The Deep Dark

by Gregg Olsen

  Sunshine’s ventilation engineering staff had met with the USBM’s Warren Andrews and Ralph Foster on April 24, just nine days before the fire. Launhardt held Andrews and Foster in high regard. They were not, by his estimation, government hacks occupying space until pension time rolled around. The USBM team measured air volume and calculated leakage into the old workings. Andrews and Foster understood the ventilation system of the mine as well as, if not better than, the company’s own experts on airflow. The USBM men knew how a short circuit of the mine’s ventilation system could lead to serious, if not fatal, consequences for the men underground busting rock.

  FBI AND USBM CHEMISTS EXAMINED EVIDENCE COLLECTED FROM Joe and Delores Armijo’s basement where the deluded woman insisted her husband’s evil twin had conducted experiments with incendiary devices. The samples were inconclusive. Neither the Interior Department nor the FBI could rule out that arson had been the cause of the fire. Interior’s assistant director Stan Jarrett, however, kept pushing the arson angle. He doubted the thoroughness of the Shoshone County investigation. The FBI responded in an internal memo that “the U.S. Attorney felt no active investigation warranted by FBI . . . various parties having vested interest are trying to shift blame and/or responsibility for this disaster.”

  A while later, other reasons for the investigation appeared to emerge. According to another FBI internal memo: “He mentioned that there are political implications which indicate to him that the Department of Labor is attempting to take from the Bureau of Mines (Department of Interior) the functions of that Bureau.”

  Nevertheless, assistant director Jarrett continued his crusade and met with an FBI special agent in his USBM office in Arlington, Virginia. The FBI filed another report, and this time Jarrett laid the fire at the feet of the union: “Jarrett speculated that there was a militant type group in the union at this mine, which caused the company and the Bureau of Mines to be very cautious in their dealings with union representatives.”

  When the federal government’s Final Report on Sunshine Mine Fire was released in 1973, Launhardt disputed much of its content, including the following passages:

  “The emergency escapeway system from the mine was not adequate for rapid evacuation.”

  Launhardt considered that charge the most ridiculous of the purported factors, as it played out in Sunshine Mine or any other deep, multilevel mine. The poisonous gases in the air left no time for escape. Shaft repairman Robert Barker had been found with his arms folded behind his head, lying on some lagging, a coffee cup resting nearby. It was as if he was waiting for the smoke to pass, as though it was only a temporary inconvenience. Barker, like many others, had no idea there was any real urgency to evacuate.

  “Top mine officials were not at the mine on the day of the fire and no person had been designated as being in charge of the entire operation. Individual supervisors were reluctant to order immediate evacuation or to make a major decision such as stopping the 3400-level fans.”

  Launhardt agreed the evacuation could have been better facilitated, but he doubted Chase or Walkup could have resolved the issue of the 3400-level fans. No one knew how the fans would affect the atmosphere, because no one knew where the fire was burning.

  “Company personnel delayed ordering evacuation of the mine for about 20 minutes while they searched for the fire.”

  Many debated that charge. There had been a search for the source of the smoke, and confusion about who could make the call for an evacuation. Launhardt didn’t find out about the smoke for at least a half hour, and by the time he dumped the stench, many of the men were already trapped. Launhardt supported the search. In order to determine which way to send his men out—through the Jewell or Silver Summit—the foreman needed to know where the smoke originated.

  “Most of the underground employees had not been trained in the use of the provided self rescuers and had difficulty using them. Some self rescuers provided by the company had not been maintained in useable condition.”

  It was that charge that hit him the hardest. It was the worst kind of finger-pointing because Sunshine was the first hardrock mine in the district, maybe in the country, using self-rescuers at the time. Neither federal nor state laws required them. Launhardt had brought them to Sunshine in 1963 because he thought they would be a good safety measure. Although testimony from many of the survivors indicated that some of the units were in poor shape, or completely unusable, Launhardt felt that there had been enough to go around. Without them, at least forty-three more men would have died.

  “Mine survival training, including evacuation procedures, barricading, and hazards of gases, such as carbon monoxide, had not been given mine employees.”

