by Gregg Olsen
“Got it,” Clapp said, facing down the drift. Embers lit up the trackline by the raise. They were past the fire zone, and had to go back through it to get out. “Let’s go,” he said.
Clapp knew no man should find himself on the other side of a fire. Always hit the fire from one side, and push it away. Linked together again, Clapp, Austin, and the rest of the crew passed the 08 pipe shop. There, just days before, Greg Dionne had machined coupling threads and stacked finished pipe for delivery. Austin stopped. All around were bodies, bloated and black. Clapp didn’t want to look. But Austin jabbed his finger in the air and started counting.
“Seven here,” he said.
It was the first time Clapp had really seen any of the dead. He’d heard body counts and names, but communication between those who knew and those who might have wanted to know was almost nonexistent. The smoke was a veil. But even if it was clear, he couldn’t have named those men scattered around. There was no story to tell about what might have happened, except that it had been quick.
“Hurry, let’s go!”
It was Austin again, and the link line stretched taut as the five began to retreat. Clapp felt someone take hold of his line, and he nearly jumped off the track.
“What the—?” he said. “Who grabbed me?”
No one had. His tag line, the tail of the rope, had caught on the track. Clapp was spooked. He unhooked the line and off they went. This was no place to be. He looked up at the raise from where, only moments before, the smoke had boiled. For the first time he could see what the crews had been doing. Three-quarter-inch plywood had been hammered into place, and yards of burlap had been stapled along the edges where the panels met timbers. Foam had been sprayed.
After a second or two, Austin let out his familiar refrain: “We gotta get out of here.” And the link line grew taut once more. A moment later they were on a motor heading back to the Jewell station. When they arrived, the phone was ringing.
“You guys okay?” a shifter topside asked.
“We’re fine,” Austin answered.
“Something tripped the main breaker up here.”
A little while later, the answer came. The raise that the crew had passed under just minutes before had collapsed. Carbon monoxide levels dropped in the mine, and some incorrectly assumed that the cave-in had put out the fire. No one knew that the cave-in had also crushed the compressed-air line feeding 4800.
TIME UNKNOWN, MAY 8
4800 Level
“JESUS! IT AIN’T MOVING!” TOM WILKINSON SAID, LOOKING UP, his mouth agape. The grimy paper towel on the fan line, the one that functioned like a ribbon on an air conditioner and confirmed that bad air was moving away from the Safety Zone, paused. It hung limp, no longer fluttering at a thirty-degree angle. Both men sat up and strained to make sure what they were seeing in the dim light was real and not another bad dream. Not only had it stopped, but the paper towel then did the unthinkable: it curled in their direction.
“We need to get the hell out of here.”
“Get what you can and let’s go.”
Flory grabbed his boots and belt; Wilkinson followed. They had to move closer to the borehole and the good air. But moving from the crosscut meant leaving the motor and their best source of reliable light. Wilkinson’s lamp still worked, but it wasn’t going to last much longer. As the smoke crawled at them, the paper towel reversed itself again. Something was happening somewhere in the mine. Someone was doing something. It was possible that pressure had built up down on 5000 where the smoke had been fed down through the crosscut. The guys set their stuff down. They could stay. Dripping from the heat and the blast of panic, Flory pulled out his powder knife and a piece of wood and proceeded to whittle a toothpick. They both needed thinking time. It was getting close to do-or-die. The only two alive on 4800 sat on their bed boards in the dim light of the motor’s headlamp, a single eye staring them down. Conversation had dwindled not only because they were weak from hunger, but because they’d exhausted every subject for discussion ten times over: girls, mining, and—a favorite—how their wives would spend their life insurance money. But other things were making the situation more desperate. Wilkinson wondered about Flory’s mental state after his insistence that he could climb out of the mine, a half-crazed and determined effort that was wholly out of character. Flory had never acted with such stupid recklessness. The only thing left to eat was the Hunt’s pudding, but for some reason neither could quite understand, food wasn’t as appealing as it had been. They were shutting down, in both body and spirit. And they were probably going to die. They’d be found there, God knows when, and it would be obvious, by the little home they’d created in the Safety Zone, that they’d survived the initial poisoning of the mine’s air.
