Morragh Mine

MORRAGH MINE

Shortly before the Morragh Mine blew up last June, an alarm went off in the surface control room, which warned of high methane levels underground. Twenty miners were killed in the explosion at the financially troubled mine. Since the mine did not know who was on shift at the time of the explosion, many wives of the miners received phone calls that morning asking if their husbands were at home. At the time of the explosion, the mine had been under an order from the provincial labour department to establish a safety plan to prevent coal-dust explosion. The cause of the disaster was later established to have been ignition of coal dust, which was caused by an explosion of accumulated methane.

Even before the two-year-old mine owned by the Calgary-based Westar Resources Inc. opened, it had been the subject of controversy. Morragh Mine cost $130 million to build and employed 210 people. Its main customer was Northern Hydro, a Crown corporation that had signed a contract to purchase 600,000 tons of the mine's coal per year. The contract with Northern Hydro was a fifteen-year agreement to pay Morragh for set amounts of coal annually. Local politicians criticized federal and provincial governments for financing the mine to a total of almost $90 million in loan guarantees and interest subsidies. Many local miners and resource specialists also doubted its safety. The mine tapped the Craigleigh Seam, one of the ten major seams that make up the Manitou County coal field. Before the disaster about 400 people had died in