A wave of dread
Newfoundland’s tsunami had big effect on families, Pat St. Germain discovers.
The Wake: The Deadly Legacy of a Newfoundland Tsunami Linden MacIntyre
HarperCollins Canada
Fascinating, infuriating, eloquent and cautionary, Linden MacIntyre’s story of relentless tragedy on Newfoundland’s south coast is coloured by a lifetime of experience, both as a journalist and a son of an oldschool hard-rock miner.
Born in St. Lawrence, N.L., and raised in Cape Breton, MacIntyre opens on a personal note, the first of a handful of intimate “Conversations with the Dead” sprinkled throughout the book. It’s a memory of a visit home in 1968, a few months before his father died, when they talked about mining, a new job, his father’s health: “He coughed a lot.”
Over time, hundreds of miners with nagging coughs came to know “the dread” — a diagnosis that spelled early death from lung diseases caused by exposure to lethal levels of water-borne radioactivity. Worsened by political corruption, ineptitude and mind-boggling disregard for health and safety, their suffering is inextricably linked to a natural disaster that had occurred decades earlier.
On Nov. 18, 1929, an undersea earthquake shook homes and rattled nerves in seaside towns and outports all across Newfoundland’s Burin Peninsula. Gripping first-hand accounts describe how, hours later, harbours suddenly emptied of water, signalling the devastation to come.
As a powerful tsunami raged toward the shore, some panicked families fled from collapsing homes and scrambled to higher ground. Others were swept away as the massive wave carried off entire houses, at least one where children had just been put to bed. In the immediate aftermath, the death toll stood at 28, but
St. Lawrence and other communities on the isolated coast would feel its impact for generations to come. There’s a terrible symmetry in a later chapter, in which nurses share memories of miners who died under their watch.
It’s not clear if there was a direct connection, but after the tsunami, the fishery collapsed. Compounded by the Depression and an ineffectual, seemingly uncaring government in
St. John’s, the stage was set for a man-made disaster. When a U.S. investor appeared with promises of steady jobs mining fluorspar, a mineral used in aluminum and steel production, the desperately poor people of St. Lawrence took the bait. Men who had spent their lives at sea went underground, working without pay to get the mine up and running. They were exploited even after the mine was making a profit, supplying fluorspar to U.S. and Canadian manufacturers during and after the Second World War.
When workers were enlisted from established mining communities, MacIntyre’s father was among them, leaving his family behind in Cape Breton while he earned a paycheque underground.
MacIntyre himself might have followed suit, but for his father’s insistence that he return to university after a summer job in a mine.
Instead, he built a career as a highly regarded print and TV reporter, including a 24-year stint hosting CBC-TV’s The Fifth Estate. He’s also the author of several novels, as well as a memoir, Causeway: A Passage from Innocence.