ALL DAY, MAY 8
Sunshine Mine Yard
SUNSHINE’S MINE YARD WAS SWARMING WITH GOOD INTENTIONS and dismal failures. The capsules from the AEC were deemed too small to ferry back survivors, and the smaller of Sunshine’s own capsules was put on a flatcar and brought from the topside machine shop down the Jewell to 3700. Once in the borehole, it took more than half a day to get the walls barred down. Some wondered if the air pressure would be enough to haul the men up and down. It was asking a lot of a hoist designed to lift small machines, supplies, and heavy tools. And then there was the cable from which the capsule would be suspended. At a half inch thick, was it really strong enough?
But there was something worse. It was the sudden and unexpected rekindling of the original fire that had caused the cave-in. Crews working their way down 3700 were forced to turn back; increased heat and skyrocketing carbon monoxide readings made it too dangerous there. The men working that section reported that the heat was so brutal that their packs became too hot to touch. All were ordered out.
Despite the setback, Marvin Chase still held hope they could get the hoist going.
“I can’t say I am as optimistic as I was before,” he told the press. He also quietly amended the figures the papers had been reporting since the first day. There were ninety-three men trapped, not eighty-two, which meant with thirty-five known dead, fifty-eight, not forty-seven, were missing.
Jerry McGinn, the reporter who doubted Sunshine’s figures, heard a voice call out across the yard. “That guy’s the reporter!”
McGinn had been identified, and in an instant the mine yard turned into the angry villagers scene from an old horror movie. The faces of those he’d been writing about surrounded him—union men, wives, and shifters. All were pissed off. He’d betrayed them all. One guy kicked him hard where it counted. McGinn went down and doubled up. His red face matched his hair.
One of the reservists grabbed him by the shoulders. “Is that good enough for you?”
Another shouted, “You won’t make it out of town alive!”
McGinn was escorted from the yard by a guardsman and some miners, knowing who’d probably fingered him. Damn AP, he thought.
Charlie Clapp’s brother, Dennis—the young miner who’d alerted Flory and Wilkinson—completed a shift on body detail and went straight home. He’d bagged Ace Riley’s partner, Joe Armijo—also the first guy with whom Clapp had mined. He’d recognized Armijo by his diggers and his boots—not his face, which was cracked and bloated. He and another miner spread a body bag over the body, flipped it over, and struggled to zip it up. Fingers slipped and stumbled, and the zipper pull snagged. Clapp almost vomited. When he got home, he knocked back some whiskey. The hideous odor of the day rooted itself in his nose and throat, and only booze seemed to lessen it. The trunk of a body-detail buddy’s prized Chevelle was another matter. Clapp had made the mistake of stashing his stinking diggers there. Despite hours of crazed scrubbing, the stench had an astonishingly enduring staying power. Never again, he thought.
ALL DAY, MAY 8
Osburn
THE WORLD WAS PAYING ATTENTION. PAUL ROBINSON’S DESK AT KWAL was covered in a two-inch-deep shower of confetti from heaven. Most of the letters sent to the station ha
d a dollar or two tucked inside, along with notes wishing the best for “the children of the miners of the Kellogg disaster.” Robinson was flabbergasted by the response from the Salt Lake City radio station. The missives were from all parts of the country. The Long Valley Forkettes, a 4-H club in McCall, Idaho, planned a fund-raiser; the children and faculty of Highlands Elementary School in Boise collected $376.73. Also from Boise came $90 from the French and Spanish classes at West Junior High. A lawyer from Libby, Montana, sent $25; a Spokane florist sent $100; the ladies’ auxiliary of a transit union in Seattle collected almost $30. A widow from Meadow Vista, California, whose son-in-law had just died and left a ten-year-old girl fatherless, cleaned out the man’s change box and sent it to KWAL. With an official relief account open and growing at the bank in Wallace, JCPenney astounded Robinson with generosity that none could have imagined—a check for $10,000.
