Chapter VI: St. Lawrence Town: Its Triumph and Tragedy  (continued)

By November 1939, the American Newfoundland Fluorspar Company was well on the way to rivalling the St. Lawrence Corporation. The Director mine promised substantial profits, and the fluorspar market looked favourable, as World War II had begun in September. Yet those very features that predicted a good future also made it the perfect time to sell out. Lavino, ever the opportunist, approached the Aluminum Company of Canada (ALCAN) in Montreal with an offer. ALCAN responded with a counter-offer to buy the company holdings, and Lavino called a stockholders meeting to consider the matter.

For Lavino the meeting was merely a formality. He had every intention of selling out and knew that Hookey and the other Newfoundland stockholders could not prevent him: they owned only 49 per cent of the shares. Hookey and Co. knew this too and stormed out of the meeting when E.J. Lavino and company voted to accept the ALCAN proposal. ALCAN, anticipating a smooth transaction, incorporated Newfoundland Fluorspar Limited in December 1939 to manage the property.

However, ALCAN did not reckon upon Hookey's anger. Unwilling to accept the transfer he appointed a lawyer, Leslie R. Curtis, to convince the court that the 1937 Hookey-Lavino contract had been for working the claims, not for selling them. The court granted Hookey and Co. an injunction on 12 January 1940 to stop the sale, but then revoked it; and on January 26 Lavino sold the American Newfoundland Fluorspar Company holdings to Newfoundland Fluorspar Limited.

William Cave and John Caul managed to survive what they viewed as a gross betrayal.* Not so Joshua Hookey. He remained bitter until his death on 10 March 1942 at the age of 78.

A comparison of the Newfoundland Fluorspar Company's first years in St. Lawrence with those of the Corporation is a study in contrasts. Whereas the Corporation in the beginning had to use returns from fluorspar sales to continue mining, Newfluor could afford to spend two years developing the Director mine before removing ore from underground. It could also provide the miners with a change house containing a dining room, showers and toilets. The house was the envy of the Corporation miners who had to eat in a drafty shack, relieve themselves where they could and walk home at the end of shift in wet clothes.

Because of Newfluor's superior working condition, the 1941 strikes that troubled the Corporation hardly affected Newfluor, though miners from both companies received the same wages. What did affect Newfluor was an American government decision in 1941 to build a naval base 60 miles from St. Lawrence in Argentia. The Americans lured Placentia Bay men with the latest in conveniences and, to Newfluor's displeasure, paid them 55 cents per hour. Newfluor had little choice: fearful of losing manpower to the Americans at a critical stage in its development it raised its surface wages to 55 cents per hour.

With the Argentia naval base came an increased traffic of American ships up and down Placentia Bay. On 18 February 1942, a blinding snow blizzard forced two ships - the S.S. Pollux and the S.S. Truxton [sic] - to run aground near St. Lawrence within two miles and a few hours of each other. When the alarm went out, men rushed from the Director and Iron Springs mines to the scene of the disaster. Some risked life and limb by launching dories into the storm toward the stricken vessels. Others threw ropes from cliff tops down to the beaches and hauled the sailors inch by inch up the precipice, using mine lamps to illuminate their work. Those survivors who could, walked back to town. The rest were pulled on sleds to the Iron Springs mine for first aid and then to St. Lawrence for soup and shelter. Altogether, 182 men were saved by the local people.

When the American sailors returned home they praised their rescuers so highly that the United States government felt moved to present St. Lawrence with a hospital. It is shameful that circumstances, not the least of which was the Newfoundland Commission of Government's reluctance to maintain the service, postponed the hospital's construction until a decade after its presentation.

The late 1940s and '50s and their post-war slump in fluorspar prices were troubled times for Newfluor. The company survived only because of its parent organization. ALCAN spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in upgrading Newfluor facilities, exploring new veins and maintaining the mines when they lay idle between 1945 and 1948. ALCAN also provided Newfluor with a captive market by purchasing the fluorspar for the ALCAN aluminum plant in Arvida, Québec, where fluorspar was used to make artificial cryolite, a flux in the aluminum-making process.

Conditions improved in the mid-1950s. Newfluor acquired material assets of the St. Lawrence Corporation in 1965, reopened the Tarefare mine and sank new shafts on the Director and Blue Beach veins. In 1969, fluorspar prices began to pick up. The increase in activity and production should have had St. Lawrence thriving and optimistic about the future. Instead, the community sat under a black pall that first had appeared as a faint cloud two decades earlier.

In the mid-1940s, Rennie Slaney, a St. Lawrence miner, began to notice that an abnormally high number of his fellow workers suffered from what was diagnosed as tuberculosis. Many returned home from the Sanitorium in St. John's, apparently cured, only to die shortly afterwards. A few years later, Dr. Cyril Walsh of St. Lawrence observed a large incidence of lung cancer among his miner patients. Both Dr. Walsh and Slaney wrote of their findings to the Newfoundland Department of Health; neither man received a positive response from that branch of the government.

Thus began the history of observations that led to the discovery in November 1959 that the St. Lawrence mine air contained radon gas in concentrations vastly exceeding the maximum permissible level. Subsequent studies indicated that the radioactive gas entered the mines dissolved in mine water, having been leached from uranium minerals located in the surrounding granite.

The established presence of radon gas combined with findings of a concurrent medical survey - the death rate from lung cancer in St. Lawrence far surpassed that in the rest of Canada - forced authorities to draw a chilling conclusion: the St. Lawrence miners had for years been receiving large cumulative doses of a radioactive gas and in so doing had sustained irreversible damage to their lungs and other organs.

Although it can not be denied that both the companies and the governments involved reacted unduly slowly after first learning of the miners' high incidence of lung cancer, it should, in all fairness, be pointed out that Newfluor inherited much of its problem from the St. Lawrence Corporation by hiring ex-Corporation miners who had worked in the Iron Springs and Black Duck mines. Newfluor's ventilation program was, from the start of operations, adequate for what were assumed to be normal dust conditions. The company ordered a forced ventilation system immediately after the discovery of radiation in November 1959, and installed it in March 1960. Radiation-induced cancer, however, can take 20 or more years to appear: despite the new ventilation equipment and despite the mines' present inactivity, men may still die from their pre-1960 exposure.

Updated March, 2007