R. Saunders - Underground and Radioactive

I had few personal problems during my time working underground, something I didn’t appreciate fully until years later. When there was something bothering me, I successfully avoided taking whatever it was to the job. Mining was too dangerous to be thinking about anything but the work.

Looking out for my partner and myself was always the main priority underground, and I had stuck to that rule. Yet here I was, distraught after having experienced a very bad weekend. I was functioning on four hours of sleep and not thinking much about the job.

My helper, Anthony Gonzales, and I had spent the past three months cleaning the sand-fill out of a very large portion of the 502. Clearing the sand-fill had been tedious, had not paid much, and was dangerous, but we had done it.

This day we were preparing to again mine the rich uranium that had been found by the geologists. We had set up our water and compressed air lines and had a nice new machine to drill with and a stack of timber waiting.

Before beginning the sand-fill operation in the 502 months earlier, I had removed all the valuable equipment, pipes, and hoses.

Among the items not removed were many scraps of wood left over from building the dozens of square-sets needed for ground support. I say scraps, but these ranged in size from small chunks to four-foot sections of twelve-by-twelve timber.

Because the sand sinks to the bottom and water stays on top, anything that floats ends up near the back during a sand-fill operation. The end result was a lot of large, waterlogged timber remnants pinned up to the back. That wouldn’t have mattered, and nobody would have cared if the mined-out stope was sealed up. But in the case of the 502, Al and I had gone back in, making it a very dangerous place with all those timber remnants many feet above our heads.

As the sand was being cleared, we constantly kept an eye out for any timber scraps mixed in with the sand that could potentially fall on us. It wasn’t unusual to have small portions of the walls of sand collapse on us as we dug. They were minor, but frequent. Having the walls of sand cave in on us was serious enough, but to get hit by one of those scraps could have been fatal, so we always stayed aware of where the waterlogged blocks of wood were. Similar to scaling the back and ribs after blasts, we often induced some sand cave-ins just to remove the danger posed by blocks of wood, taking great care when bringing them down.

We were now in the stope, having removed better than 95 percent of the sand-fill we needed to remove and could see the rich uranium ore we were after. This, I thought, would provide some very good paydays.

While the uranium ore was rich in the 502, the ground was no more stable than it had been during the days when Cal and I had mined there. In addition to watching for those chunks of waterlogged wood, we had to be vigilant for signs that the ground above might give way. In fact, having had many months of experience in there, I was much more apprehensive about the ground falling in on us than what condition the remaining sand-fill was in.

I had seen this place collapse before, and it didn’t look much better or sound much different as Anthony and I prepared to drill and blast our first round in over three months.

As we got closer to the area where the ore was, I had spent some time surveying and planning. The face where we would be drilling didn’t look good to me. The ground was very uneven and would need to be blasted flat in order to install proper ground support.

The immediate area where I would be drilling was an odd shape with many angles created by minor cave-ins and the overall of deterioration of the stope that had taken place prior to the sand-fill operation. All of the places I had mined previously had a square look to them similar to rooms and hallways. We built square-sets to hold the ground up, so we blasted square patterns to fit the sets into. Fairly simple. As I surveyed the area in front of us, I was thinking of ways to make it square and pretty.

I could see that the uneven ground had the black, sandy look of good uranium ore, but it wasn’t flat, so wouldn’t do. No, that place had to be made square, so I decided to make the floor nice and flat, and since it was good ore, we would get paid for doing it.

The area of the stope that we had cleared of sand was a fraction of the overall space that had previously been mined. We were to the left of the hundreds of collapsed square-sets from the previous cave-in that occurred when Cal and I worked the stope. All we had to our right was another eight-foot wall of sand approximately forty feet long.

It was usually prudent to plan wisely and work safely underground, but having been in a hurry, I unfortunately did neither in this case, and neglected to clear a larger area to our right that would have made the site where we would be drilling much safer. So there we were, preparing to drill just a few feet from a huge wall of unsupported sand. Furthermore, I should have considered that the reverberations caused by the drill could have potentially broken the wall loose, but it either never occurred to me, or I ignored the internal warning.

High in the upper right corner of our new stope face, I had seen a large piece of twelve-by-twelve square-set timber that I estimated to be three feet long. I knew from a lot of experience lifting similar remnants during the sand-fill clean-out phase that waterlogged pieces that size tended to be extremely heavy—so heavy, in fact, that it usually took both Anthony and me to lift one and move it to the side.

This particular piece was embedded in the sand at the corner of the exposed face on the right. It was clearly visible, and we should have brought it down before beginning to drill. While it was up high, the block of wood seemed to be far enough away from the small mound that I intended to drill and blast flat that Anthony and I would be safe. It could be dealt with later when we actually got to drilling the face. Still, I had resolved to keep an eye on it and asked Al to do the same.

As was a helper’s responsibility, Anthony was setting up the drilling machine while I surveyed the job, all the while obsessing over the trying weekend I had experienced. Having already planned out the operation in the days prior, I wasn’t getting into much detail with myself about the job by considering options and alternatives. The end result was that I overlooked safety.

I have mentioned previously that when at full speed, the Ingersol1-Rand drilling machine made an ear-splitting racket and literally shook the entire environment in the immediate proximity of its operation. One downside was that talking or yelling to my partner became impossible with the machine running, so we relied on hand signals and stayed relatively close to one another for that purpose while the drill was on. Both partners constantly watched the back and ribs for signs of loose slabs and, when seeing one, would stop the drilling long enough to take care of it.

The vibrations the machine caused usually didn’t have any effect on a work area properly supported. It was why most miners would never drill without stulls or a roof jack or both. Many, me included, would build square-sets right out to the face and use that for support and cover. But then, in the 502 things were different.

While this was not a ballroom, the back was too high in places to install a roof jack or a stull. The shape of the open area was too irregular for square-sets.

Anthony and I had used scaling bars and, in the spots we could reach, chipped away at the back, peeling off any piece of rock that had the potential for danger. Out in front of where I would be drilling, only that large chunk of wood high in the sand to the right posed any potential problem. If Anthony and I both kept an eye on it, I thought we would be fine.