“The workers were at it from first light till darkness, they often used to sleep in the galleries, and working conditions were dreadful. Serpieri had his own lead coinage and he paid the workers in that. But you couldn't buy anything from town with it, so Serpieri had shopkeepers of his own and the workers obliged to shop from them. Down to 1935, the average life expectancy was 30 years for men and 35 years for women. Everyone used to die of lead poisoning and miner's lung. Since 1980, much has been written and said (by doctors, journalists and other people) about lead poisoning in Lavrio. Things like that strike me as really strange nowadays, when I think how much care we take with our own children. When we were their age, we used to go swimming in the sea after school. And where did we swim? Right next to the outflow pipes from the French and American Companies, where all the waste from washing the ore went into the sea. Our mothers used to tell us the gunpowder was good for the bones and lungs. Much they knew about it, poor women. The older people used to soak their feet in the bog by the mine and then sit in the sun, because they said it was good for the arthritis they' d got from the damp when they were working in the galleries. The Company trains burned coal, or rather coke. In the winter, we used to go to deserted areas and wait for the train to go past. The workers always used to throw off lots of lumps of coke to take home when they went home. All hell would be let loose then, because we lads used to pounce on the coal and share it out with the sons of the train-workers. When we took the pieces of coal home, hearing "good boy" from our mothers was all we got for it. Never mind -that was worth having too. And we'd be able to keep warm for a day or two. Ι remember my father, who worked in the galleries, saying that when they sat down to eat what they'd brought with them, great big rats would appear to devour whatever the miners left. The miners didn't harm them: down in those dark galleries, the rats were their guardian angels. If no rats made their appearance in a gallery on three days running, the miners wouldn't go into it, because they knew that had to risk our lives at times. We had to go down into the ancient shafts, 90 metres deep, on ladders rotten with rust, to repair water pumps or the molten lead would be boiling in the cauldrons and we would have to go up on to the cauldrons to repair a motor which was about to burn out, it was so hot.” Dimitris Moroglou narrative in S.B. Skopelitis, Lavrio (in Greek, French, English), Athens, Exantas Publ., 1996, p. 419-420.
During the first time I was working down there, I would often awake at night. You would wonder how you could come down when you saw the rocks hanging above you. And it was not just that. Down there working conditions were very unhealthy. But people must live. What to do? How many miners did they lose their lives? Tens of them… Hard times. Each day we could play with death. K. Loukas narrative (ex engine driver in Serpieri No 1 Tunnel) in newspaper Sounio 06/07, no 148, p. 8-9.