A bump shakes, rocks, bursts, bumps, kills, saddens, registers. A coal mine bump does a lot of things. The one in Springhill, Nova Scotia on October 23, 1958 shook the small town that had already seen so much tragedy both in the mines and on the streets of their small quiet town.
As I am not a geology student, nor do I pretend to be well enough acquainted with the subject, I will allow other sources to fully explain to you exactly what a bump is. In layman's terms, i.e. my terms, a bump is an underground earthquake that, in this case, took relatively perpendicular levels of rock and brought them together in a moment crushing everyone and everything in their way.
This first resource is from the Final Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Springhill Mine Disaster of 1958. It provides a summary of the coalfield and and makes qualified presumptions as to what caused the bump.
This second resource is courtesy of our trusty research helpers, Wikipedia. Based on my limited understanding of the geology and physics of the bump it seems to be fairly accurate.
This third and extremely detailed resource is a document about Coal Mine Bumps and why they occur and how to control them (if possible). Near the beginning of the document is a fleshed out definition of a coal mine bump.
I promise that the blog posts to come will be more social-historical in theme and content but it's important to have a grasp as to why the bump happened in Springhill, Nova Scotia on October 23, 1958.
Looking forward to sharing this journey with you all,
Rebecca
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