The Deep Dark

by Gregg Olsen

  Jack Harris found a small reserve of self-rescuers on the station, but didn’t bother to get one. In fact, most of the men sitting around waiting were without them. Chippy hoistman Don Wood sat on a bench with other hacking miners, trying to catch his breath. Wood said the smoke was overpowering in the hoist room, and he’d had to get out of there. Wood’s departure was the likely reason Harris hadn’t received a response when he belled for a cage from 4500.

  ON 4400 THE LEAD MAN FOR THE SHAFT CREW WAS ROBERT BARKER, a compact man at five-foot-six and 150 pounds. Barker’s nose was a bit of a ski jump with flared nostrils, which all family members called “the Barker nose.” The father of six, Barker was there along with a handful of other guys, including former Smelterville chief of police Jack Reichert, who’d given up the badge for a girl and for a job welding underground. The smoke seemed translucent, and there was some speculation that Reichert’s torch had touched off some timbers. Barker went down to the timber station at 4500 to see if the smoke was coming from there, but found nothing. He rang for the cage, but no one answered. There was no phone on 4500, so Barker walked across the station to squawk for the double-drum.

  Ten

  11:45 A.M., MAY 2

  4400 Level

  BILL MITCHELL, TWENTY-SIX, THE MINER WHO’D MOVED TO THE district for the love of a Smelterville girl, had a crooked grin and a five-o’clock shadow that appeared before noon. Prior to the morning of May 2, Mitchell and his fifty-year-old partner, Bob Waldvogel, had driven a raise fifty feet up above the 4400 level and were mining a block of ore that ran along a particularly good vein. Instead of using the far more common—and far less dangerous—cut-and-fill stoping method, Mitchell and Waldvogel were shrink-stoping. In cut-and-fill, a block of ore about six feet in height is drilled and blasted down across the full length of the stope. A slusher drags the blasted rock to a chute that supplies muck cars on the level below. As each cut is made, sandfill is poured into the stope up to the desired level, after which the next cut is mined. In shrink-stoping, however, ore is drilled and blasted down onto a muck pile that fills the entire stope. After each cut, only enough muck is sent through the chutes to provide enough room for the men to set up to drill and blast another cut. And over and over it goes. When all of the ore has been drilled and blasted, mining ceases and all of the ore-laden muck is drawn out of the stope through chutes at the haulage level until there is enough room to allow the miners to repeat drilling and blasting. When the ore has been mucked out, the stope is a vertical crack, maybe 5 feet wide, 50 feet long, and 150 feet high.

  In ordinary stope mining, each day twenty or so muck cars were loaded for the station, dumped in the ore pocket, and hoisted out of the mine. With what Mitchell and Waldvogel were doing, they’d have tons and tons ready at once—an endless parade of muck cars that lasted for weeks, or even months. Since 4400’s narrow walls were considered “good country”—not prone to collapse—the technique met with considerable success on that level. Miners, however, generally didn’t like shrinking the stope because it delayed their gyppo money until the completion of the project.

  Late Tuesday morning, a motorman used his cap lamp to signal Mitchell, who was pulling muck and dropping it into a car. The signal was the rapid shaking of his head from side to side, the beam bouncing in an obvious “no” fashion.

  “Hey!” the motorman repeated. “Stop what you’re doing and tell Bob to get your dinner buckets and let’s get the hell out of here. The mine’s on fire and we’re evacuating.” The motorman said he’d been telling the rest of the crew to get to the station.

  “Hold it!” Mitchell called up to Waldvogel, who was slushing, and couldn’t hear above the racket of the muck against the machine. Mitchell shook his lamp from side to side and Waldvogel stopped, though he plainly couldn’t understand the fuss. Nothing indicated anything was burning. Their stope was at the tail end of the drift, where there was very little air movement other than what came from the compressed-air line. In fact, smoke from Mitchell’s cigarette blew out of their stope.

  A moment after the motorman’s hurried warning, the partners left for the station, swinging their buckets and shaking their heads. More than the worry of a mine fire was the thought that they were not going to make any gyppo money that day. They’d have to settle for the day’s pay—$24.

