Poplar Road looks like any street in suburban Canada, it should. The
street, like the town where it's located, was the product of a 1950s
planning model that was applied to countless cities and towns across
Canada. Two shopping plazas, precursor to malls, were at the center of
the town's suburban-like sprawl. At its peak in 1960, the town had
25,000 residents and the distinction of being one of the largest
single industry mining communities in Canadian history. This was
Within a decade of its emergence from
Ontario's northern wilderness, the population plummeted to 6700, only
to bounce back in the 1980s. The town's population would rise and fall
with every boom-and-bust cycle in the industry. Each cycle created a
large turnover (up to 50% in 1981) of residents.
Elliot Lake wasn't just any mining
town. It billed itself as the "Uranium Capital of the World"
(a title now claimed by Saskatchewan). At the town's entrance,
visitors were greeted by a giant model of a uranium atom. Between 1956
and 1966, there were 11 mines operating in the Elliot Lake-Blind River
area. Two of those mines, Milliken Lake and Stanleigh, were less than
three kilometers from Poplar Road.
Inka and her brother, Patrice, on Poplar Road circa early 1980s.
(Photo: Inka Milewski)
Gus Froebel was a uranium miner. He
lived with his wife and children at 32 Poplar Road. In the early 70s,
he developed lung cancer. At the time, the Workmen's Compensation
Board (WCB) and the uranium industry wouldn't acknowledge there was a
link between exposure to radiation in the mines and lung cancer. As
far as the WCB, the industry, the Atomic Energy Control Board, and
government-funded cancer research agencies were concerned, smoking
among miners was the major cause of lung cancer. With thousands of men
working in uranium mines, reversing this mind-set would have had huge
policy and financial implications. Gus and the union who represented
him were in for a long fight.
Forty years earlier, two Czech
scientists and physicians published a landmark study in the American
Journal of Cancer (Pirchan and Sikl 1932). They linked miners' lung
tumors with radon exposure in Czechoslovakian mines. Ten years later,
Wilhelm C. Hueper, a world leading expert on lung cancer and founding
director of the environmental cancer section of the U.S. National
Cancer Institute, came to the same conclusion. He reviewed 300 years
of radon data on European miners and found that radon gas produced
lung cancer that killed more than half of all miners 10-20 years after
their employment. He issued warnings worldwide, including in Canada.
These were largely unheeded.
Declassified documents from the 1950s
show that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission told Hueper that
references to occupational cancers among uranium miners were "not
in the public interest" and "represented mere
conjecture"(Nikiforuk 1998). Forty years after the Czech study
was published and thirty years after Hueper's warnings, a 1974 Ontario
Royal Commission on the Health and Safety of Workers in Mines found
that Elliot Lake uranium miners were experiencing twice as many lung
cancers as expected. The report was filed the same year the WCB would
hear Gus Froebel's case.
Uranium is a heavy metal, in fact the
heaviest. Unlike any metal, uranium is radioactive. Trapped in ore and
in the ground, uranium is relatively harmless unless it leaches into
aquifers and contaminates drinking water or its deadly radioactive
by-products (thorium-230, radium-226, radon-222, and the radon
daughters: lead-210, bismuth-210 and polonium-210) escape through rock
fissures and collect in the atmosphere or in homes.
Uranium deposits in Elliot Lake were
low grade. It took one tonne of ore to extract one kilogram of
uranium. The miner drilled, blasted, and mucked (excavated) the ore
and mill operators crushed it. Through these processes, toxic radon
gas and its deadly daughters were released. The gas is easily inhaled
and exhaled. The daughters, however, lodge in the lining of the lungs
and bombard the delicate tissues with radiation. As for the
by-products, millions of tonnes of radioactive leftovers or tailings,
they gave off 10,000 times more radon gas than undisturbed ore.
In 1932, the federal Department of
Mines (as Natural Resources Canada was then known) knew from its own
studies in Port Radium that "a hazard may exist in the breathing
of air containing even small amounts of radon"(Nikiforuk 1998).
The federal government would not set radon standards until 1967.
Tailings area for Stanrock mine (Elliot Lake). A wall of radioactive sand 10 metres high holds back the tailings.
(Photo credit: Robert Del Tredici, 1987).
Gus Froebel won his battle with the
Workmen's Compensation Board in 1974. It was hailed as a landmark
victory. Lung cancer in uranium miners would now be recognized as
being caused by exposure to radiation. Even so, making a claim
wouldn't be a simple matter. Miners filing claims would often have to
jump through many hoops to prove their eligibility. It was a long,
sometimes expensive, and not always successful process.
Not long after his victory, Gus died of
My father was also a uranium miner in
Elliot Lake. Like Gus Froebel, we lived on Poplar Road just four doors
away. Like Gus, and hundreds of other uranium miners, my father died
of lung cancer that eventually spread to his brain. Despite having
chest x-rays every year (as required for all miners), a lung biopsy,
being hospitalized several times, breathing difficulties, and finally
collapsing in the mine, local doctors attributed his condition to all
kinds of diseases except work-related lung cancer. Convinced my
father's case was eligible for compensation, we sought second and
third medical opinions, hired a lawyer, and eventually won. Not all
miners and their families were as determined.
And, like Gus, my father didn't live
long after his victory.
While the last mine in Elliot Lake
closed in 1996, the toxic legacy of uranium mining lives on in the
miners, the majority of whom with their families are scattered across
Canada. Any meaningful assessment of the true health impacts of
uranium mining on Elliot Lake residents is almost impossible because
of the high turnover in the population over the decades. The massive
uranium tailing areas are legend. They are the subject of hundreds of
studies, documentaries, books, and photos and support an army of
scientists and engineers that are trying to figure out how to contain
Sources and Additional Reading
(all sources available online)
Edwards, G. 1992. Uranium: The
Deadliest Metal. Perception 10(2).
Leadbeater, D. 1998. The Development of
Elliot Lake, "Uranium Capital of the World": A background to
the layoffs of 1990-1996. ELTAS Analysis #1A19, Laurentian University,
Sudbury. 51 p.
Lewis, R.K. 2006. A history of radon
1470-1984. Proceedings of the 16th National Radon Meeting. Frankford,
Nikiforuk, A. 1998. Echoes of the
Atomic Age: Cancer kills fourteen aboriginal uranium workers. Calgary
Herald, March 14