Miners' bodies frozen solid: brother

A grieving relative says three dead miners drowned in such frigid water that their bodies were frozen blocks of ice by the time they were recovered.

The three men were trapped when a northern Quebec gold mine was flooded Friday. After a frantic rescue effort, their bodies were found three days later in the mine owned by Metanor Resources in Bachelor Lake, not far from Desmaraisville. The facility is about 600 kilometres north of Montreal.

Rescue workers had frantically pumped water from hundreds of metres below the ground in the hope of finding the men alive.

But Pietro Bollini said Tuesday that there's no way the three men — including his brother, Domenico — could have survived for very long.

He said rescue workers did their best but that the water was so cold the men likely died within minutes.

"Submerged in water like that? Forget it. They're blocks of ice now," Bollini said in an interview.

"When they took them out yesterday, they were frozen from head to toe … Fifteen minutes in there, and you're dead."

Authorities have launched an investigation into the deaths of Bollini, 44, Marc Guay, 31, and Bruno Goulet, 36.

Emergency workers located the bodies of Bollini and Guay on Monday in the flooded mine.

On Tuesday morning, officials confirmed they had found Goulet's body overnight — some 500 metres underground.

Officials at Metanor Resources released a statement Tuesday expressing their condolences and saying they "share the profound sadness of the families."

The company also thanked rescue workers and nearby mining facilities that assisted in the efforts to pump water from the mine.

Metanor's superintendent of human resources, Pierre Bernaquez, said a staff meeting was being held Tuesday to address the deaths.

He said the victims’ families would be provided assistance in making funeral arrangements.

The trio had been sent down the shaft to carry out repair work on Friday night.

They lost contact once they reached the bottom levels of the shaft. When workers at the surface realized something was wrong, they brought the cage back up and found it drenched, with the emergency ceiling latch open. 

The workers were wearing heavy overalls and helmets and were carrying tools and flashlight batteries when they went down.

All three men were found between Level 11 and Level 12 of the recently reactivated mine.

An alarm to warn miners about water did not go off the night Guay, Bollini and Goulet were in the shaft, and it seemed pumps intended to keep the mine dry had also failed Radio-Canada's Francis Labbé reported from the mine site.

Quebec's workplace health and safety board (CSST) inspected the mine in September because the underground facility was scheduled to be reopened after being idle for some time, said spokesman Pierre Turgeon.

He said the CSST has launched an investigation into Friday's incident in co-operation with Quebec provincial police.

"Our inspectors will go down the mine to check what kind of equipments are there, what kind of security equipments were there — if not why … what went wrong?" Turgeon said.

Bachelor Lake facility key to Metanor

All activities at the mine had been halted since the incident Friday.

Bernaquez said Metanor is seeking permission to restart activities at the mine in the next few weeks.

"It is the survival of the company that is in question — there are about 100 people who earn a living with this mine," he said.

The mine produced about 130,000 ounces of gold in the 1980s, and required significant capital to rehabilitate.

The underground network was pumped before operations resumed this year.

Metanor acquired a 50 per cent stake in the Bachelor Lake property in 2004 from Campbell Resources. It later bought the remaining interest from Halo Resources.

Metanor acquired the nearby Barry open-pit mine in 2006 to feed its mill at Bachelor Lake and generate the cash flow that would finance the redevelopment of the higher-grade Bachelor Lake mine.

The company had planned to restart mining operations at Bachelor Lake in mid-2010 and has been ramping up capacity at the mill to handle additional production.

The facilities were expected to more than double Metanor's gold production, to about 70,000 ounces a year.

It is not yet clear how Friday's incident might affect the company's timetable and production goals.

Metanor shares fell 22 per cent on Monday, but were up three cents at 48 cents Tuesday afternoon on the TSX Venture Exchange.