Forty-five
LATE AFTERNOON, MAY 8
Sunshine Mine Yard
TOPSIDE, A CREW MEMBER CAUGHT UP WITH BOB FOLLETTE AND confirmed that his son, Bill, had been found among some barrels and benches near 10-Shaft on 3100. The basketball player’s frame was contorted in a crouching position as if he had been fighting for fresh air along the drift floor. His partner, Louis Goos, was just a few yards away. They had come up in the cage seconds after partners Bob Follette and Howard Markve jumped onto the motor for the Jewell and fresh air.
Maybe he was there, but in the smoke I couldn’t see him? Follette asked himself.
Bob Launhardt stayed away from the body detail, but no one had to tell him how gruesome it was. He’d heard stories of coal-dust explosions where bodies had sat for days, and had bloated like dead cattle on a sun-soaked pasture. He’d heard, too, how miners used their picks to poke holes in a body before stepping on it with their boots to deflate the corpse like an air mattress.
Outside Launhardt’s safety office window, light rain had fallen. The chill it brought made the masses of people in the yard constrict as a defense against the shivers. It was a devastating scene.
When would it end? How would it be resolved?
Launhardt scribbled a short note for personnel director Jim Farris.
“Mr. Chase says we should contact Mrs. Beehner and tell her it is OK with us if she wants to interview with Life magazine.”
He hesitated a moment and added a postscript: “I will meet with her and tell her exactly what happened to Don if she wants this info.”
The stress of the week had been taking its toll, day by day, hour by hour. It was so subtle that someone might have missed it. But Bob Launhardt was so pressed, so crisp, when he first faced the TV cameras. His words, even in the shocking hours just following Beehner’s death, were sharp and clear. He was the picture of a safety man in whom any miner could entrust his life. A man in charge. But as the days of the tragedy wore on, the tall, lanky man seemed to shrink as though he were fading away, just a little at a time, until he’d just blow away.
EVENING, MAY 8
4800 Level
FLORY AND WILKINSON HAD BEAT ON PIPES, CALLED FOR HELP UNTIL they were hoarse, and braided a mile of blasting wire. Neither could understand what would keep the rescue crew from coming after them. Every day since they were trapped, they’d made an attempt to get to the station, but the smoke had been too caustic. Nothing was going to stop them Monday afternoon. To wait any longer was to concede right then and there that they would die. They were without food. Digestive juices in search of something to dissolve were consuming their insides. The pain rolled and passed in waves of agony. This is what it feels like to starve to death. Making it worse was that there was no end in sight. It seemed that no one was coming for them. They doused their shirts with water and took off. The smoke was a whisper by then, but they could still taste its acrid tang. Passing the men on the tracks was always the worst of their hurried walk. They had swollen like balloons. Shirt buttons had popped. Wilkinson doubted that their identities could be matched with photographs anymore. They looked nothing like they had in life. Stepping past them was like maneuvering through the most difficult obstacle course.
Lights flooded the station. It was empty, but for one man. He was slumped by the phone, still clutching the receiver in his hand. His face had inflated into a monster’s. Damp T-shirts still covering their mouths and noses, Flory and Wilkinson exchanged horrified looks and kept away from the man. Wilkinson went for the cord and belled for the cage, using the emergency nine-bell signal. They craned their necks and looked up the shaft and hollered into the darkness.
“Hey! We’re down here!”
But it was quiet.
Flory fastened his eyes on the man with the phone. The closer he got to the dead man, the sicker he became. The man’s skin had split, and coagulated body fluids were oozing out. Flory grabbed the cord and pulled on it to extricate the receiver from the dead man’s grip. A gooey film covered the receiver. In his hunger, it reminded Flory of tapioca pudding.
He took the T-shirt from his face. “Hey!” he called out again. “We’re down on forty-eight!”
The line was dead and without static. Flory balled up his fist and banged on the box. Neither man knew about the cave-in that had crippled the communications link to their level.
They were captives, and the futility of their situation was making Flory crazy.
“I’m going to climb up the shaft,” he said. “I’m gonna get the hell out of here.”
