DAY 8 SUNDAY OCT 15, MINE #3 For some ungodly reason, I have scheduled this tour to be at 9 a.m. what an idiot! Would have been fun to sleep in since it seems so easy to do here with the dark. The room is nice and warm and we have to open the windows to cool off a bit and stay under the duvets. Perfect for sleeping. This is a great room but Saturday night must be party night and let off some steam because there were a lot of people in the pedestrian way very late last night. A room on the other side of the hotel might have been a bit better. Still, it's good.
Breakfast had a nice treat this morning of bacon and eggs. Usually not there. But we are ready to be picked up at 9 and away we go to the mine with the maxi taxi driver. The van is full of people from various places and we have a young lady will be our guide in the mine.
Mine 3 was actually opened after Mine #1,2, 4, and 5. But it was the third discovered and marked and claimed so it retained its status as mine #3. When the miners/owners and all decided to shut the mine and leave it, they just walked off basically and left everything there. In the polar north and polar night, often it is just much cheaper and easier to leave stuff than to go to the expense of clearing it or moving it or shipping it out. Guess that makes sense and also explains a good deal of why you always see photos of polar villages that look like total junkyards.
We looked at the stuff outside for a bit and it was blowing and snowing and cold. There was a small railroad outside that carried coal. And before that, there were towers built that carried to coal from the mine to a processing plant and coal yard where it would be gathered up to be shipped elsewhere and sold. The towers were very much like modern power poles but were made from wood and had cables on them where the large buckets of coal would swing from tower to tower until getting to the coal yard. She said there were still some buckets on some of the towers but I never saw that.
Then we are into the mine and the first part is offices and preparation rooms and break rooms and such
. During the last years, they had numbers on a board and you took your number when you came in and put it on the board when you left. That way they knew if anyone was still in the mine. Before the numbers, there was a board with your name and your survival kit. You turned your name over and took your survival kit and put it on your belt. If you forgot to turn your name over and check out, they would look for you in the mine. If you forgot to check in, they would never look for you even if your survival kit was gone.
The survival kit was a small metal container that looked like a small lunch box but it had a mask and a nose plug and supposedly would give you oxygen to breathe for a few minutes, long enough to walk away from a methane pocket or something. Problem was, to work, it required a certain amount of oxygen to be present and if you ended up in a methane pocket, there wasn’t enough oxygen for the respirator to work so you were dead. That happened more than once. Now they have a different self rescue-er that works when there is no oxygen present but still a very dangerous profession.
So we are going into the mine now. We go into the changing room where we get a blue suit to put over our clothes. I have to put it over my clothes with my coat on top
. My husband does too and thinks he won’t take his coat with him but I convince him otherwise when I ask her the temperature in the mine. She says it might be around zero.
We also get a hardhat that has a head lamp on it. This is what the miners wore to see. There were no lights where they were working. At one time, they had a lead battery with a light. The lead battery was pretty heavy and wouldn’t always keep a charge so they might be deep in the mine working when suddenly their light would go out. They would have to figure out how to get out in the dark, and this is total pitch black dark with no light. Also available for us to try were a more recent version of lights that connected a battery pack to their belt with a small light. These weren’t working but several of the guests put them on for the realistic feel of what the miners carried, sort of, and put the self rescue-er on the belt as well. We didn’t.
The lead battery lights were also used on the trains. The trains had a light on the front of each car and one of the back of each car so the miners would know when a train was coming. Usually good except when the batteries went out. But the engine would also have a number that said how many cars they had attached to them
.
Everything in the mine was so fascinating and dangerous to hear how they mined. What a life. And one that I would not have wanted to experience for anything.
This was the best article I could find online to talk about the coal mining experience: I found this at: http://website.lineone.net/~polar.publishing/svalbardcoal.htm
""””Svalbard Coal - A Hundred Years
by Ken Catford
Articles in Polar Worlds (December 2002) have given a wonderful impression of the remote and awe-inspiring natural environment of the Svalbard archipelago. However, during most of the twentieth century, man's main reason for travelling north to Svalbard was much more down to earth - beneath the earth in fact! The reason was coal.
Svalbard's coal seams provide one of the few sources of good quality coal in the far north
. It was ideal for fuelling steam shipping on the Northern Sea Route as well as supplying Norwegian railways in the days of steam.