  Sunshine was a metal mine, not a coal mine. Launhardt had followed the letter of the law for safety training. He was also a realist. He knew the resistance the men felt toward the subject. Most thought they’d never need to escape a fire at Sunshine, because Sunshine wouldn’t ever have one.

  “The controls built into the ventilation system did not allow the isolation of No. 10 Shaft and its hoist rooms and service raises or the compartmentalization of the mine. Smoke and gas from this fire was thus able to move unrestricted into almost all workings and travel ways.”

  Launhardt couldn’t argue that one because it was a fact. But the USBM had a role in that scenario. The USBM ventilation experts didn’t recommend such system controls following their 1971 ventilation survey.

  And though the report had been the culmination of hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of testimony, research, and analysis, it did not address what Launhardt considered the most important issue: Why did the Sunshine fire spread more rapidly and produce more toxic gases than a normal hardrock fire?

  According to the Final Report, “a fire smoldered in the abandoned area, filling it with smoke before the smoke was expelled and detected. The sudden release of a large volume of smoke and toxic gases was not characteristic of the normal growth of an open fire.”

  SOMETHING WAS MISSING. THERE WAS NO WAY A FIRE WAS GOING TO smolder in those sopping old workings, building an enormous toxic cloud, and go unnoticed. In early spring of 1973, the legal team connected the dots when a Minnesota pig farmer successfully sued a foam manufacturer after his sheet-metal pig barn became engulfed and killed his animals. The fuel that fed the blaze was the supposedly nonburning, self-extinguishing polyurethane foam. The foam sprayed on 3400 near the 09 crosscut in Sunshine Mine was nearly identical.

  The insulating product had long been promoted by the industry. Mining & Quarrying, a trade magazine, reported in an August 1962 article titled “Knocks Fire Cold”:

  “A revolutionary method of insulating and sealing passageways in coal and metal mines by applying sprayed-in-place urethane foam to exposed underground surfaces was demonstrated by the U.S. Bureau of Mines for the American Mining Congress in Pittsburgh. . . . Since the foam will not support combustion, it can be used to insulate combustible materials in the mine and makes possible the quick erection of emergency, flame-retardant curtain walls to localize an outbreak of fire underground. . . . ”

  It turned out that polyurethane foam had a deadly past. In 1957 a fire in a British coal mine killed twenty-nine men. During the post-fire investigation, the polyurethane foam that had been used as a sealant became suspect when evidence indicated that the purportedly inflammable product had burned. At first the investigators zeroed in on the possibility that the foam had been improperly mixed, rendering it unsafe and flammable. Graham Wilde, head of the Mine Fires Section of the British Health and Safety Executive, conducted a series of laboratory tests and found the rigid foam could ignite; in fact, surprisingly easily. A report indicating the inherent dangers of the sealant was dispatched to the United States with a letter from Graham urging the USBM to join England and other western European nations in banning the foam for use underground.

  Donald Mitchell of the USBM responded to the British report and conducted his own tests at the Bureau’s test mine in Brewste
r, Pennsylvania. Little, if anything, was relayed to the industry, but Mitchell’s test results indicated that the foam was in fact flammable, even in a strong air current. He also confirmed Wilde’s findings that the product burned with such intensity that once ignited, it was difficult to extinguish. And yet nothing in USBM literature indicated mining companies should remove what was sprayed into mines and railway tunnels. Even more surprisingly, polyurethane foam continued to be promoted and used.

  Almost a decade after the British banned the foam, American mines still used it. For Sunshine, it was viewed as a timesaving and cost-effective way to stop leakage and channel airflow in a mine’s ventilation system that was becoming increasingly deeper and more difficult to manage.

  In 1966 the USBM’s own publication, Fire Hazards of Urethane Foam in Mines, said:

  “After two years of research on sealants and coatings, the Bureau of Mines published a report on urethane foam. Fire hazard from foam exists if flame propagates beyond the ignition source or penetrates the foam. . . . Foam on the ribs and adjoining roof presents a fire hazard. . . . Flame propagated in all tests with foam on the ribs and across the roof.”