It was Wilkinson’s turn to cool down his partner.
“You are not,” he said, his words a command. “You’ll never make it. You’re going to stay here. We’re going to get out of this.”
Though mentally foggy from hunger and full of fear, Flory immediately retreated from the irrational idea of a thousand-foot climb through darkness.
“It’s been too long since we had a good meal,” he said. “We’d never make it. It would be a long climb without a good meal. I think the Lord wants us to stay right here and wait until somebody comes.”
Ron Flory was sure he and his buddy were close to the end. Certainly they had the will to survive and the drive to make it out of the goddamn mine, but they had no food, water was in short supply, and the hours were piling seamlessly into days. Flory promised God he’d go to church every Sunday if he ever got a second chance.
Forty-six
3:00 A.M., MAY 9
Sunshine Borehole
AROUND 3:00 A.M. ON TUESDAY, A FOUR-MAN USBM CREW RODE the capsule to 4800, laying phone lines as they descended into the dark. They traveled in pairs, but one man had to remain in the capsule, talking to the hoistman on 3700 so he’d be able to navigate through the rough channel. The first man out of the capsule pointed out footprints in the muck. There was no way of telling when they had been made, but their proximity to the telephone was either curious or coincidental. When the four had assembled at the borehole, they worked their way west into the dead-end drift. The air was 92 degrees and breathable without apparatuses. Methodically moving toward the face of the drift, some three hundred feet away, the crew saw evidence that men had been working there on May 2. A pair of jackleg drills rested in the muck. The diffuse beams of their cap lamps sprayed light over the rock face, revealing fuses draped from drilled holes. No miner would ever leave live charges if he had thought for one minute he wouldn’t be back. No one abandons explosives for some other guy to find with the end of his drill. The crew went east, looking for any signs of life. But fifteen hundred feet down the drift, their lights began to fade.
“Hello, hello . . . anybody there?”
They stopped to listen, but there was only silence. Sunshine men were dead at the station or bulkheaded in someplace where nothing could be heard. Disappointed, the rescue team returned to the surface. Another crew would take over.
Ron Flory and Tom Wilkinson had been a thousand feet from rescue, but nobody knew it.
DAWN, MAY 9
Bunker Hill Warehouse, Smelterville
LAMP NUMBERS FIRST, THEN CLOTHI
NG, SCARS, AND TATTOOS WERE the first indicators of who was who as the identification crew sifted through the bodies in the Smelterville warehouse. Most miners wore the same jeans, hats, shirts—or no shirt at all—every day of the workweek. They’d hose the muck off at the station, go upstairs, and strip down and hang everything in the dry until the next shift. Most brought diggers home once a week for washing, but some never did. The men scanning the remains worked with a rhythm that, once going, fueled them into the long hours of the night. Victims who had been sealed in body bags for a longer period had looser skin. It was as though they’d been in a crockpot all day, and the heat of the mine and the fluids of their bodies had softened tissue to fall-from-the-bone goo, making it easier for examiners to slide off fingertips for inking and printing. The bodies that had remained in the mine the longest, those at the deeper levels, however, were more difficult. Their skin had hardened; patches seemed plasticlike, or leathery. In those cases it was impossible to pull off fingertips. FBI men used a pair of steel cutters and snipped through the bone, then the digits were daubed in ink and pressed on paper.
Although their faces were gone, there were clues to pinpoint identity. In the most gruesome task on a hideous list, dentures were pulled from disfigured mouths. Some men had personalized their hardhats with automotive or powder supplier stickers. One had stenciled green racing stripes on his hat. Most smoked, so a brand of cigarettes—a pack tucked into an inner-tube hatband—was also a clue. One miner carried his eyeglasses to and from the station that way. Tool belts also held potential. Some guys had special wrenches or expensive Snap-On tools.
When a bag holding one of the larger dead men was unzipped, a flare of yellow contrasted sharply against the black morass of decomposing remains. A closer look revealed that coils of yellow blasting wire had been used to fasten the victim’s overall shoulder straps.