The Gulf Stream warms the western shores of Spitsbergen, which is the main island of the Svalbard group, melting the sea ice and giving access to shipping for a few months each year. It also alleviates the worst of the climatic conditions, making life tolerable with mean monthly temperatures ranging from -15 °C in January to +6 °C in July. In summer the islands enjoy 24-hour daylight and conversely when the sun sinks below the horizon in mid-November it does not reappear until the end of January.
This is the environment in which men have struggled to win coal during the last hundred years.
The coal outcrops had become known during the nineteenth century and sealing and whaling crews would simply come ashore and dig out the coal for themselves, at first to fuel the boiling of whale blubber and then with the advent of steam vessels to stoke the boilers. The first attempt to exploit Svalbard coal commercially was by a Norwegian, Søren Zachariassen, who mined on the north shore of Isfjorden from 1899.
In 1901 the luxury cruise ship Auguste Viktoria visited the fjords of Spitsbergen. One of the passengers admiring the scenery was an American industrialist, John Munro Longyear. He noticed the small-scale mining on Isfjorden and his imagination was fired. Two years later he was back again with two business colleagues, and that second quick visit settled the idea. Never mind the permafrost, the frozen winter seas and 24-hour darkness, or that biting cold wind: they would turn coal mining on Svalbard into a prosperous business venture!
He set about the task systematically and efficiently. From 1906 gangs of men worked throughout the summer, with some continuing through the winter, to establish a mine together with all the necessary paraphernalia of workshops, transport system and loading quay. In 1907 Longyear's first three shiploads of coal reached the Norwegian mainland.
Svalbard at that time was still a political no-man's-land, and although Longyear had staked mineral claims over large areas there was no effective system of enforcement. Longyear became paranoid about 'trespassers' from other countries who also attempted to exploit Svalbard's coal. Among those was a British company which had set up a mining operation as early as 1904, but it has to be said that they were no match for Longyear's business-like approach
. The British operation struggled along for a few years until being taken over by Norwegians who kept some production going until 1939.
Russia also came prospecting, and in 1912 one of the last activities of Russian explorer Vladimir Rusanov (whose subsequent expedition along the north coast of Siberia was lost without trace) was to investigate coal seams at Grumant on the shore of Isfjorden. Longyear predictably was enraged by this encroachment but the Russians were not deterred.
Even the Scottish scientist William Spiers Bruce had an altercation with Longyear. Bruce was surveying Prins Karls Forland in 1907 when through a misunderstanding Longyear sent out a search party for him when no rescue was required. Longyear's correspondence with Bruce's solicitors in Scotland over who should pay the costs dragged on for months, but no compensation was paid.
In 1916 Longyear sold out to the Norwegian government and the state-owned SNSK (Store Norsk Spitsbergen Kulkompani) took over. By this time Longyear had developed two mines, one on each side of Longyeardalen valley. Yes, not only had he named the valley after himself, but the miners' village became known as Longyearbyen
!
SNSK developed more mines in Longyeardalen in the 1930s and subsequently further along the southern slopes of Adventdalen from the late 1950s.
In parallel with the Norwegian developments, the Soviet Union opened an extensive mine at Barentsburg in the 1930s and another at the very remote location of Pyramiden on Billefjorden, which came into production in the 1940s.
By the mid-twentieth century, a sizeable Norwegian mining village had developed at Longyearbyen, and there were separate Soviet communities at Barentsburg, Grumant and Pyramiden. Further afield, Norwegian mining activities were also to be found to the south at Svea on Van Mijenfjorden, and to the north at Ny Ålesund on Kings Bay.
It goes without saying that it was a tough life, being a miner on Svalbard. The main coal seams outcropped high on the valley sides, so getting to work involved trekking up a steep track on the snow and ice covered slopes, in darkness in winter, in the face of that icy wind if not a blizzard. Once there, the working seam was generally less than a metre high, and the temperature in the mines was a constant -4 °C
.
Living accommodation until at least the 1970s was very basic, and the Soviet propaganda of the time that their community facilities were better than the Norwegians' seems to have been true - there was a swimming pool at Pyramiden, for example; by far the most northerly in the world! The communities of course were male dominated, although miners could bring their wives with them if they could find work in the laundry or canteen, or as wardens of the hostel blocks. Generally in the summer the miners went home to Norway or Russia (and Ukraine in many cases) for a few weeks, because the main production activity took place in winter. Summertime effort was concentrated on loading the ships from the huge stock-piles of coal which had accumulated waiting for the sea ice to clear.