  Launhardt was flabbergasted. How could the USBM ignore what was so patently obvious? The research in England was incontrovertible, and the USBM’s own findings backed it up. Why was the information dismissed? Why hadn’t Donald Mitchell heeded his own concerns? Even in the piss ditch, down low from the test inferno, Mitchell’s hair and eyebrows were singed. Why hadn’t the government called for the removal of all underground foam? And why, during the rescue and recovery effort in May 1972, had USBM crews allowed the use of gallons of spray foam to seal the leaky drifts?

  The foam had seemed so innocuous that Launhardt never paid it any mind. It sprayed on a creamy white, but in time the dust and grime of the mine coated it and it looked like the mud of a wasp nest—a bubbly form wrapping timbers and rocks and bulkheads in a smothering sheath of hardening goop. Launhardt came to believe the benign miracle insulator was a killer. He knew that it didn’t take a lot of heat to get it to burn, and once it started, it burned like solid gasoline. Had the foam not been sprayed all over 3400, Sunshine’s safety engineer believed, the fire would not have played out as it did the morning of May 2. What was there to burn, anyway? The marine plywood was as soggy as a rowboat at the bottom of a lake. The hot, wet mine took its toll on timbers all the time—which was why timber-repair crews were among the busiest crews. Launhardt dismissed the Bureau’s theories that the crew cutting rock bolts with acetylene torches had hauled off for lunch around 11:00 a.m., leaving behind chunks of hot steel to rest against the bulkhead. Maybe careless, maybe stupid, but it shouldn’t have been a big concern in any case because the timbers were wet there and the men had been told that the foam didn’t burn. Had it not been for the foam, nothing would have come of it whether it was an errant cigarette or a hot rock bolt. And he knew it couldn’t have happened that fast. If the foam hadn’t been there and it was a small wood fire—all fires start out small—it would have smoldered a little and the smoke would have alerted someone before things got so out of hand. The fire just wouldn’t have flashed to consume an entire bulkhead in less than a minute.

  Launhardt was also bothered by USBM ventilation inspections in the fall of 1971 and a little more than a week before the fire. Both times the Bureau’s experts passed through the polyurethane-foam-sprayed airways. No one could have missed the massive amounts of foam, it was so pervasive and obvious. And at the time the Bureau knew that the foam was a potential fire hazard. Instead of informing Sunshine that it ought to scrape that toxic foam out of there, they didn’t even remark on it.

  It was, of course, a combination of factors that led to the disaster. Without the short circuit of the ventilation system, most of the combustion by-products from the burning polyurethane foam would have gone harmlessly to the surface. But it was the velocity of the fire and the magnitude of toxins in its smoke that were so crucial to understanding what happened on May 2. Many, including Launhardt, believed—as subsequent tests concluded—that polyurethane foam acted as an accelerant akin to solid gasoline, which led to rapid combustion. That, in turn, gave rise to the torrent of smoke and deadly gases, the likes of which had never been seen before. The scenario was what experts called a “fuel-rich” event. The difference between flame-spread rates in timber fires and polyurethane foam fires was the essential clue. British researchers of fuel-rich mine fire scenarios later reported that fire in a timbered mine advanced at a rate of 2.3 to 17.1 yards per hour. Burning polyurethane foam advanced at 0.7 to 2.5 yards per second.

  Mine Safety Appliances Company and Dow Chemical had developed the product, called Rigiseal, with the research support of the USBM. The Bureau not only promoted Rigiseal, but even sent its own employees to demonstrate the product at various mines, including Bunker Hill. For some reason—ownership, incompetence, whatever—the people pushing the product at the mines were unaware of its dangers. Launhardt and others close to the Sunshine case were suspicious. They felt that the reason the foam had been overlooked during the initial investigation was to keep the government out of potential lawsuits. By then several suits were pending, including fifty-two wrongful death claims on behalf of miners’ survivors, and the company’s own legal claim to recover damages and lost production. The government was a defendant in both scenarios. The key issue in the litigation was the premise that, but for the combustion of rigid polyurethane foam at the 3400–09 intersection, the fire would not have been a disaster.