  There goes our contract, Mitchell thought.

  Bob Waldvogel was less concerned than Mitchell about his paycheck, an attitude that reflected how he lived his life. Waldvogel bounced from Lucky Friday to Bunker to Galena to Sunshine as though employment were some kind of scavenger hunt and he could never really find the prize. Mitchell was rock-solid. He had two daughters and a wife to consider. Waldvogel’s personal life was a shambles and was going nowhere. He roomed at Pat’s Boarding House in Kellogg and filled his free time in district bars. More than once he’d come to work with the smell of a drink on his breath. Though Waldvogel had been an employee of Sunshine off and on many times over, it was Mitchell who had seniority. He’d been there two years steady.

  Both men tasted the smoke. It wasn’t heavy, just the light scent of a campfire that had been doused with a bucket of water and then had smoldered for a while. Visibility was fine. They were curious about what had caught fire and where it had started.

  “Boy,” Mitchell said, “smells like something’s burning on the 4600.”

  Waldvogel, a severe asthmatic, looked down the drift through smudged glasses. Smoke was an irritant to his lungs, but working in a mine meant he had to put up with it. He kept inhalers in his bucket, and puffed on them whenever burning oil or dust gave him fits. The pair reached an air door and pushed it open. A thick, billowing cloud rolled over them, and visibility nosedived to barely twenty-five or thirty feet. It was like a chimney fire with creosote burning and sending ashy, thick smoke from a rooftop. They couldn’t be seen, but men could be heard hacking as hot smoke entered their lungs. Waldvogel and Mitchell picked up the pace. As they rounded a crook in the drift, they saw the shrouded blush of the station’s fluorescent lights. The lights were diffuse through the smoke, giving the drift the appearance of a full moon on the foggiest night. They couldn’t see individual lights, just the shape of brightness through darkened air.

  For a fire down on 4600, Mitchell thought, we’re sure getting a lot of smoke up here.

  FOUR HUNDRED FEET BELOW WHERE MITCHELL AND WALDVOGEL wrestled with the smoke, Ron Flory and Tom Wilkinson rode a motor about a mile down the drift to alert the other guys on their level. Since they were working on a main level, the men of 4800 had their own motors to haul muck to the station. Motors beat walking any day.

  “We need to get our self-rescuers and wait for the cage,” Flory called out.

  Wilkinson didn’t know anything about self-rescuers, but Flory had heard a little about them. He had been told once by a shift boss that if there was dense smoke—other than blasting smoke—men were to put on a self-rescuer and call for the cage. He knew the units were kept in a box by the station phone. That was the sum total of his training—and he was the best trained of the nine men on the station. The smoke was visible, but nothing they couldn’t handle. The men talked for a while and put on the breathing units.

  A miner called for the cage again, and the hoistman promised it would be down to get them as soon as possible. Smoke was worse on the upper levels, he said, and they’d have to wait their turn. While this was going on, Flory started having trouble with the mouthpiece. It was too hot to keep his lips around. It was as if he’d put his mouth around a shard of dry ice. He tried a second unit, and then reached for a third. Others did the same. Some gave up and breathed around their mouthpieces.

  “Why are these getting so goddamn hot?” Wilkinson asked.

  No one knew. None of them had given the units a thought before that moment.

  The smoke grew in density, and the men heard the cage fly through the shaft at least twice—skipping 4800. Each time, the man on the station phone reminded the hoistman that they wer
e there.

  “In case you forgot us,” he said.

  Their eyes irritated to the point of tears, they retreated to the motor barn, a large, blasted-out working and storage area where train batteries were recharged. Although clouded with smoke, the air seemed better there.

  “When is the damn cage gonna get here so we can go out?” Wilkinson asked.

  No one answered. No one had a clue.

  Flory and Wilkinson talked about getting a beer at the Happy Landing once the smoke thinned out and they got out of there. Maybe Wilkinson’s buddy Johnny Davis, who had refused to dump shift, could meet them there to celebrate his birthday. They’d be early, which was good considering the popularity of the miners’ hangout. It wasn’t the only place to drink in downtown Smelterville, but the Happy, with its live country-and-western bands, foaming-over-the-edge schooners, and rowdy miners, always guaranteed a good time. Flory and Wilkinson were regulars there.

