost miraculously, not only did nothing fall on or near me while I was drilling, but nothing significant at all ever fell from the back as a result of the blasts. Sometimes you just get lucky.

The final piece to the puzzle was setting up a very long slusher cable, which required drilling another hole out in the ballroom against the far wall, into which a rock bolt would be inserted with a block attached. I did that too, and it was the final time I ever pressed my luck working in a ballroom.

Blasting all those boulders got us many more cars of good ore that took well over two shifts to slush out. When we were done, what was left was a huge open area with a relatively flat floor ready to timber.

For the better part of two weeks, Hill and his helper and Art and I worked building square-sets. Not only was I good at erecting sets, but it got to the point where I was able to pull ahead of Hill. If he put up four sets a night, I would put up six. I felt pretty good for a while there.

My experience with Cal had taught me how to build good, level ground support, but Hill, although good, was not the perfectionist that I was. I’d notice some uneven work of his when I came on shift that needed fixing on occasion—no way anything other than plumb and level was going up in our stope.

Square-sets paid well, and we continued to make good money. I was up around the fifty-dollars-an-hour mark during that period and just entering the fringe of good miner territory on the contract board—a very satisfying feeling. It was the only period I managed to do it with any consistency.

After my fortuitous big blast and about four or five weeks of big money, things settled back into a routine. Hill again did all the drilling and blasting, and Art and I would muck it up, with me sometimes running the motor and pulling the chute.