The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
As a memorial mass is being said today for a veteran miner killed on the job, crews will start returning to five Vale mines where production was suspended after the fatality.
Stephen Perry, 47, died Sunday afternoon after being struck by rock while working on a piece of loading equipment at the 4,215-foot level of the main ore body at Coleman Mine in Levack. Hundreds of people, including about 45 family members from his native Newfoundland, were expected to attend the 10 a.m. service.
About 1,550 production and maintenance workers have been off the job, with pay, since Perry was killed. While some will start returning to work, the focus will remain on safety and not production, said Vale spokeswoman Angie Robson.
Returning workers will be “focused on tasks associated with safety and risk management, and not production-related work,” said Robson. “There is still no timeline on when our mines will return to production.”
The first meeting of a joint committee struck to investigate Perry’s death was held Thursday. The company and the union have agreed to work together to find out how the tragedy occurred and how to prevent further deaths.
Perry was the fourth Vale miner inn Canada to be killed on the job in eight months. Jason Chenier, 35, and Jordan Fram, 26, died June 8, 2011, when a run of muck overcame them at the 3,000-foot level of Stobie Mine.
A miner at Vale’s Thompson operation, 51-year-old Greg Leason, died in October, 12 days after the scoop tram he was operating plunged down a mine shaft.
MPs from all parties rose in the House of Commons on Thursday and applauded in tribute to Perry after Nickel Belt New Democrat MP Claude Gravelle, his party’s mining critic, issued a statement before Question Period.
As a former Vale employee who worked at Coleman, Gravelle said he knows “firsthand how dangerous it is to work underground. At the end of the day, all a miner wants to do is earn a good living and go home to his family. My heart goes out to (Perry’s) family and his coworkers.”
Gravelle said he was also thinking of Chenier and Fram. “These are tragedies felt by the entire community,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Labour has ordered Vale to produce several documents relating to Perry’s death.
The ministry wants documents relating to previous incidents or accidents where a piece of machinery called a mobile ANFO loader was involved, dating back to Jan. 1, 2011.
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