by Gregg Olsen
AT HIS DESK ON THE SECOND FLOOR OF SUNSHINE’S WAREHOUSE, Bob Launhardt unlatched his dinner bucket and smoothed out a napkin. He set out a sandwich he’d made that morning and prepared to dig into the safety rules handbook, when his phone rang. Tom Harrah’s voice shot through the line with a desperate urgency that at once propelled Launhardt to his feet.
“I want you in front of the warehouse. Right now!” Harrah said, abruptly hanging up.
Launhardt dropped the phone and hurried down the stairs. When he found Harrah, the shop foreman was sweating profusely and breathing heavily.
“We’ve got a fire in the mine,” said Harrah, gulping air. “They want us to dump the stench and bring the helmets to 10-Shaft on 3100. You help our yard man get the helmets out of the safety office and into the mine.”
Launhardt, caught completely off guard, said he’d release the stench. Stench was a warning system that hardrock mining operations used to alert underground personnel to evacuate. Historically, stench was a foul-smelling liquid made from garlic and other strong aromatics. Sunshine used ethyl mercaptan manufactured by Eastman Organic Chemicals, a product similar—though not as concentrated—as that used to odorize propane, butane, and other potentially deadly gases. The compound came in a glass ampoule that, when added to a compressor’s air line, sent stomach-turning fumes through the mine. In the south end of the compressor room, Launhardt broke the glass and opened three green and three red valves to release the acrid vapors into the mine. The size, configuration, and depth of a hardrock mine made the electric-powered visual and auditory warning systems used in coal mines impractical. Sunshine employed stench instead of sirens because every part of the mine was serviced with compressed air.
“Helmet” was mining vernacular for a breathing apparatus used for underground rescue. The units kept in the safety office were somewhat similar to what firemen wore on their backs when entering a blazing building. But there was a key difference: those used by firemen were compressed-air units, like scuba gear; a mine rescue helmet used compressed oxygen in its cylinder. In essence, it was a re-breather. The air that its user expended circulated through the device and was processed by chemicals that removed the carbon dioxide by-product of respiration. A chamber in the breathing circuitry held a supply of cardoxide to absorb carbon dioxide. Without the cardoxide, carbon dioxide levels in a breathing unit would quickly reach toxic levels and the wearer would collapse and almost certainly die. The apparatus gave a man a maximum of two hours of rescue time—four times what a fireman had with the much heavier compressed air. Sunshine had ten helmets.
At no time in Launhardt’s life did events melt and blur more than during the first few minutes after he released the stench. He could feel his heart pulsate against his rib cage. He returned to his office and dialed Central Mine Rescue’s number in Wallace. But the director of the mobile unit that supplied rescue equipment and know-how to the mining companies of the Coeur d’Alenes was at lunch. Launhardt frantically called the Shoshone County Sheriff’s Office and told the dispatcher that the rescue man and his familiar panel truck were needed at Sunshine.
ACROSS THE YARD IN THE JEWELL HOIST ROOM, LINO CASTANEDA kept his ear attached to the phone. American-born (“Sonora, Arizona, not Mexico!”), Castaneda had picked spuds in southern Idaho before finding his way to the district and steady, permanent employment at Sunshine. His half brother, Roberto Diaz, worked underground as a motorman. Castaneda, by and large easygoing, was seriously stressed as he listened in the morning of May 2.
He heard the hoistman on 10-Shaft’s double-drum say he was about to faint.
“Will you hand me one of those breather deals? I’m feeling kind of groggy.”
Castaneda hunched over a little where he stood, gripping the telephone receiver as if it weighed forty pounds. Every line that could be picked up throughout the workings of the mine had a man on it, pleading for help and offering whatever they could about the fire’s location. Castaneda stood mute. When rock rabbit Larry Hawkins asked what was happening, the hoistman shook his free hand to tell him to shut up. That motion brought light to Castaneda’s face. The hoistman’s dark brown eyes had pooled with tears.
Hawkins left the hoist room and found Launhardt near the mine portal. The safety engineer’s face was a study in anxiousness, but he spoke calmly. His reassuring tone suggested things were under control.
“I need someone to go underground with me,” he said.
