The tunnels being constructed to shift the huge volumes of water from one side of the mountains to the other were dark and wet, illuminated only by a string of electric light globes along one wall, until one neared the face. There it was like a crazed film maker's impression of hell.
Men in glistening oilskins moved disjointedly like demons through the strobing blue flash of welding torches. Beyond them, at the face, powerful arc lights threw a harsh glare over ant-like teams working on giant two and three-deck work platforms, or jumbos as they were called.
Drillers clung desperately to the end of four-metre long drill bits, biting with a harsh deafening rattle into the rock face. They wore no ear protection and their faces were raw from the stinging spray of their water-cooled tools. Moving among them in the confined space were locomotives, shunting wagons and collecting rock spoil. A man only had to take one wrong step, or stumble and he could be crushed and dismembered under the steel wheels.
The official death toll during the construction of the Scheme is one-hundred and twenty-one, though this figure is open to dispute. It wasn't compiled until 1981 and men killed in several multiple-fatality accidents failed to make the list, indicating some serious gaps in the records, which were maintained by the contractors. The toll also doesn't include the many fatalities that occurred on the Scheme's steep access roads.
In 1958, Sir William Hudson told a national conference on industrial safety that an analysis of accidents on the Snowy showed the greatest dangers were in the use of modern, fast-moving plant and in the increased tempo of work on modern, large construction sites. Work safety education had not yet caught up with the technological and mechanical advances now employed on construction sites.
Sir William ordered a closer observance of safety procedures. But the practicalities belied the good intentions. The contractors had their eyes fixed firmly on the bonuses the Authority was offering for projects finishing ahead of schedule. Shifts were pitched competitively against other shifts. Daily and weekly progress became the general talking point.
Consequently, scant regard was paid to safety. The safety supervisors deployed at most construction sites received no thanks for stopping work over a safety concern. Even many of the workers saw stoppages in terms of lost money, even if it was for their own welfare.
To mechanic-turned-tunneller Alesandro Wialletton the tunnels were worse than a nightmare because you couldn't escape simply by waking up.
"It was frightening ... terrifying. The only sound was the ear-splitting noise caused by drills and compressed air. The fumes made it hard to breath and you could barely see your hand in front of your face in the vapour and dust which filled the chamber. Fresh air at the end of a shift was a joy in itself.
"While in the tunnel you had to watch where you put your feet, at the same time as watch the roof for loose rocks. The floor was slippery rock, covered in a film of oil, grease and water. One day one of the loco guards jumped off to run ahead to switch the track. As his rubber boots hit the ground he slipped forwards and the loco's wheels cut off both arms. It happened in an instant and it was so typical.
"No man could ever know what would happen from one moment to the next. Everyone worried ... it is silly to say otherwise. It sometimes didn't matter how careful you were. If a rock dropped from the roof just as you walked under ... what could you do? If a compressed air hose burst just when you were using it ... what could you do?
"One time an air hose burst and started scything with enough force to cut a man in two ... it had happened before. A fellow panicked -- he had seen his mate 'shot' through the chest and killed by a sharp stone fired from the ground by the force of a broken air hose. So he jumped head-first into the bucket of the mucker (an electric-powered machine with large steel buckets working on a conveyor) to escape but knocked the controls on the way. The bucket lifted up against the roof and cut off both legs.
"After you saw something like that, you had days when you were so scared you could hardly move.
"Often you didn't know what had happened. You just saw the ambulance drive away and all the men leaving work. You knew someone had been killed and so you also stopped work."
People ask why men stayed in the tunnels. In one word – money. With bonuses a tunneller could earn up to fifty pounds a week -- double the average wage. Tunnellers were urged on by footage bonuses on top of their hourly rates. When the going was good a man could make more from footage bonuses than his ordinary pay.
For a long time, Alesandro, who eventually left the Scheme to run a garage in Cooma, could not bring himself to look at the memorial erected to those killed: "I didn't want to remember ... the fellows I had come to Australia with and who were dead so quickly. It hurt ... still hurts ... to remember.
The procedure for building a trans-mountain tunnel began with the surveyors, whose measurements and calculations were crucial for tunnels which had to meet up at a point deep under a mountain range. The work started on the surface with surveyors working in conjunction with diamond drillers who determined the rock condition at the proposed tunnel depth.