  Flory would usually party with Myrna, who’d drop Tiger off with her mother or sister in Kellogg. Sometimes Frances Wilkinson would come along, but Tom liked drinking far more than his homebody wife did. When his wife wasn’t around to keep him in line, some saw Tom Wilkinson as trouble—but no more so than half the guys in the district who enjoyed cutting loose. Wilkinson had a short fuse and had seen his share of trouble. Flory had had his scrapes with the law, too, but of the two, he had the more amiable reputation. The men were partners in the mine, superficially friendly, but neither would count the other as his best friend. Flory was quiet and considered himself a decent listener. A muscular man with a shy boy’s personality, he could puff himself up and pretend to be comfortable in his own skin. Wilkinson, by far the bolder of the pair, thrived on the idea that money was made to be spent and a good time was there for the taking. He wasn’t alone in his thinking. Few miners cared about saving a dime. Hell, I could be dead in a rockburst tomorrow, and why should my old lady get something out of that?

  THROUGHOUT THE DEPTHS OF THE MINE, SMOKE SPED THROUGH the vast ventilation system. It had become a stealthy tornado. Wherever it could find a place to expand, it did. It was fast enough that no man wearing twenty-some pounds of mining tools, batteries, gear, and sweat-filled rubber boots could outrun it.

  Eleven

  BEFORE NOON, MAY 2

  Sunshine Mine Yard

  AS A GENERAL PRACTICE, THE DOORS TO SUNSHINE’S MILLING operation were kept open to let fresh air into the stifling building that sat on the rocky mountainside, just west of the men’s dry house. The state-of-the-art mill used crushing, grinding, flotation, and filtering techniques to concentrate silver, lead, and copper ores for shipping to smelters in Montana and Washington. The milling process turned the stony rubble hauled from Sunshine into the consistency of powdered sugar.

  A little after noontime the mill crew smelled something burning, but a quick check showed their machinery in good order. Someone called out that smoke was coming out of Sunshine’s ventilation shaft. A group went to look, but the wind had shifted and the smoke had dissipated. The crew shut the doors and everyone returned to work.

  On the first floor of the engineering building, stenographer Richelle Pherigo, twenty-two, took over as relief switchboard operator. Pherigo sat behind the small console and answered the mundane calls that came in at that hour—wives wanting to get messages to husbands and inquiries from men looking for the hiring office. Not long after she took her seat, an excited voice came from underground.

  “Call down to Marvin at the North Shore! We need him and the rest back here, right away. Looks like we got a fire in the mine.”

  Marvin was Marvin Chase, the mine manager. He and the company’s top executives—including the New York owners—were addressing Sunshine shareholders forty miles away at the nicest place in the district, the North Shore Resort, overlooking Lake Coeur d’Alene—the aquatic jewel of the panhandle.

  The mine itself had come off a good production year—though the company had lost more than a million dollars on paper due to write-offs and other vague financial hocus-pocus. Nevertheless, shareholders, large and small, assembled in a banquet room to look toward the future. There were fears that the company was running in the direction of bankruptcy, pulling money from operations and investing in ill-conceived ventures that only served to make the board of directors richer. Those fears were not unjustified. Turning a deaf ear to such subjects, executives announced plans for additional ore exploration in the coming months, as well as the continuation of the record-breaking retrieval of the high-grade ore that made Sunshine legendary in the annals of mining. Things had been good for the mine in 1971, they said, and they were just about to get better.

  The urgent message was a jolt, and Richelle Pherigo looked outside. Smoke rose in the sky, dark and columnar, like the trail of a rocket. She dialed the resort and was connected to personnel director Jim Farris. She explained the importance of reaching Chase.

  “He can’t be disturbed,” Farris said.

  His response took Pherigo aback.

  “Well, we got a fire here and he needs to call back to the mine,” she said.

