Chaos at Hy Tower Mine

    I remember working at the mine below Bells Falls. It was in the late summer of 1985. Two other guys from Timmins, one of whom I worked with at Hemlo just before we started at High Tower Mine and the other was his brother who joined us. They were really good miners, and I never met two miners who I laughed with so much. Everything we got involved with turned into an event of great mirth.

    To begin with, a fellow approached us with an offer of work to open and operate two mines in the area. We had no other immediately pressing plans and readily agreed. This operator was more promoter than miner and really didn't have a clue what to do, but he seemed sincere enough to get started.

    The mine at Bell's Falls wasn't really a mine but rather a quartz vein in a mountain about 300 feet high and about 500 or 600 feet long along the top of the mountain. Some previous attempts had been made to trench out the ore vein on top, and a short adit or tunnel was driven into the base of the cliff. There were a lot of buildings, old vehicles, and some other junk from bygone years, cluttering about three or four acres in the little horseshoe valley at the cliff base, no doubt relics of earlier attempts to develop the vein into a mine.

    The operator wanted us to start at the top and bench out the ore, slushing it over the cliff to be picked up by a front end loader at the bottom. He didn't want to get into a lot of problems by mining out the vein properly from the bottom by a method known globally as "Shrinkage Stoping", and no amount of talk from us could convince him otherwise. We figured we could do it his way as long as we could support the rock walls on our way down. We asked the only logical question before starting. "Do you have any insurance on the buildings at the bottom." The answer was a resounding "It doesn't matter, because you only have to break the rock and slush it over. It won't go that far!" We all knew with those words, his entire knowledge of the dramatic effects of dynamite, and with the elevation of about 300 feet above the buildings, the recovery rate of the ore would be directly proportional to the size of the chunks we could break it into. We estimated we could probably hit the Little White River about a half mile away with most of it, and if the direction could be somewhat controlled we figured the buildings might still be identifiable for at least the first three blasts.

    Along the face of the vein from the bottom to top there was a lot of loose rock which would require clearing before we could cut a proper chute into the cliff face. So we planned our attack from that angle: by blasting from the top and working our way down. The only hitch in the plan was the equipment. This outfit was small. I mean, we had one pipe wrench, one crescent wrench, a couple of pluggers for drilling, a couple of drill steel and some air hose. We were awful short of caps and electric detonators, too. Now along about this time we began to realize the job of clearing loose was a little bigger than our supply of blasting caps so we started to set bigger blasts, tied together with B-line detonating cord. The Navy used this stuff for clearing beaches for an assault because they found if they tied a lot of explosive together with this cord, they could clear a mile or two of beach with only one detonator. It basically set off all the charges along its length at about the same time.

    I will never disclose the actual amount of explosive we used to my dying day. Be it enough to say we did the traditional thing miners are noted for and used "lots". We spent the whole morning and half the afternoon hauling bags of Anfo and packing it into cracks behind the loose. We primed it by placing a couple of sticks of Forcite into each of the bombs, and these were all tied together with the B-line. The blasting cap, the only one we had left, was tied to the detonation cord at the top. Common sense, what little we had, told us we would be safer on top and behind the blast, than below and in front of it.

    We took three precautions when blasting. First we closed the gate at the bottom where the road accessed the buildings, since we had been setting off blasts for some few days now, we figured the sign on the gate would warn off sight-seers. Second, we had a siren on top of the mountain and always gave it a few wild cranks before setting off any blast. And third, we had a little pole shack covered with about three feet of dirt, to hide under as protection from fly rock.

    After this blast we also initiated a fourth measure. Having taken the first three precautions, we lit the fuse, ran back to the hide out, and mused on how big the concussion would be.

    We felt the ground shake when the "thok" of the shock wave hit us through the ground, and then the air blast knocked most of our pole shed down on top of us. When we dug our way out and looked back there was a cloud of dust about a cubic mile in diameter drifting down the valley. The concussion echoed for several seconds from each ridge of rock as the dust drifted away, and from out of the dust cloud appeared a helicopter who must have had a very upset crew on board. It seems they belonged to Ontario Hydro and were flying along the transmission lines and towers, one of which was on the same hill as the mine, and from whence the name "Hy-Tower Mine" was derived. We discussed this and concluded the fourth measure would be required - a large, visible red flag was flown whenever we would be blasting.

    When we got home that night there was a posse waiting. Apparently the concussion hit the chicken farm 2 miles southeast further down the valley, it piled 25 000 chickens up against the east end of the barn. When they stopped squawking and finally unheaped themselves the dust cloud hit and was sucked into the ventilation vents creating another mess.

    The kids were at school in Iron Bridge about 10 miles away, and about the time the shock wave hit them they volunteered cheerily that "That was dad blasting at the mine again!" The shock wave registered about 3 on the Richter scale and the Feds called up the Ministry of Labour to see if they knew of anyone blasting around our area.

    When we finally got the Chicken Farmer calmed down and showed the local constabulary the permits to mine, the two characters from Timmins volunteered the brilliant cure to solve the problem. They volunteered to order 25 000 pairs of "mini" earplugs for the chickens for use until someone could develop silent dynamite.