JAMAICANS OPERATING A COMPRESSED AIR DRILL
One day at Matachin an engineer with whom I was talking called a Spaniard and sent him off on an errand. I noticed the man walked queerly and commented on it. “It’s a wonder that fellow walks at all”, said my friend with a laugh. “He was sitting on a ledge once when a blast below went off prematurely and Miguel, with three or four other men, and a few tons of rock, dirt and other débris went up into the air. He was literally blown at least 80 feet high. The other men were killed, but we found signs of life in him and shipped him to the hospital where he stayed nearly eight months. I’d hesitate to tell you how many bones were broken, but I think the spine was the only one not fractured and that was dislocated. His job is safe for the rest of his life. He loves to tell about it. Wait ’till he gets back and I’ll ask him”.
HANDLING ROCK IN ANCON QUARRY
Presently Miguel returned, sideways like a crab, but with agility all the same. “Tell the gentleman how it feels to be blown up”, said the engineer.
“Caramba! I seet on ze aidge of ze cut, smoke my pipe, watch ze work when—Boom! I fly up in air, up, up! I stop. It seem I stop long time. I see ozzair sings fly up past me. I start down—I breathe smoke, sand. Bang! I hit ground. When I wake I in bed at hospital. Can’t move. Same as dead”!
“Miguel never fails to lay stress on the time he stopped before beginning his descent”, comments my friend, “and on the calmness with which he viewed the prospect, particularly the other things going up. His chief sorrow is that no moving picture man took the incident”.
Incidents of heroic self-sacrifice are not unknown among the dynamite handlers. Here is the story of Angel Alvarez, an humble worker on the Big Job. He was getting ready a surface blast of dynamite and all around him men were working in calm assurance that he would notify them before the explosion. Happening to glance up he saw a great boulder just starting to slip down the cut into the pit where he stood with two open boxes of dynamite. He knew that disaster impended. He could have jumped from the pit and run, saving himself but sacrificing his comrades. Instead he shouted a frantic warning, and seizing the two boxes of dynamite thrust them aside out of the way of the falling boulder. There was no hope for him. The rock would have crushed him in any event. But one stick of dynamite fell from one of the boxes and was exploded—though the colossal explosion that might have occurred was averted. They thought that Alvarez was broken to bits when they gathered him up, but the surgeons patched him up, and made a kind of a man out of him. Not very shapely or vigorous is Angel Alvarez now but in a sense he carries the lives of twenty men he saved in that moment of swift decision.
The visitor to the Cut during the period of construction found two types of drills, the tripod and the well, busily preparing the chambers for the reception of the dynamite. Of the former there were 221 in use, of the latter 156. With this battery over 90 miles of holes have been excavated in a month, each hole being about 27 feet deep. The drills are operated by compressed air supplied from a main running the length of the Cut and are in batteries of three to eight manned by Jamaica negroes who look as if the business of standing by and watching the drill automatically eat its way into the rock heartily agreed with their conception of the right sort of work.