by Gregg Olsen
Word had gotten out through miners drinking at the Big Creek Store that the mine’s hostile environment was exceedingly cruel to the dead, and because of that, few bureau or district men had the stomach for the recovery detail. Miner Johnny Lang volunteered because he didn’t have any kin among the missing. Lang had seen dead bodies before, too. As a nineteen-year-old merchant marine in Algiers, he’d followed the sound of machine-gun fire wanting to see what a war looked like. He had climbed a hill and looked out over the scene of death. A row of dead men, bloated and bleeding, lined a stone-paved lane; the smell of their rotting flesh pummeled the sea breeze.
Lang drew on that experience as he kept his eye on one of the mine supervisors who’d been called to work in his crew. They met on 3100 to inspect breathing equipment before retrieving bodies. The supervisor looked green.
“You think you’re gonna be able to handle this?”
The man said he wasn’t sure, and Lang pushed him.
“You know what?” Lang asked. “If you throw up in your mask, you got to eat it. If you take the mask off in there, you’re dead. If you don’t think you can handle that, go back up there. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. If we go back there and you panic, you’ll endanger all of us,” Lang went on. “And you know what? I’m not gonna give you my air. None of it.”
The green-faced man turned around and departed. That astounded Lang. A real miner would have pressed on rather than look like a coward.
It took balls and a lead-lined stomach to do the job that no one wanted. Their buddies had ceased to look like men, their features exaggerated far beyond the bounds of recognition. Eyes bulged grotesquely. Teeth seemed to push forward, as if they were wrong-side-out. Ears had swollen to twice normal size. The steel grommets on tool belts pinched so tight that a couple of guys were nearly cut in half. When Lang tried to position a corpse into a bag, the flesh gave a little. It shocked him. This fella’s arm might come off, he thought, and slid his hands under the torso to loosen the suction that held it to the floor of the drift. Wherever the leather of his gloves touched the dead man’s skin, wide strips of darkened flesh peeled off. Lang’s mind messed with him as he worked. He could smell the putrid odor of the decomposing flaps of skin, yet he was breathing contained air. It wasn’t possible to smell anything. It took him back to Algeria and the dead soldiers he’d seen there when he was nineteen. A phantom stench recirculated through his face mask.
The corpses were packed into two-handled zippered black bags with whatever had been scattered around—lamps, dinner buckets, or equipment. A few still had BM-1447s stuck in their mouths—one last breath before falling. Self-rescuers were within arm’s reach of many. Some could have fallen as they staggered across the drift, but Lang recalled what some of the mine escapees had told him on Tuesday. The thing got so hot, I sucked a little cool air from the side.
It was that cool air that had killed them.
One crewman had to puncture a corpse with a pick to drain the gases and fluids so it could be put into the bag. The body hissed like a leaking tire.
Lang somehow found a way to do his work without allowing emotion to creep in. He looked at the placement of the bodies and imagined their last moments. He studied three fallen miners on 3100 and imagined a courageous, then desperate scenario. One was separated from the others by a few feet. It appeared the first two had been walking together with the third, and the smoke got so bad that the strongest of the three had to let the others fall to the ground because he couldn’t help them anymore. In some movies, men ran off and left their comrades behind. Every man for himself. It wasn’t like that at Sunshine on May 2.
Nobody went off and left his friends, Lang thought. None of them guys panicked. Pretty tough men, them miners.
TIME UNKNOWN, MAY 7
Wallace
IN WALLACE, A TALE OF ARSON WAS, IN FACT, SMOLDERING. Nervous and exhausted, Joe Naccarato’s wife, Georgia, was about to be sucked into a scenario spun by Ace Riley’s partner Joe Armijo’s wife, Delores. Both women had husbands trapped in the mine. Armijo was positive her husband had intentionally torched the mine. She rambled out a convoluted tale of good and evil twins, incendiary devices, a book that recorded a disastrous mine fire that had acted as a blueprint, and, in the worst of it, she implicated Ace Riley.
“You had better not tell anybody about this or I will get this guy,” she told Naccarato. “His name is Riley and I’ll have him follow you around.”