Hawkins held a restricted rescue card because his weight had ballooned. He reminded Launhardt that he was allowed on the helmet crew only in the event of a real emergency.
“This is an emergency,” Launhardt said. “And I need you now.”
The idea that there was an urgent situation somewhere in the mine was hard to grasp. Hawkins had just come out of the mine where everybody was kicking back, relaxing. They were fine. Nothing had been out of the ordinary. How could something so dire happen so quickly?
Before the call from Harrah, Launhardt had been most concerned about a shaft fire. Smaller electrical fires or waste fires in the mine could be extinguished with relative ease. Shaft fires, however, were far more lethal. Sunshine’s primary fire safety measures revolved around a series of air doors that automatically shut when sensors detected carbon monoxide, thus stopping airflow that would feed a fire. In addition, deluge rings holding hundreds of gallons of water had been planted atop the Jewell Shaft to dump a cascade of water on any shaft blaze there. But that wasn’t happening today. The fire wasn’t a shaft fire.
A boiling plume had erupted from Sunshine Tunnel, an air outtake vent on the mountainside above the mine yard. It looked lethal. Now, carrying a flame safety lamp, used to monitor oxygen levels, and a Draeger 1931 multi-gas detector to check for concentrations of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, Launhardt joined a group of men around Sunshine portal. For a moment he could not look beyond the men who had just made it out. Fear was imprinted on every face. He studied each one, looking for the men he knew best. Some were there. Many more were absent. Launhardt had no idea how many miners were still underground, nor did he know exactly where they would be. He knew there was only one place to go: into the smoke.
12:10 P.M., MAY 2
5000 Level
TOM WATTS AND HIS PARTNER, JACK LOVESEE, WERE IN THE middle of lunch at the timber station on 5000, just east of the No. 7 raise. Usually by that time of day they’d be done and headed back to the stope to set off their rounds before calling it quits. Lovesee was still nursing his coffee. He offered his partner a cup, which Watts drank down in a few gulps.
“Where are you going?” Lovesee asked. “Back to work?”
Watts was impatient. “Well, it’s about time, isn’t it?”
“Hell, it’s only ten after twelve.”
Watts hesitated a moment and started down the drift and back to work. He picked up his earplugs and gloves from the water line, where he’d hung them. Lovesee caught his partner’s attention and pointed down the drift.
“What the devil is that?”
“It’s smoky in the drift,” Lovesee said.
Watts thought someone must have blasted, but Lovesee wasn’t easily convinced. He hadn’t heard any explosion, and the smoke didn’t look like powder smoke.
“I mean to go find out what’s going on,” he said.
Lovesee left for the station and Watts resumed drilling, the roar of the compressed-air drill’s steel against rock, shutting out the world. A moment later he saw a light bobbing back and forth.
It was his partner, Lovesee.
“Smells like a fire!”
Watts put down the jackleg, and the two disappeared down the drift toward 10-Shaft. The smoke grew heavier and seemed infused with a heavy, acidic odor. It smelled like a burning plastic ventilation line, like the fire that had burned at the Star Mine not long ago. They thought it was likely electrical in nature, but whatever its origin, the odor was unlike anything either man had ever smelled—thick, plastic, acid.
On the station, a mine
r repeatedly belled for the cage. Others just called out from the dark.
“Come on, get us out of here!”
Watts asked Bob McCoy if he knew what was going on. McCoy indicated he’d called the blue room and was told by a foreman to sit tight, help was on the way. But if help was coming, the men wondered, why was it taking so damn long? Several men began to strip self-rescuers from their cellophane bags and began to read how they operated. Watts and others left the station for clearer air near the grizzly, a thick steel grate with eight-inch holes, mounted over a chute that fed muck cars waiting below. The grizzlyman pounded the rock to a size that would fit through the huge grate. It wasn’t easy. Sunshine rock was hard. Sometimes hammers bounced off without so much as leaving a mark. The effort helped prevent the chute from clogging, and, to a lesser extent, ensured that ore was of a manageable size for milling. A grizzlyman’s job was hard physical labor, the kind of work that faced prisoners with no hope for parole. No man liked working the grizzly.
Yet on 5000, just then, the grizzly was a little bit of heaven.
