"I was there that day 38 years ago," said retired miner Tom Rannelli. "You know what? I didn't go underground that day, fortunately, but I recall that minute. That whole ground shook! It was unbelievable," Rannelli said.
He was one of several speakers who gathered Monday morning to remember the day a rockburst occurred at the Falconbridge Mine at 10:12 a.m. on June 20, 1984.
Sudbury's Mine Mill Local 598 gathers every June to honour and pay tribute to the four miners who lost their lives that morning. Learn more about what happened that day here.
Rannelli was passionate Monday as he recalled what felt like an earthquake. He was working on surface that morning, 4,000 feet above the stope and drift that had just caved in.
"And you could feel yourself shaken right away. It dawned on me that there was something wrong down there. It was hell," Rannelli remembered.
He said he went to the headframe and the phones were ringing for the deckman and the cage tender as it became apparent a major emergency was underway. As it would turn out, three miners had been killed quickly. But a fourth miner, who was trapped by fallen muck, died 27 hours later despite heroic efforts by mine rescuers to reach him.
Rannelli's voice sounded almost angry and he recalled the tragedy might have been worse. He said another group of eight or nine miners were working below the 4,000 level.
"Two hundred feet below, there was another stope on 4,200 level. The guys ran out of there. The timbers and everything else falling behind them as they ran to get out of that drift (tunnel). That's how bad it was," he said.
Rannelli said one memory that sticks with him to this day is the miner he described as "one big tough guy, tough as nails" who was so upset he quit working underground.
"He took his lunch pail and he threw it down the shaft. Never again. He never did go underground again. A big tough guy. That's how much it scared him."
Rannelli also has praise for the mine rescuers who worked through the night and into the next day to recover the bodies of Daniel Lavallee, Sulo Korpela and Wayne Chenier, and crawled on their hands and knees trying to reach the fourth man, the trapped miner Wayne St. Michel.
"They are the heroes in my books. They are the heroes," he said
Other speakers at the event Monday recalled that mining health and safety has come a long way since the tragedy in 1984.
Sudbury MPP Jamie West said the legacy of the event is that workers have learned the importance of fighting for the living so that hopefully tragedies such as this never happen again.
"But that fight for the living. That's the legacy that we have for these four men that it isn't just we come together and we think about what happened and we feel mournful. And we all have condolences for the families and the co workers and the union members and their friends,” West said. “It's more than that. It's that we come together and we recommit to how we ensure this doesn't happen to others? How do we protect other people in other industries to ensure they don't get hurt?"
Mining executive Peter Xavier, the vice-president of Sudbury Operations at Glencore, reminded the gathering that Ontario's Occupational Health and Safety Act is something that needs to be acted on by all workers when it is appropriate and that is the right to stop work when anything becomes unsafe.
"Now, one thing we've done as an organization is give everybody the power — you don't need a special title or certification — to stop work. We give that power to everybody. So if it doesn't feel right, you stop. And we actually celebrate that; we celebrate the near misses we get every morning and reread them learning throughout," Xavier said.
He added that sometimes it takes determination but it needs to be done.
"And so you know, we got to have the courage to do that. And I know, sometimes it's tough. Sometimes it's tough to go to your partner and tap them on the shoulder and say what's happening is unsafe," Xavier explained.
"But you’ve got to fight through that. And I hope that one day, people stand back after those conversations. And they might think, you know what, somebody cared enough to stop me. And that's appreciated. But it does take courage. But eventually, that'll be the norm."
Len Gillis covers mining and health care for Sudbury.com.