Later, a buddy of Riley’s was in a Wallace bar when a sheriff’s deputy came in asking a lot of questions. The cop wanted to know how much Riley drank, whether he was a decent fellow. When Riley heard about it, he went looking for the deputy. Riley wasn’t good at concealing his anger, nor was he adept at waiting out situations to cool off.
“You want to know anything about me, all you got to do is ask me,” he said. “You keep messing with me and I’ll have your goddamn badge.”
The deputy said the county prosecutor had put him up to it. Local law enforcement was investigating information that his partner, Joe Armijo, had intentionally set the fire.
“There’s no goddamn way in hell,” Riley said. They had taken the cage to 5000 together that morning. Never was there a moment when he wasn’t aware of his partner’s whereabouts the day of the fire.
“There’s no way he could climb up to set the fire and come back down.”
Riley got the message. Sunshine and the Bureau want someone to blame for the fire. Spontaneous combustion sounded feeble, and the bureaucrats and bigwigs knew it. The mine was hot, of course, but it wasn’t hot enough to ignite timbers and gob. When some crazy woman came in with a ridiculous story, those who needed a scapegoat pounced.
Yet among those who seriously doubted the arson theory was mine superintendent Al Walkup.
“Some guys were bitter about the company, all right,” he said when the subject came up. “But Armijo didn’t seem that way. I know the man. He didn’t do it.”
Walkup thought racism might have made Armijo a target. Mexicans are always getting blamed for everything around here, he thought. Even if it isn’t their fault, they get blamed.
IT WASN’T UNTIL SUNDAY THAT THE FANS ON 3400 WERE FINALLY shut off. Launhardt was nervous about the shutdown, even though it had been discussed since the first day of the fire. The cardinal rule of fighting a mine fire was to do nothing to a mine’s ventilation system until you knew what would happen. With the circuitous drifts and leaky bulkheads scattered throughout the enormous Sunshine, no one could be sure about anything. But leaving the fans operating only served to blow smoky toxins to the 3100 and 3700 levels. When the fans ceased, so did the smoke. It was the only good news there’d been in almost a week. Now, Launhardt told himself, there was a chance to get to 10-Shaft and then on down to the men.
THROUGHOUT THE DAY, MAY 7
Sunshine Mine Yard
BLACK WINGS CIRCLED THE OUTTAKE CHANNEL OVER THE MINE. None who noticed the flock of crows wanted to say why the scavengers were there, what it was they smelled that brought them. Up at the mine’s collar, softhearted miner Jim Gordon, who once drove ore trucks to Sunshine’s processing plant or to rail cars in Silverton, transported bodies to Uncle Bunk’s warehouse in Smelterville—the only place other than the nursing home where they could be hauled. With scarcely a word, men loaded the back of a Trojan Powder Company red-and-white truck. Gordon didn’t think about his cargo, but only about the advice given by a boss as he turned the ignition.
“Best keep the windows rolled down and drive as fast as you can.”
Elizabeth Fee, the high school Latin teacher, resumed her place on a bench near the portal. A lavender-and-yellow sign mocked her breaking heart, its message in a hippy-dippy floral graphic scheme, LOVE SAFETY. Mrs. Fee had chain-smoked cigarettes to the filter, her skin ashen, her cheeks concave. She had been through hell, and she knew her prayers weren’t going to be answered.
Army reservist Lee Haynes approached his former teacher in what felt like the long
est walk of his life. He started to break down even before he spoke. He had a promise to keep.
“Norman’s gone, isn’t he?” she asked, sparing him from saying the words. A cigarette dangled from her trembling hand. She held Haynes like a baby, and they cried. Richard Lynch, the boy who’d lived with Haynes to finish his senior year, was also among the confirmed dead.
And for the pessimists or those who’d just flat given up, the mine indeed seemed cursed. Those who trusted their faith were repeatedly taunted by a fire they couldn’t see, one that shouldn’t be burning in the first place. Frustration escalated when a surface fan whirled to a dead stop and more smoke streamed through the mine. Although the fan was quickly repaired, disheartened crews discovered that not only had the fire resurged in the 910 raise where Harvey Dionne first saw smoke boiling behind the bulkhead, but the 13,800-volt power line that snaked eastward from the Jewell along 3700 had been severed in the process. Once again, the ever-beleaguered 10-Shaft hoist was without power. The drive to get the capsule down the borehole to 4800 was stymied by the debris fall that came with the rekindled fire. A twelve-inch air line had been cut, causing air to bleed and dropping pressure from 80 to 30 psi—inadequate to run the crane the USBM men were using to lower the capsule. A larger compressor was sent for from another mine.