Once the course of the tunnel was decided, the excavating began -- simultaneously from both sides of the mountain at once.
Once the tunnel was started, rail tracks were laid -- first for the big drilling jumbos, which worked at the face and then for the locomotives. The jumbos were hinged in the middle so they could be swung back to allow the 'mucker' through to the rock spoil after blasting. It was a continuous cycle from midnight Sunday to midnight Saturday -- drill, pull the jumbo back, blast, bring in the mucker, then push the jumbo back for the next drill pattern.
Drillers worked in pairs, one man on the drill and the other at the face holding it against the rock until it was deep enough to stay there.
The drillers charged their own holes while a powder monkey -- not necessarily someone with an explosives certificate -- made up the primers.
Colin Purcell, one of the Authority's tunnel inspectors, said most tunnel fatalities involved either locomotives moving in the confined space, roof falls and premature explosions -- mostly caused by men drilling into the remainder of holes still containing unexploded charge from the previous firing.
During its twenty-four-year construction period, the Snowy accrued many stories of heroism and horror but nothing was ever as mind-numbing for those were present as the multiple fatalities.
On 16 April, 1958 at Kenny's Knob. The winch, which lowered the man-haul cage to the Tumut-1 underground power station seized. The cable snapped and four men went screaming to their deaths, plunging three hundred and seventy metres (twelve hundred feet) into a black hole.
The lights at the bottom of the shaft were blown by the impact and a young Latvian doctor, Dr Jon Baksa, had to be lowered alone into the darkness to locate the bodies and pronounce them dead.
A similar accident had occurred the previous year during the lining of the two pressure shafts to Tumut-1 power station with huge thirty-tonne steel pipes. The pipes were lowered down each three hundred and sixty-six metre vertical shaft by a massive winch.
As each pipe was lowered, a steel platform was placed on top of the pipe and several men would ride the platform on the pipe's slow, careful descent. Their job was to keep the load stable, by fending it away from the walls of the shaft.
On the afternoon of the accident, Max Paterick, a local boy from Kiandra who had started with the Scheme as a packhorse handler for the surveyors and was now with the Authority's transport division, arrived with a load of stores. He stopped to watch the activity while he waited for the supervising foreman to be free to sign for the deliveries.
Max watched, fascinated as a crane positioned the giant pipe into the opening of the shaft where it was hooked to the winch and fitted with the platform.
When all was ready, the foreman, an Irishman, told the riggers -- a Frenchman and three Italians -- to go on down without him. He had paperwork to do. The foreman and Max watched as the winch began to lower the massive load into the hole, then went inside the lift house to mark the delivery dockets.
Max had only just closed the door when there was a loud bang. The pair rushed back outside to see the steel hawser spilling freely off the winch drum.
A distant boom sounded from within the shaft and with mind-numbing dread they sprinted to the edge. The hawser came to the end of its length, snapped and disappeared also into the void. The screams of a man in agony reached them and peering cautiously over the edge they could see one of the riggers about ten metres down, impaled and slowly spinning on the end of a length of steel reinforcing rod which protruded from the top of a section of concrete lining. The man, recognised as the Frenchman, had been skewered through the middle and was spinning in the rush of air blasting back from the plummeting
load. He was face-down and as he turned, his blood fanned outwards, making neat crimson spirals before dripping into the black hole.
Of the huge pipe, the platform and the three other men, there was nothing. The shaft was more than three hundred metres deep and the two men could see only a black emptiness, from which there came nothing but deathly silence -- a silence which amplified the agony of the man just below.
They tried to shut their minds to what would be found at the bottom of the shaft and worried instead about the screaming, tortured rigger. The man had started to clutch at the rod protruding from his stomach, his arms and legs moving in jerky spasms like a pinned insect. Max ran back to the hoist house to raise the alarm, call for the ambulance and doctor and hopefully find a bottle of rum or scotch. He desperately needed a strong drink. The foreman began organising workers at the site to weld together a platform with which to rescue the injured man.
