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    Cold Truth
    Cold Truth
    Cold Truth
    Ebook75 pages1 hour

    Cold Truth

    By Roger Russell

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    About this ebook

    There is a body of men and women who buy and sell shares in companies and thereby earn the wherewithal to live. Some of them buy shares in mining companies. The pursuit of money blinds many of them to the things that other people are doing to keep that money keep coming in. Between the shareholders and the reality of a mining operation are the directors; people who feed on the ignorance of the shareholders and the need for the members of the workforce to survive. They make the decisions about what will or will not be done on the mine; the decisions that keep people safe or expose them to injury or death. Death is no respecter of persons; shareholders die, Company directors die and so, all too often, do the workers. The difference is that shareholders are in control of their environment as are directors; not one of them is really in any danger because of the circumstances in which they work. The employees at the bottom however must eat, so must work and largely do what they are told. If death's door is opened around them they are, to all intents and purposes trapped. Between the workers and the senior people are the supervisors and lower level managers; their work is to achieve high production results, reduce costs and eliminate accidents. They are also the experts. They know what must be done and how it must be done. They do not have the authority to enforce most of their knowledge or to spend the money they should. Everything must be approved, must be controlled for the sake of a little more profit. Workers and countries are frequently exploited. Directors and boards are frequently axed if profits are not good. This story is about the men in the middle who fight to look after both workers and company; to make both ends satisfy conflicting needs. It is a true account of a series of events which led inevitably to disaster. It is set in Finland but could be about any number of mine sites all over the world. It is about the inevitability and patience of death, about love and friendship and about sincere efforts to provide the minimum safety needs of a mining operation. It is about the difficulties experienced by foreign workers on a remote location. But it is more especially about the game corporations play and the risks they are prepared to take with the lives and health of their employees to add more profit to the bottom line and keep the shareholders happy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRoger Russell
    Release dateOct 30, 2013
    ISBN9781311734631
    Cold Truth
    Author

    Roger Russell

    Born in 1947 in Eldoret, Kenya Roger attended school in Bournemouth, UK and St David's College in Johannesburg, SA. Roger Russell fell into a long drop toilet when he was three years old, out of a car when he was four. He went on to almost drown himself at six, cut through his left leg when he was seven and crush his right arm when he was nine. By the time he was eleven he had spent over a year in hospital and had been the recipient of many hundreds of stitches. He was banned from playing soccer or rugby and could not run to save his life. He started in the mines at nineteen and lost his finger in an accident before a month had passed. He joined the U/G Rescue team and was gassed, trapped and lost underground within the space of a single year. Roger married in 1968 and is the father of four children by his first wife, Sharon, to whom he was happily married for twenty five years before she died of cancer in 1993. He has since remarried and lives with Cynthia on a 30 foot motor cruiser in Hermitage Marina near St Ives in the UK. They have one child, a boy named Gordon after Roger's father. In 1993, after the death of his wife, Roger walked from Beit Bridge on the Northern border of South Africa to Cape Town, a distance of 2000km. He slept alongside the road and walked alone and un-armed through one of the worst political times the country had ever seen. He saw then and has continued to see immense power in common people. In 1999 he walked right around South Africa to support a much maligned South African Police Services. He was mugged by a squatter camp gang, attacked by a policeman in a remote station in the Transkei and swept away in a flash flood in the Orange Free State. He has seen police barracks that were worse than some prison cells, met and spoken with criminals, saints and politicians. The British media called him a South African hero and Steve Tshwete, the South African Minister of Safety and Security at the time said he was truly a South African patriot. Roger has also walked in America on two occasions, promoting South Africa and cancer awareness to the people of California, Nevada, New Mexico and other states. Roger has written several books all of which he plans to publish with Smashwords in time.

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      Book preview

      Cold Truth - Roger Russell

      Cold Truth

      Roger Russell

      Published by Roger Russell at Smashwords

      Copyright 2013 Roger Russell

      Discover other titles by Roger Russell at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/rogerrussell

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      About the Author

      COLD TRUTH

      CHAPTER 1

      The fact that we have life means that we must pay the final price which is death. But death is ignored, not really believed, shelved for some other time. But it is coming, coming to each of us. How it comes might be individually different but it will always be very personal. What will we be dealing with when life ends? How will it be for you? Quick and short, over before you are really aware of it or slow and drawn, taunting you with certain knowledge? Will it be an accepted event for you, a consequence of your understanding of the nature of the world or will it be frightening, dark and terrifying, as inevitable as it is unacceptable.

      James was no stranger to death; he had seen it take others and had seen it come for him. He had seen it so real and close that when he thought back on it; it seemed that nothing that he had been able to do had dragged him back from the darkness. Only chance or some greater power than he could have intervened and brought him back.

      In his work as a miner in some of the most dangerous mines in the world and as a member of the underground rescue team he had sometimes dealt with men that were dying or had died already. In one instance, he had crawled over bodies, the crushing presence of tons of rock not half a metre above his head, looking and passing judgement, quick and brutal; leave this one, try to help this one. Because there were too few rescuers, too far from adequate assistance and too many injured to help them all. In one case as he knelt beside a worker with crushed legs and blood wetting the grit and stones beneath him, James had seen death claim him, the life going from the man’s eyes as he looked into them. If the man had wanted to plead for something it was too late and then he was gone. Many years later, alongside a mountain road, James again knelt beside another injured man, putting his hand underneath his head to lift it out of a small rivulet of water, his fingers sank into the skull and James realised that the back of his head was jelly and that he too would not make it. James had the freedom then, because there were others, to stay with him until he was collected by the paramedics but he knew what the man did not… He would not survive.

      Many times in his life James saw death outside of himself, alongside him, before him, once even taking someone very dear to him but only twice had it been inside him, making itself a place in his understanding of himself and his impermanence. These two experiences with the final payment had come in two distinct forms; once, when he was in hospital with double pneumonia, he had a seizure and stopped breathing. He would not accept that he would not live; on the contrary he fought bitterly to keep alive. He could feel the room going dark and dragged desperately for air to feed his lungs, to feed his body and keep it alive. In the final moments he remembered his rescue team training and reversed the battle for breath, blowing air from his chest to allow space for new oxygen rich air to enter. When his body finally got what it needed he fell to the floor sucking in great mouthfuls of air. Death had been there with him but he did not accept that fact until afterwards. He was however so frightened by the proximity of death at the time that the panic nearly handed him over to it. But in the moments of closing darkness there was still this desperate grip on life and a determination not to give in. Later he realised that death had touched him and that nothing could have stopped it taking him if not for his wild clutch at trying something, anything.

      The second time was very different. In the middle of the seizure James had had a heart attack but because of fight for breathe had hardly known anything about it. He was sent for an angiogram and then told he must have a triple bypass. It took a year before he was scheduled for the operation. For everyone else it was a step forward but for him it was the reality of the final moment standing leering at him from the shadows. One is not allowed to show fear if you are governed by the rules in his family. So James had to be OK. He would survive; it would be just another phase in his life. But it was not… it was an awakening to a reality about himself; he realised that he was getting older and more susceptible to sickness and sooner or later he would have to pay the price of life.

      The operation was done and he found himself in a black hole. He had never been so alone, never so futile and helpless. Nothing he could force by his will or dominate was going to make any difference; he had to wait for his body to decide whether or not it would climb back up the walls of the pit into the sunlight. His knowledge of death had become personal

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