  Farris promised to pass on the message, and Pherigo and the others expected an immediate call-back. But none came. The column of smoke became blacker and blacker, now shooting straight up, like one of those tall, black office buildings in some city far from the district. An agonizing half hour later, there still had been no response from the shareholders’ meeting. From her front-row seat, Pherigo saw men swarming the yard. Shifters were breathing down her neck to get in touch with Chase or Al Walkup, the mine superintendent. Anyone who had some authority.

  Sitting at her desk in accounts payable, clerk Linda Daugherty, twenty-four, could hear the buzz as the remaining office people continued in vain to reach Chase or Walkup. The way she understood it, the guys underground wanted to evacuate, but they wanted the go-ahead from the top.

  No one, she thought, wanted to evacuate unless it was a real emergency. No one wanted to lose an afternoon’s production.

  SUNSHINE EMPLOYEES HAD NO GRIPE WITH MINE MANAGER MARVIN Chase, but after years of abuse at the hands of the revolving door of managers, the office employees, who paid the bills and handled the voluminous paperwork of the state and federal governments, had been beaten down so many times that they were unsure and a little cowed. The previous manager, Tom McManus, a former linotype machine manufacturing plant manager, had been sent to Big Creek by the out-of-town owners. He quickly established himself as the manager from hell. Not only was McManus a tyrant and a mean-spirited eccentric, he didn’t think staff people were worth a damn. All could easily be replaced. Engineers, he habitually ranted, were “a dime a dozen.” He also remarked that he didn’t see the value of a mine safety program. The effort stole profits from the bottom line.

  Behind his back, McManus was called Black Mac, less for his taste in clothing—the shiny black suit that he always wore, his fly once fastened shut with a safety pin—than for his insistence that all lights be turned off unless absolutely necessary. Under the McManus regime, pens were locked in the safe and issued only by sign-out. A single pen was to be used until its ink was exhausted. When it ran dry, an employee took it to McManus’s secretary and she tested it on a legal pad to ensure that it was dead before issuing a new one. Pity the poor clerk who discovered that someone had walked off with her pen. She’d be reduced to tears and left to beg for a new one. Black Mac thought the hiring office’s water fountain was “wasting water” and ordered it disconnected. The tube lights in the office were so antiquated that when they were shut off at his insistence, they’d cease to function when turned on again. It got so bad that the electrician eventually moved into the office. In addition to humiliating the staff for personal sport, Black Mac could be unforgivably cruel. He once fired a clerk for taking the day off to attend her nephew’s funeral. Another woman was given her walking papers because McManus consider her ample breasts a “distraction” to mine engineers and geologists.

  Not u
ntil the fall of 1969, when they signed union cards, did the staff stand up to the little dictator. McManus refused to negotiate, and in February 1970 the emboldened office workers staged a strike. It lasted less than a day. The staff had feared the miners wouldn’t be supportive. But miners coming for their shifts saw the office workers’ signs and turned around. Talks with management, and a speedy resolution, took a sudden priority.

  Six months later, when McManus was ousted, it was as if Dorothy had vanquished the Wicked Witch of the West. The McManus legacy was not how well he managed operations, but how frightened and damaged were the people who had cowered in his presence. Even with nice guy Marvin Chase in charge, the anxiety never went away. Fear lingered. When the events of May 2, 1972, began, no one thought he had the power to do a thing about it. No one wanted to lose his job by calling for an evacuation.

  IT FELL ON THE SHOULDERS OF AN ACCOUNTANT TO GIVE IN TO what was as risky as it was right—the official evacuation order from topside. He wasn’t management, and he sat in an office that had once kept pens in the safe; the likes of such autonomy had seldom been seen. Few in the office were sure what was going on underground and what, if any, evacuation plan was already under way. Some assumed the source of the smoke was above 2700, a level well above where most of the men worked. They didn’t think smoke could get down to 3100 without the men knowing well in advance.

  Pherigo rang the North Shore for the third time. Superintendent Walkup answered, and she patched him through to a shifter. Walkup, a bear of a man with a foghorn voice, said he’d return to the mine right away. He was unruffled. All mines had little blazes. There was always more smoke than fire.

  Twelve

  12:02 P.M., MAY 2

  Safety Office