12:15 P.M., MAY 2
5000 Level
WHEN THE CONDITIONS ARE JUST RIGHT, A STORM CAN ROLL across a landscape without a sound. Clouds can fiercely and silently churn and turn the atmosphere into a Mylar shield stretched from the ground to the blackest sky. It can suddenly become so dark that it would be impossible to read a line of text, yet within the formation of the swelling storm there are tones of black, and amorphous shapes of varying darkness. The black shield can seem alive, like the sea on a moonless night. The smoke coming at the twenty-five men working on the 5000 level was like that when it rolled through the drift.
Delmar Kitchen and his partner, Darol Anderson, were fifty-one feet above the floor of the drift in a timbered raise, preparing it for mining. Water lines and air hoses snaked up from track level. They liked to keep the water flowing nonstop; it minimized the dust and cooled the air. Shifters didn’t like the practice, so they’d come through the mine complaining that water was backing up and the pumps couldn’t keep up with it. Whiz-bangs hooked to a compressed-air line were never turned off. Not by Kitchen, anyway. It was too hot to work without compressed air blowing air into their stopes.
Of the Kitchen boys, Delmar, with his black hair swept back so that he looked like a subterranean Elvis, was the softest of a pretty sturdy bunch. His twin, Dwight, and their older brother, Dewellyn, were the kind who thought it wasn’t a good night around town if there wasn’t a fistfight in Happy Landing’s parking lot. Delmar had always hated going out with his brothers for that very reason. The fact that nine times out of ten his brothers would come out on top in an altercation offered minimal consolation. The single time Dwight didn’t prevail ended his life. He was murdered in a bar in northern Idaho.
Kitchen and Anderson finished their meal and left the station for their working area up above the drift. Just as they picked up where they had left off, a motorman alerted them about the fire. Anderson acknowledged some smoke down the drift. But Kitchen, up in the raise, couldn’t see any, and was perturbed about having to stop. He didn’t think a little smoke was any big deal, but he climbed down anyway. When the pair got to the drift, a thickening layer of smoke met them like a wall.
In a minute’s time, Delmar Kitchen went from the raise, with its whiz-bang and clear air, to a faint wisp of smoke, to a tornado that sucked him deep inside. He couldn’t see Anderson as he staggered forward, gagging and unsure where he was going. Somehow he found an open air door, behind which was a fan, and just as quickly as he moved inside, the smoke thinned. Visibility improved to about five or ten feet. He found a water line, and doused his face and mouth. Thankfully, Anderson had been right behind him. The water brought instant relief. Kitchen thought maybe the water had delivered oxygen to his body. The air behind them was choked with smoke. There was nowhere else to go but forward. It was the only way out.
They followed the mine rails and traced the line of overhead lights, each lone bulb wrapped in a protective wire cage, a row of illuminated beehives. Farther down was the faintest outline of the station, buried under a mantle of smoke. It reminded Kitchen of another station fire, less than a year before, when a pump had burned up and sent ashy smoke through the mine. It had been hard to breathe, but the mine wasn’t evacuated. Men returned to their working areas and waited until the ventilation system sucked out the smoke.
This, Kitchen knew, was far worse. There was much more smoke and it wasn’t going anywhere.
ON THE WAY OUT TO THE JEWELL, JACK HARRIS AND KEITH BREAZEAL came upon a leaking air door on a cross-drift to old country intersecting with 3100. A sheet of smoke seeped under the door, arcing and blending with fresh air. The pair found a broken shovel and moved quickly to seal the door. They joked about the fine job they did with the crummy shovel. A few yards farther down was another failing air door. It was framed with rotten timbers shot through with a helter-skelter lattice of holes. Harris scratched his head. This one was beyond patching. They’d need fifty yards of burlap and a stack of lumber. He knew his Big Creek neighbor Gene Johnson could use more time to evacuate, but he and Breazeal were stymied. By the time it got really bad, Harris figured, all the men would be out anyhow.