It was about half an hour before the platform was ready and a doctor arrived from Cabramurra. All this time the skewered man's screams etched deeper and deeper into the minds of the men working frantically to rescue him. When the platform was ready, the doctor and several workers were lowered by crane to the stricken rigger. The doctor injected him with a pain killer then the workers, their own faces deathly pale, plucked him off the rod. It was a messy, bloody task. The doctor tightly bound the man's torso to stem the blood flow and they were lifted back to the surface.
Meanwhile, Max Paterick had decided to leave the shocking scene. There was nothing he could do and he returned to the transport pool at Cabramurra. However, his involvement in the drama was not finished. The injured man was taken up to Cabramurra on the back of a jeep for transfer to an ambulance and Max was the only available driver.
"Fast as you can," ordered the doctor.
After hospital staff had wheeled the injured man away for surgery, the doctor and Max stood together leaning against the ambulance: "I could do with a drink," said Max. Wordlessly, the pair walked to the nearest hotel and ordered double scotches.
Back at the shaft, salvage teams were organised to descend to the bottom to clean up the mess. It was a sickening sight. There was little remaining of the men. Two had been dashed to pieces on the drop after being blown off the platform by the speed of the descent. The third man had ridden the platform all the way to the bottom but was then shredded by the steel hawser following behind.
The cause of the accident was a broken winch wheel and failure of the winch's emergency braking mechanism. The skewered man died a week later in hospital.
On all of the Schemes construction sites the work was dangerous and frightening, even for men hardened to battle. Explosions which went wrong caused horrendous injuries in the enclosed space of a tunnel. In the Eucumbene-Tumut tunnel two men were walking towards the exit when the face behind them was blasted. They hadn't taken cover when the siren sounded because they were more than two hundred metres away and considered themselves well out of the danger zone. A slab of rock hurtled along the tunnel from the face and took off both their heads. The velocity of the rock was so great that after decapitating the men it continued on for almost another hundred metres.
Sometimes accidents made news, sometimes they passed unnoticed by the outside world. On Monday 26 October, 1959, a small article appeared in the Cooma-Monaro Express, chronicling another fatality, another statistic. The report read:
A man was killed in an explosion in the access tunnel at Section Creek on Saturday afternoon.
He was Ernest Vecchiato, 29, a miner of River Camp. Police say that about 4.50pm on Saturday, Vecchiato was working a jackhammer in the tunnel. A small quantity of explosive not cleaned from the face exploded.
Vecchiato was severely injured about the lower half of his body and died about 6.20pm in the Sue City medical centre. Constable Ron Davies of Cabramurra is in charge of inquiries.
The report was straight, matter-of-fact newspaper reporting, the information picked up on a routine phone-around of police stations by the reporter. But like all such accident reports, it belied the personal tragedy.
Ernie had actually been using a hammer drill and against standing orders not to use the remnants of previous drill holes because they could contain undetonated explosive -- but conscious of the pressure for haste -- he inserted the drill.
Moments later the bit detonated an unfired shot still in the rock. He was penetrated from head to toe with slivers of granite. The blast didn't kill him instantly and he had to be manhandled out of the tunnel on a stretcher.
"Poor Ernie ... he goin' to die," he repeated in broken English as he was carried from the rubble to the surface where he had to be ferried by jeep to the first-aid station at Sue City eight kilometres away.
His workmates tried to reassure him: "Cut it out Ernie, you'll be right."
Some of his workmates were crying bitterly as they carried him out. Ernie was a popular fellow, expressive and gregarious and liked by all for his humour and his fine voice. After he had finished on the Snowy he wanted to be an opera singer.
But his dreams and the dreams which had brought him to this strange frontier on the other side of the world were fast slipping from his grasp. He peered pleadingly from his torn face: "Ernie die ... oh, Ernie die," he said.
His friends went with him to the medical post, encouraging him; willing him to pull through. But despite their efforts, Ernie died at the first aid station an hour and a half later. He had been in terrible pain but had never once complained.
So many had been killed and forgotten that this time they wanted to remember their mate. With the rock pulled from his body by the medical officers they bordered a small garden outside the medical post and christened it 'Ernie's Rockery'.
Sadly, both Sue City and Ernie's Rockery later disappeared under Talbingo Reservoir.