Open Writing

We had a guy called Bruce W_ that worked there around 1970. He was a mad Welshman and was a blaster and did all the blasting for the company at the northern end of the mine. He was bloody good even though a bit crazy. He was a lot older than us – about 40 or so.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, he only hung around for a year and then left as he got into too much trouble with management. He used to put blasting caps (detonators) packed in mud under the Landrovers parked in front of the single quarters and they would go off with a loud bang and everyone used to be terrified and wonder what the hell was going on.

When that got too boring he used to wrap about 10 turns of a detonating cord called Cordtex, around old 44 gallon drums that were lying around and try and spilt the drum in half. He took a dozen drums about half a kilometre up the riverbed and had lots of fun with them. He never could get the drums to split neatly – they just turned into a crumpled mess. We watched Bruce’s efforts with amusement.

Bruce had heard that Cordtex was used by the Americans to lop trees in Vietnam, so one weekend with nothing to do we decided to have a go ourselves. Cordtex, which is a high-speed fuse, burns at 6000 metres per second. That is pretty damn fast. Because it burns so fast it is an explosive in itself.

Now all we had to do was find a tree…. We couldn’t find a tree big enough but did find an old telegraph pole that seemed to be doing nothing and was just stuck in the ground down from the footbridge on the single quarter’s side of the riverbed. About 80 or 90 metres away from the single quarters itself, it was decided that it was an eyesore and had to go.

Now how many turns of Cortex would we need to cut the pole? It took 10 turns to destroy a drum, how many turns would it take to cut a 30 cm pole in half? A drum was hollow but a pole was solid. Hmm.

After a bit of calculations, Bruce decided that 20 turns of Cordtex should do the trick. How he calculated this we will never know. But he was the expert. So we got everything set up.

“Cordtex – 20 turns. No make it 25 turns just for luck.”

“Are you sure Bruce? It seems like an awful lot to me.”

“Don’t worry I know what I’m doing. Detonator. A 10 metre slow burning fuse. Get everyone well back.”

Which way would the pole fall? How tall was it? Only if it fell directly on the footbridge would there be a problem – any other way it was safe.

So we got a long length of cable, about 150 metres long, attached it to a Landrover and pulled it as tight as we could until the pole had a distinct bend in it. There. Now it HAD to fall that way - away from harm.

Bruce lit the fuse and we all stood at a safe distance waiting with bated breath for the pole to fall as if pole-axed, as the saying goes.

There was a deafening explosion, and a huge plume of dust and smoke shot up. It sounded like a miniature nuclear explosion. Bits of debris clattered around us, on the roof of the dining room and on the single quarters. We all ducked and ran around with our hands covering our heads, as if that would protect us from a 50 kg rock hurtling up through space and then coming back down again at the speed of light.

Where was all the debris coming from? We waited for the dust to clear and looked towards the pole. It had disappeared. It had virtually been vaporised. There was hardly a piece bigger than a matchstick. A crater almost a metre deep had been gouged out in the earth. There were splinters everywhere.

Damn. How were all the buildings? We checked. There seemed to be no damage. Not even a broken window. But we could see bits of timber all over the kitchen, dining room and single quarters roofs. Some guys were pale while others laughed nervously.

We checked the Landrover and it seemed to be OK except for a few more scratched and small dents. A big rock had landed next to it, not more than a metre away.

“Bruce, you almost blew up the whole of Affenrucken.”

“F---, Bruce, You almost got us all killed.”

“How the hell did you calculate that?”

We cleaned up the mess and collected all the bits of timber and got some shovels and filled in the hole before anyone came and looked to see what was going on. How we didn’t blow up the footbridge, I’ll never know.

It took Bruce a long time to live that one down, and thinking back we were lucky, very lucky indeed. Perhaps the young have guardian angels watching over them.

Others were not that lucky. The blasters used to blast 1000 to 2000 holes at a time and safety was paramount. Accidents were rare, but they did occur. Most blasts were done using fuses, but occasionally electric blasting was used when necessary. It was not an accepted or recommended method, due to the sensitivity of the electric detonators which could go off from any stray electric current.

One day the blasters were preparing a set of holes for electric blasting and were finishing up when suddenly the whole lot went up. Two miners were killed in the blast, and after that electric detonating was banned from the mine site. They never did find out what caused the premature detonation.