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NEAR, ROCANVILLE, SASK. and TORONTO – Darwyn Wirth was driving down a mine travelway a kilometre beneath the Saskatchewan prairie when he saw fire. It was, he said, “a fairly large ball of flame.” Something had gone wrong deep inside the mine workings at Potash Corp’s Rocanville mine.
Mr. Wirth, a shift electrician, knew it was more than he could handle with a fire extinguisher. He retreated to a phone, notified the control room and sought safety in a refuge station.
Almost exactly 24 hours after his shift began early Monday evening, he emerged from the shaft, after workers put out the underground flames – which had erupted from a trio of cable reels – unscathed, and with a story to tell.
“There was two other gentlemen in the refuge station with me. We basically just spent time talking to each other, and at one we were allowed to call our spouses, which was nice,” he said. Their discussion, he added, included “anything but fire.”
Eighteen hours after twenty workers were trapped in the potash mine, they’re coming up to the surface in groups – 15 mine operators at first.
“It’s been a long day,” said mill operations superintendent Terry Daniel. For rescue crews, it had started at 2 a.m. Tuesday when the fire started, then almost 12 hours as workers armed with foam and water fought a blaze of burning wooden reels wound with electrical cable. For hours after the fire was extinguished, they waited for the mine to cool and used massive fans to clear the air enough for it to be breathable.
“We’re very pleased: It seems like everything we’ve prepared for over the years with all our teams has happened much in the way it was anticipated,” Mr. Daniel told reporters at the mine site Tuesday evening. “Everything’s going to work out as we’d always hoped. Everyone’s going to come up fine.”
Nine people on the 29-person night shift, including two supervisors and three maintenance workers, were saved by mine rescue shortly after the fire began Tuesday, as workers outfitted in protective gear reached them in refuge areas whose air was fresh enough to make them accessible.
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