And way down on 4800, the water line, once a gusher, slowed to a trickle. Flory and Wilkinson’s worries escalated. Given the heat they endured all day and night, water was keeping them alive. Even a single day without water might lead to serious dehydration and death.
LATE EVENING, MAY 7
Cataldo
THE LAST MOMENT SPENT WITH A LOVED ONE OFTEN TAKES ON increased importance in a grief-burdened heart. In the shadow of Cataldo’s historic Jesuit mission, Doug Dionne sat with his family and unspooled his last visit with Greg. The brothers hadn’t seen each other in three years. With his Army service completed, Doug returned to the district the last week of April, just a week before the fire. His first glimpse of Greg was a messy-haired, stubble-flecked grown man with a slight scowl. Greg had just been rousted from his bed—and so had his wife, Jackie. Greg teasingly chewed out his older brother for the intrusion, in the half-serious, half-kidding manner brothers tend to relish. Now, as Doug Dionne grieved, an image from that reunion surfaced. Greg was holding his tiny daughter, Dusty, in hands as large as oven mitts. The fuzzy-headed baby swayed like meadow grass. Greg directed his gaze at the baby, not at his wife or his brother. How he loved his little girl. Instead of fading, Doug Dionne’s final visit with his brother was flash-frozen.
Betty Dionne’s thoughts were fixed on Greg, too. Like all women with sons trapped underground, she would rather die than outlive her boy. Men like Bob Follette, the father of missing Bill Follette, held another view. Certainly he loved his son. But Bill had become a man in the mine. From the first day he rode the cage, Bill was a miner first, a son second.
Never in a million years could a mother make such a distinction.
Forty-four
EARLY MORNING, MAY 8
Sunshine Mine Yard
BOB LAUNHARDT DID WHATEVER WAS ASKED OF HIM. MONDAY morning he was in front of reporters to answer how a simple fire had become one of the worst mining disasters in American history. Sunshine lawyers had pushed him front and center to combat media reports questioning the mine’s safety program. But Launhardt’s argument—accurate as it was—did little to placate detractors. The company had done what was required by Idaho and federal law—and more than most metal mines. Some criticisms were specific and obviously sharpened by 20/20 hindsight. Hoist operators in metal mines did not work in sealed-in compartments with oxygen, as was required in coal mines. And once the hoistman was down, no one was getting out of the mine. Period. Launhardt also took more hits on the self-rescuers. Federal law required coal-mining operations to provide one unit per man. Metal mines had no such requirement. Words failed him when a reporter asked why so many had failed, when he said he’d inspected them personally.
And fire drills? Also not required. But the escape-route issue was a problem. The Silver Summit route was on 3100, a level to which most never ventured. There were signs posted, but as smoky as it was May 2, no one could read them.
Launhardt put the onus on the employees. They needed to be responsible for their personal safety.
“I don’t believe it is fair to the industry to put the entire burden on management and nothing directed toward the individual,” he said.
Such statements, not surprisingly, didn’t win him new friends among the growing legion of widows and partnerless miners.
The USBM left Launhardt to twist in the wind. Some charged flat-out incompetence, claiming that Launhardt wasn’t up to task for the safety job. The USBM also suggested that since Launhardt reported to the personnel director and not the mine superintendent or general manager, Sunshine didn’t consider safety significant. That contention offended Marvin Chase, but it was also further proof that the feds didn’t know what they were talking about. Chase knew having a safety man report to the operations boss was a terrible idea. There was too much pressure to push aside safety rules to make production.