The problem of transporting the coal from mine to quay was solved by the very ingenious ropeway system. Continuous moving ropes straddling between timber trestles carried buckets each with a capacity of 0.7 tonnes of coal, at a rate of up to 120 buckets per hour. For nearly 80 years the ropeway network provided a continuous service unaffected by snow and ice, until eventually heavy lorries took over. Many of the trestles still remain, and are a characteristic feature throughout the Longyearbyen area
. 'Ropeway Central', which was the main control centre and complicated junction point, still stands as a prominent structure on the hillside.
There was no ropeway at Ny Ålesund, where the flatter ground enabled a narrow-gauge steam railway to be laid in 1917. Visitors to Ny Ålesund today can still see the tiny locomotive with a few trucks preserved close to the quay. Mining at Ny Ålesund ceased in 1963 following a mine explosion which killed 21 miners. A scientific research station now occupies the attractive domestic buildings of the mining village.
Tragedies
It is sad to record that Svalbard's mining operations were dogged by accidents throughout the century. Hardly a year went by without at least one fatality. On one day for example in 1952, two separate gas explosions killed six and nine miners respectively, and a year later 19 were killed. During less than 50 years' mining at the tiny community of Ny Ålesund, no fewer than 80 miners died.
When Liv Balstad left her high-society circles in Oslo in 1946, having just married the Governor of Svalbard, she was the first influential woman to experience life on Spitsbergen. Ten years later her memoirs created a political stir in Norway with their revelation of the harsh living and working conditions in this forgotten outpost of Scandinavia.
There is less information about the Soviet Union's mines but perhaps they fared no better and certainly as recently as 1997 23 miners died in a mine fire at Barentsburg. This followed an even greater tragedy in 1996 when a Russian plane carrying 141 people (including miners' families from Ukraine) crashed close to Adventdalen during a blizzard. These tragedies are commemorated by a small chapel recently erected in the centre of Barentsburg.
Mining at Svea
Mining at Longyearbyen declined towards the end of the twentieth century, and SNSK is developing a new, modern mine 50 kilometres to the south at Svea. Because of its environmental impact this is a controversial project, but at present it seems that the closure of the last Longyearbyen mine is imminent, with all future Norwegian effort to be concentrated at Svea.
International heritage
A unique and fascinating aspect is the existence of two separate communities with such completely different characteristics - Norway and Russia. The two sets of communities have always kept themselves very much to themselves but lived in harmony.
It is astonishing that extensive industrial activity should have taken place for over a hundred years in such a remote location and in such extreme climatic conditions. Also it is fortunate for our future heritage that many of the industrial archaeological remains are officially protected by the Governor of Svalbard as 'cultural relics'.
A concern for the future must be the increasing pressure of tourism. Some of the tourists who come to Longyearbyen expecting to experience a natural Arctic wilderness are dismayed to find themselves in the midst of a coal-mining community, and its structural remains. There could be increasing pressure from the tour companies to 'tidy up' the surroundings of Longyearbyen. The Governor must be encouraged to adhere to his present strict policy of preservation, and to resist forcibly any pressure to remove or 'prettify' those features such as the mine buildings and Ropeway Central, which in the future will represent a remarkable story of twentieth-century man's struggle against the elements.
© K.E. Catford 2004 (text and photographs). Ken Catford is an Architect who has been an enthusiast of industrial archaeology for many years. His interest in researching early development in the Arctic has arisen through several visits to Arctic regions since 1990. This article is derived from his research paper: 'The industrial archaeology of Spitsbergen' in Industrial Archaeology Review Vol.XXIV, No.1 (May 2002) published for the Association for Industrial Archaeology by Maney Publishing, Leeds, UK.
“”””
The entire place did look as if the miners had just gone home for the day and would be back for their next shift later. Our guide told us that newbies sometimes only last a few days or a few weeks because the work was so very, very hard. The lack of light, the cold, the dirt, the work was so physically demanding. Often they were working in areas where they were crawling on their stomachs to get to the coal and they had to pull their gear behind them or push it in front of them. I cannot even imagine. Basecamp had built a small “tunnel” that we could crawl through but when some of the real miners came in and saw the tunnel, they laughed because they said it was about 2x as high as their real tunnels for working.