  As expected, the lawsuits to place blame and accountability took their sweet time to make it to trial. Widows did not sue Sunshine. For some that was out of loyalty, but also because by accepting the $25,000 paid over ten years from workmen’s compensation, they were precluded from taking legal action against the company. By the time the primary case was heard in a U.S. District Court in Boise, six years after the fire, in 1978, many of the litigants had dropped out or settled. A consortium of chemical companies that had had a role in the manufacture of the foam settled for $6 million, to be divided among lawyers and the two-hundred-plus heirs of represented families. Sunshine was also a plaintiff seeking damages from the USBM, the Pittsburgh firm that manufactured the self-rescuers, and the makers of the foam, Mine Safety Appliances Company. The chemical companies, however, did not settle with the mine. The government argued that no blame could be placed anywhere because the facts were unclear about when the fire ignited, where it started, and the role, if any, of the polyurethane foam. The government lawyers also tried to prove that Sunshine was more focused on production than on safety and therefore was to blame. After five months of testimony, including five days with Launhardt on the stand, Judge Ray McNichols ruled in favor of the defendants. Judge McNichols was unconvinced about the role of the foam. He said that even if the polyurethane foam had been the cause of the catastrophe, the federal government couldn’t be liable under the federal Tort Claims Act. Many disagreed with the judge’s ruling, but in the end it stayed firm. The only proof that polyurethane foam was recognized as dangerous was that after the Sunshine fire, no American mines continued to use the product underground.

  AND FOR DECADES, THE FIRE PLAGUED THOSE WHO WERE THERE MAY 2.

  Delmar Kitchen thought he’d dealt with the fire, but in time he came to understand that he’d only become a good liar. After the sole survivor of the legendary Kitchen men buried his father and his brother, he found himself drowning in anxiety that went on for years. His hands would grow numb when he was driving, forcing him to pull over and wait it out. It was as if his own sadness wanted to choke the life out of him, like clenched hands around his neck.

  Though the bodies were tucked into pockets of earth for all time, many still found it impossible to accept. Lou Ella Firkins’s children would swear on the family Bible that they had seen their father’s silhouette in an upstairs window watching as they played in their backyard. Once, Don Firkins’s widow heard footsteps coming from her son�
�s second-floor bedroom. She set her ironing aside and crept upstairs to catch him playing hooky. She heard the sound of Levi’s pantlegs brushing against each other as he walked.

  “You little shit,” she said as she pushed the door open, “I caught you!”

  But the room was empty.

  Lou Ella knew it was the spirit of her beloved.

  For a long time after the fire, whenever Bunker Hill hotshot Harry Cougher saw someone sprawled on a towel sunbathing, he’d have to fight the compulsion to stop his car and stare hard. Is that person dead?

  Although touchy subjects were never broached in the Launhardt home, Julie, a perceptive thirteen-year-old at the time of the fire, had a vague understanding of the May 2 disaster. But all of it came from her mother. Simply put, it was that “it wasn’t your dad’s fault.” There were so many questions, unasked and unanswered. Julie knew her father was associated with the safety program, but was unsure to what degree. Was he solely responsible for the safety of the men? Or did he report to someone else who was? She also knew the fire was an accident, the result of something possibly preventable. When Janet and the children moved back to Pinehurst a few weeks after the fire, they faced a man more distant than ever, a man whose darkest moment was locked up and private. A mystery. Julie sensed the pain of the fire in her father’s eyes, but he never said anything directly about it. He had liked to shape things a certain way, organize problems like socks rolled into little fabric eggs and placed neatly in a drawer. After the fire, he couldn’t do that. Julie knew what thoughts were going through his mind. Why was I unable to prevent this? And, once it did happen, why couldn’t I have saved more?

  The two oldest could see that their father was holding himself together by burying himself in his work. He couldn’t let go of the fire and its cause. In a way, they believed, he was a victim along with the other ninety-one. Bob junior had a gut feeling that his dad felt the fire wouldn’t have happened if he’d never left the mine for the insurance sales job in Spokane.