Horrific Stories:

...from the workmen fleeing the 1915 Britannia Beach avalanche.

The hours that followed the disaster were a nightmare of injury, death and devastation. The survival stories, collected by reporters later were nothing short of amazing:

One man , was picked up by the slide and and literally rode it along to its point of termination.

Another man was rolled into a giant snowball and was found with only his head and one hand sticking out.

Thomas McCulla, shift boss,    was standing just outside of the mouth of the tunnel, checking off    the men as they went off shift, when the slide hit. Though nearly    buried, he managed to free himself and he rushed off, cut and    bloody in search of his wife and daughter. The spot where his    house had stood was "unrecognizable;" no trace of his family had perished.

Three Men Killed...

1949

Three men killed at Victoria camp while riding in a skip with drill steel. It was believed the steels caught two timbers and crushed the three against the bars of the skip.

The Plight of Henry Wenzel.

Halloween, 1960

Henry Wenzel, a miner, trapped in the mining tunnel for seven hours, after Mount Sheer collapsed, cut off his own shattered arm with his pocketknife.

" In a second or two, I began to think of what I could do. I began testing my arm and I felt for bones. The hands and fingers were cold and I put the arm on my knee with my right hand. I felt around and knew I couldn't move any further and I couldn't do anything with that useless arm hanging there in my way. Then I remembered my pocketknife and got it out of my back pocket and started cutting the flesh off because the arm was in the way and I wanted to try and dig myself out. I cut a bit of it but I had to stop because I couldn't stand it."

What crushed his arm also his artery, which is why he didn't bleed to death. The shift boss called to him finally and they managed to get him out. The doctor cut the rest of Henry's arm off with a pair of scissors and with only a bit of Morphine as a sedative, because it would have taken too long to retrieve his surgical equipment from the Beach Townsite.