So many dangers too. Dangers of coal dust self igniting so it was coated with chalk dust from England which would bind with the coal and help contain that problem but breathing both was bad for you. Pockets of methane gas would build up. Guess it was too cold to use canaries here like in mines in the states. The dark! We all turned off our headlamps at one point and it was black, black, black, and we had a small light behind us by several 100 yards and it was still black. The drills were heavy, the explosives were sweaty, the trains were in danger of leaving the tracks or running you over. And people were killed. There were small areas where you could go sit to eat your lunch but once you went in, you worked until time to leave and walk down the hill in the dark and cold and ice and wind until next shift. No wonder people didn’t stay long. It is a very good tour though and so glad we went to see it. Hasn’t been sanitized like so many mine tours but also most of the small crawlways where they dug out the coal have collapsed in on themselves as the coal in those places is gone so the jacks and beams are taken out when the they leave and the mountain pressure collapses. Another dangerous job to have as you didn’t know when it would collapse, seconds or years later.
We are finally back to the changing room and take off our suits and hard hats. Our taxi is coming back and he graciously stops at the Seed vault door so we can take a photo. We can’t go up to the door because the road is bad. Runa, our Trapper Lodge guide, had been lucky enough to have some connections to get into the vault and see the seeds. Then we also spotted some reindeer in the field moving towards the airport. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any good photos of them because too dark and too far away but we at least saw reindeer a couple of times.
Some more walking around in the afternoon after lunch. It has been a very different type of vacation for us. There was more to do such as hiking to the ice cave, going on a glacier, but stuff that also wasn’t really best to do until later in the season when the snow is really covering the ground and really cold, cold, cold. At least we got to see the Northern Lights 3 times.
If is finally time to go to our fancy last night dinner at Spitsbergen hotel which is further away than I thought. We are going to walk and it’s maybe ½ mile up the road, across the bridge, then up the hill as the hotel sits on top of a hill. Wow, not so convenient if you want to do much. I am glad we were much closer in town. The entrance is filled with people shoes and boots. We add ours to the collection and walk upstairs to reception. She directs us to the dining room. A young woman seats us at a table and brings the menu to explain it. A party is going on at the far end of the restaurant which two tables of celebrants.
They have a 7 course meal which you may get with or without wine. If you get it with wine, you will get a different wine paired with each course. Of course that is rather expensive being around $150 a person, I think is what I saw. Had not intended to spend that much! She also explained we could just get a starter and a main. So we studied the menu everything that was offered did not sound very good to me. The only thing I thought I could eat would be just the cheese plate. Even the desserts didn’t sound very good. Hubby thought he could get the cod but it came with some sort of beetroot thing-y. I confused consume with aspic and was thinking that wouldn’t be good either. Might have been as it would have been consume with reindeer but it just wasn’t doing it for me nor for him though not quite as much blah for him as for me. So we told her we didn’t think we could find anything. She took us to the bar which had a different menu but it didn’t seem much better so we just left and walked back down the hill and across the bridge and back to our hotel and went across the street to the Svalbard bar again and Hubby had the delicious fish stew again and I had chips (French fries) and watched a bit of a football game while we ate.
Then back to our room and pack our suitcases and distribute the weight a little better for our trip home tomorrow.
DAY 9, LAST DAY, MONDAY OCT 16, 2015 - BACK HOME
Really no plans today other than to have breakfast, finish packing up and then catching the bus shuttle to the airport and leaving. We have to change planes in Oslo but don’t have to spend the night so no problems there. There were many more people at breakfast this morning. They have a long table in the breakfast room with chairs on one side against the wall. IF the room was full, you’d have a hard time getting to the middle of the table there to sit. Luckily it wasn’t full but still more people than have been in the hotel before so we didn’t get our usual seats in the corner.
Check out was 11 so we muscled our bags downstairs and a nice hotel guest helped us. The shuttle bus comes somewhere around 11:30 and doesn’t stop unless you are out there. Not wanting to miss the bus and have to take a taxi, we went outside around 11:15 with our suitcases and it was cold and windy. Around 11:30, other people showed up with their suitcases and the bus came about 11:40.
So to the airport and pretty much just a regular journey home except it kept getting lighter as we flew further south. Kind of weird. And good flight except we hit some unexpected turbulence and the plane seemed to drop out from under us for a few seconds. Probably dropped 100’ or more. Never had that happen and it got really rough for a bit and the plane slowed down and changed altitude. With everything happening in the world right now, that was rather scary but no harm, no foul and we made it to Oslo, made it home, and had wonderful stories and photos.
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