NEW GLASGOW, N.S.
On a cold and gray afternoon, a man slowly walked up a concrete pathway. As he approached the Westray monument in the area of New Glasgow that locals call Parkdale, where flowers had been placed at the base of the stone, he removed his baseball cap and paused, looking at the names, remembering the morning the coal mine blew up and the dark days that followed May 9, 1992.
“I was 29 years old when I went to work there, and now I’m older than every name on that f-----g stone,” Lorne McLean later said, his face red, his voice trembling on the 27th anniversary of the explosion.
He’d been employed there for about three months and had been scheduled to work that morning at 8 a.m.
“I got there and everything was gone to hell.”
He went to work in the days ahead, not as a coal miner but as a rescue worker, until it became clear no one would be coming out alive. Somewhere under his feet, 11 men are still buried, their bodies never recovered.
“It brings it all back. It’s never a good time a year for me,” McLean said, as he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes.
“Oddly, it seems like it’s always wet on May 9 for the last 27 years.
“We lost 26 that day. We’ve lost a lot since, too. The families obviously still suffer. Lots of people that went underground in that shithole had suffered, too.
“A lot of them were from the county here, guys you played ball against, stuff like that. Robbie Doyle was just a kid, Robbie was from Plymouth, right beside the mine.”
He pauses for a moment.
“I guess I’ve got to be thankful I’m still here. I’ve got two daughters and they’ve still got a dad.”
