70th anniversary of Paymaster mining disaster – by Len Gillis (Timmins Daily Press – January 28, 2015)

The Daily Press is the city of Timmins broadsheet newspaper.

TIMMINS – Who knew what Hector Poitras was thinking that cold February morning in 1945, when he stepped onto the cage at the Paymaster No. 5 shaft getting ready to ride down into the mine with his co-workers?

It was a Friday. Maybe he was going to a dance that night, or maybe to see a hockey game at The Mac or the South Porcupine Arena. For whatever reason, Poitras didn’t have his mind completely on the job.

Poitras was a young rookie miner. That’s probably why another miner, an older fellow, gave him a friendly nudge and asked him why he didn’t have his cap lamp with him. Poitras had to get off the cage and head for the lamp room, thus missing his ride underground and possibly facing a bucket load of you-know-what from the shift boss.

That mistake would save his life. The cage had begun its descent into the depths of the mine. Eight men were on the upper deck. Eight were on the lower deck.

The incident itself took only seconds, at about 7:55 that morning. The cage was moving at a normal speed of about 1,200 feet per minute when the rope broke, said the Ministry of Mines report. There was no evidence to the rope being jerked or kinked, said the report.

The break sent the cage into a free fall, racing to the bottom of the shaft, instantly collapsing into a wreckage of bent steel and broken bodies.

Sixteen men lay dead and dying. It became the second-worst mining disaster in the brief history of the Porcupine Camp. The worst had occurred 17 years earlier, in February 1928, when 39 miners died in the fire at the Hollinger Mine.

This coming Monday, Feb. 2, 2015 will be the 70th anniversary of that horrible event.

NO OBVIOUS REASON

There was no obvious reason why the rope broke. The steel-wire hoist rope had been purchased by Paymaster in March 1941. It had been kept in dry storage for several months and then placed in service in August 1942.

Official records showed the rope had been regularly greased and tested by mine employees.

The official Ministry of Mines report revealed the one-inch thick rope was supposed to have a breaking strength of 102,000 pounds, 51 tons. The combined weight of the cable, the cage and the men inside was only 11,700 pounds, less than six tons.

For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.timminspress.com/2015/01/27/70th-anniversary-of-paymaster-mining-disaster