According to Deputy Chief Inspector R.B.Bonar it travelled 4400 feet in 3 seconds. That’s 996 miles per hour. That's how fast the blast was going that hit those 22 miners going into the Balmer North Mine 45 years ago on April 3rd, 1967. With it came all sorts of debris from deep inside. Power cables, timbers, chunks of coal and rock, conveyor belting and a toxic cloud of smoke and gases. Those Michel miners had literally climbed into the wrong end of a gun barrel and fate pulled the trigger at the other end.
How cruel and ironic that had that blast occurred just minutes earlier those men would still be outside and probably lived. Yet it also follows that had that afternoon shift crew been further in the mine more than fifteen would surely have died. This terrible disaster struck at the Michel\Natal\Sparwood community only nine days after a tragic car crash had taken the lives of seven of its own. An already numbed community was then forced to endure the pain that Coal Creek, Spring Hill, Hillcrest, Coalhurst, Bellevue and a host of other mining communities had suffered in the past. The event that every mother and wife lived in dread of. That day when their man doesn't come home from the mine. I saw that dread in my own mother's eyes many years ago. The sight of a Vicary Mine crew bus passing by our house at the wrong time of day was enough to strike fear in her heart; for there were four of our family working underground at one point in time.
The mines mostly took them one or two at a time. A cave-in here, a bump there. They whittled away at the men slowly, inexorably year after year, unnerving everyone with each fatality. Always hidden in the back of the mind was the thought that it had been a while and who would it claim next.
One man's story from Balmer North is that of Jerry Clarke. Jerry was one of those ten injured in the first few hundred feet of Balmer North's return airway. A Coleman man, Jerry had worked underground most of his life. He was born in Bankhead (an old coal mining town in Banff National Park) in 1911 and eventually came to the Pass and worked at the International Coal and Coke Company mine in Coleman. When the International was struggling with work one or two days a week in 1955 Clarke moved on to Coal Creek Mines in Fernie until their closure in 1957.
He then went to work in Michel and had been there about ten years when Balmer blew. Jerry sustained extremely serious head injuries including a fractured skull that day as did the other nine.
In fact almost all the fatalities in that killer rock tunnel were from head injuries; testimony to the deadly clutter contained within that whirlwind from hell. He was rushed to the Michel Hospital then and within 48 hours found himself being examined by a neurosurgeon in the Calgary General Hospital.