Thirteen
ABOUT NOON, MAY 2
Jewell Shaft
CAGE TENDER KENNY WILBUR FROZE. ON 3700 BY THE JEWELL, foreman Harvey Dionne and shifter Paul Johnson—no relation to foreman Gene—were on the phone with the surface and lower levels, talking out what could be done to get more men out. Their voices were sharp and loud, echoing off the rock walls before fading into the heart of the mine. Tributaries of sweat ran down Dionne’s suddenly very haggard face. Something big was happening. Dionne couldn’t decipher word for word all that was being said as men throughout the mine tried to talk over each other. The only voice that cut through the chatter belonged to Bob Scanlan. The hoistman on 10-Shaft said they were sending men up right then.
Dionne passed the phone to Johnson so he could try making sense of the overlapping dialog. Dionne needed a moment. From what he’d seen when he peered over the bulkhead and from what he knew about Sunshine’s ventilation system, the fire was in all probability burning somewhere above 4800. Smoke-contaminated air could be leaking to the lower levels through the old workings that cut every which way through the mine. Some had been sealed off in the most rudimentary fashion.
“You know,” he said to Wilbur, “we should pull off them laggings over 12-Shaft to get some fresh air to 4800.”
Wilbur nodded. Despite its name, at forty-eight inches across, 12-Shaft was really only a borehole. In time, the company intended to widen it and build another shaft to take some of the burden off 10-Shaft. Its location was good. It was within a thousand feet west of the Jewell. When 12-Shaft was timbered out, it would provide access to a substantial new ore body to the east. It would also serve as a ventilation conduit and an additional escape manway.
At one time, mine management had considered extending the Jewell down to 4800, but the plan had been abandoned because the Jewell double-drum was already at capacity. The chippy could go deeper, to 4000, but it was only a service hoist for men and equipment. The company needed to get muck out. A new borehole was the only solution on which management, geologists, and engineers could agree. Dionne led the project, which had been completed only a week before. To keep wayward debris from falling through the 1,100-foot drop and injuring someone, Dionne’s crew had sealed the opening with an improvised cover.
Wilbur took a self-rescuer and vanished down the drift. The air was reasonably clear, with only a few wispy patches of hazy smoke. In minutes he’d gone from the confines of a drift to an enormous room with three stories of overhead space and foot-wide belts of steel fastened to walls with five-foot rock bolts. Wilbur wanted to get the lagging cover off and get out fast. He grabbed frantically at the cover, but a piece of wood refused to budge. It was caught on the craggy rim of the hole, a mouth ready to swallow. Wilbur, a compact man only
five feet four inches tall, yanked again, hard, and teetered at the edge. He started to slip. His lamp swung wildly, swiping the ribs of the drift with a spray of light. He was going down. He stiffened his arms and pushed back with everything he had; and just as quickly as he lost it, he regained his balance.
Holy smokes, that was close, he thought. Oh, take it easy.
It flashed through his mind that if he’d fallen, there’d be nothing left of him. And with all the confusion in the burning mine, there’d be no one to know what had happened to him.
He looked down the rough circumference of the borehole into perfect gloom. A warm breath from the enormous emptiness of the mine blew over his face, and was sucked into the chasm. Kenny Wilbur hoped someone down there could get the fresh air.
12:15 P.M., MAY 2
3100 Level
LAUNHARDT AND HAWKINS WERE BELLED DOWN TO 3100, WHERE they found the McCaa oxygen packs stacked and waiting for them. A group of miners who’d escaped their working areas stood around on the station, a few in obvious shock. Some hacked up mucus. Others still held their self-rescuers. A couple wanted to help.
“Where are you going with the helmets?” someone asked.
“I’m taking them back to 10-Shaft,” Launhardt said.
“I’m going with you.”
The voice belonged to veteran shaft man Jim Zingler. Nipper Don Beehner, who had been killing time with cage tender Kenny Wilbur when the fire was discovered, also volunteered. Both men had been trained in mine rescue and the use of the McCaa.
Launhardt still didn’t know how four men would get all of those oxygen packs back to where Gene Johnson and the others were waiting. They were heavy, about forty-two pounds each. It would be beyond their endurance to carry all ten a mile to 10-Shaft. Launhardt had a lanky build, but he was strong, and with the concern and fear mixing in his bloodstream, he was ready to carry whatever he had to. Hawkins, Zingler, and Beehner were ready, too. Each wore a unit on his back and carried one in his arms, the extra weight pounding their rubber soles a half-inch into the muddy floor.