'I often think of them': Marking 40 years since deadly explosion killed 5 at Point Tupper mill
CBC
It was around 3 p.m. on Feb. 8, 1982, that Lorraine King got the call from her brother-in-law.
There had been an explosion an hour and a half earlier at the paper mill in Point Tupper on the shores of the Strait of Canso between Cape Breton Island and mainland Nova Scotia.
King was told that her husband, Pat, a 37-year-old instrument mechanic at the mill, was being taken to hospital for observation but that he seemed fine.
"So I didn't take it too serious," said King, who got supper for her four children before heading over to the nearby Strait Richmond Hospital to see her husband.
"I didn't hurry, I didn't rush. But when I got over there, everybody was rushing around."
It turns out that Pat wasn't fine. He had inhaled noxious fumes from the explosion and was being sent to the Halifax Infirmary.
After arranging for her sister to take care of her children, who were between the ages of seven and 13, King rode with her husband in the ambulance to Halifax.
"And then everything just went crazy after that," said the Evanston woman.
"They were rushing around. They took him to be X-rayed. But I knew he had pneumonia. He was just … very sick. And after they took him, I never saw him alive after that."
Pat King was one of five men who died as a result of the explosion that day. The others were Glen Anthony Sampson, 20, of Louisdale; Hugh Arnold Campbell, 29, of Mabou; Paul St. Pierre, 43, of Port Hawkesbury; and James Charles Mason, 48, of Ashdale. Several other men were injured but eventually recovered.
The explosion happened in the mill's steam plant.
John Dan (Smokey) MacNeil of Creignish was a 32-year-old water treatment operator working at the steam plant in 1982.
But he didn't go to work on Feb. 8 because he was worried about a plan to use nitric acid to wash heat exchangers in the steam plant while the plant was running. He was concerned about the acid mixing with a steam plant fuel known as "black liquor."
"I had a big concern about that," said MacNeil, who warned other workers not to go to work either. "I was told by senior people in the plant that if liquor and acid mixed, it was very likely an explosion could happen."