If Launhardt was falling apart, no one outside of his family knew it. Besides a slight weight loss that drew his long face further downward, there were no outward signs of what was gnawing at him every minute of the day. He kept everything bottled up. It couldn’t have been easy, but he was a man with greater reserves than he might have known before May 2. He faced the fire head-on to determine what had gone so wrong. Why hadn’t his safety program protected his men? Yes, mining was dangerous, but what else could have been done to spare more lives? Launhardt could have retreated from the mine and the district, but he didn’t. He stayed right there. Digging in, in search of answers. Some might have thought it was about seeking atonement. But for Launhardt, the reality was that it was about being called into service.
And while Launhardt and Sunshine were getting hit hard, longtime employees like Ray Rudd were pissed off by reports heralding the USBM as paragons of heroism. It irked him how absent the names of Sunshine rescuers had been in news reports—and how the USBM’s leaders never mentioned them. When the USBM took a series of photos to provide the media with an inside look at the rescue effort, it only served to increase tension. Sunshine employees were asked to step out of the frame, or were cropped out later. Sunshine miners were referred to only as “victims.” No one bothered to say that dozens of Sunshine boys were doing all they could to get their buddies out of the mine. And they weren’t giving up.
“Why do they make it seem like all our guys just ran away?” Rudd, his face red and hot, asked a friend. “We don’t run.”
The feds worsened relations by comparing the lethal conflagration at Big Creek to the Titanic disaster—a cautionary tale of man’s greed and hubris. Instead of an opulent and gargantuan luxury liner, the target was a vast mine that surrendered future luxury in the form of silver ore. Sunshine Mine superintendent Walkup groused about the government’s blatant grandstanding. Other locals were outraged by the shameful and casual disregard they were shown by a few of the outsiders from back East. Some had no business—no real interest—in being anywhere near Big Creek except to boast in graphic detail about their supposed conquests of the young wives of trapped miners. That wasn’t even the worst of it. When Walkup went underground to check the progress of a ventilation repair, the USBM escorts who had seemed so cocksure topside turned out to be ’fraidy cats. These guys are scared to death most of the time, he thought.
MIDDAY, MAY 8
3700 Level
THE DOUBLE-DRUM AT 3700 10-SHAFT WAS WITHOUT POWER, AND the only way to reach the lowest levels was once again stymied. Chase, Walkup, and Launhardt knew that as long as that was so, the men on the lower levels would never see daylight. Launhardt knew the toxicity of the air. It was hard for him to pretend he held any hope. One breath, he knew, and a man was dead. Not everyone was so fatalistic or pragmatic, however. Elect
rician George Clapp, the older brother of the young miner who’d warned Flory and Wilkinson of the fire, wanted to believe there were survivors so badly that he accepted no other alternative. The five-man crew with Clapp, now at the front of the line, and former boxer Johnny Lang at the rear, went down 3700 and under the 910 raise that the other crew had been shoring up and reinforcing with timber, rubber bladders, and polyurethane foam. As they passed under the fire zone, embers fell on the track, leaving a scattered trail of topaz glowing off into the darkness. Clapp and Johnny Austin, the lead man from Bunker Hill, separated from the other three to get to the hoist room. Their packs swung with their hurried steps, pulling the shoulder straps sharply into their skin. A mantra played repeatedly in Clapp’s head: Gotta flip that switch.
Just past the raise, they hit a blast of fresh air before entering smoke once more. Condensation had collected on overhead pipes, and a scalding rain fell on their heads and bare arms. A little farther on, they stepped over bodies as they moved in on the hoist room and the electrical panel. A row of oil switches faced Clapp like five guys giving him the finger. He had to pull down the primary switch, and then reset it to reenergize the hoist. Adrenaline was a river through his veins. This had to be quick, and they had to get the hell out of there. Smoke, embers, and toxic gases filled the space. He pulled down. Too fast. The switch didn’t trip. He did it again with the same result. His heart raced. He was pulling on the switch with force and haste, and though he knew better, he couldn’t pull himself together to slow it down. He tripped the switch just fine, but resetting took some finesse, and in his nervousness, that was eluding him.
Johnny Austin kept barking at the electrician to get on with it.
“Hurry! Hurry!”
Clapp returned an irritated look. “I am!” he said, his remark muffled somewhat by his face mask. He stopped for a split second and slowly pulled the switch until it reset and latched.