The Deep Dark (33 page)

Tom Wilkinson's best friend, Johnny Davis, was one of the few who wore a “Butte hat,” a hardhat with a visor like a baseball cap. District miners thought Butte-style hats were a joke. Water from overhead could trickle down a man's neck if he was wearing one of those dumb hats. Why Davis wore one, no one knew. He was a Mullan boy, for God's sake.

Thirty-six bodies had been counted by the end of the day, with only eleven identified. That left fifty-seven missing. Bob Launhardt told the rescue team that unless the men had found a place to dig in and keep out the smoke—and had done so quickly—there was little chance of survival. Curiously, he told his father-in-law another story. Bill Noyen wrote in his diary that night: “Bob . . . said the officials definitely believe there is a good chance they'll find most of the missing people alive.”

T
IME UNKNOWN,
M
AY
4

4800 Level

T
HE DIVIDING WALL OF SMOKE ADJACENT TO THE
S
AFETY
Z
ONE
on 4800 stirred
.
Thirty to forty feet from where Flory and Wilkinson had first sought refuge, along the rib of the main drift of the 4800, a crosscut led to a raise down to 5000. A dimming signal light hung on the opposite side of the junction. They collected some three-by-twelve-inch-by-six-foot lagging and made miner's bed boards, set against the ribs at a comfortable angle facing the crosscut. Wilkinson used his powder knife to slice a section from one of the enormous rolls of burlap used underground to stabilize sandfill by acting as a colander of sorts, after the slurry of water and sand had been piped into mined-out stopes. He and Flory doubled, then quadrupled the loose-woven fabric to fashion a makeshift mattress.

It appeared that the smoke poured down 10-Shaft, across 4800 station, and down the drift, before hesitating and then continuing its route into the crosscut. Both survivors knew that as long as the smoke kept moving away, they'd be safe. Neither man thought much about toxic gases that could be hanging at different depths down the drift. All they understood was that the smoke had killed the others on 4800.

The flow of fresh air coming from the borehole created an invisible barrier, pushing the bad air away. Neither knew it, of course, but it was Harvey Dionne's quick thinking and Kenny Wilbur's unbridled nerve that had uncorked the flow by removing the lagging cover on 3700.

“As long as the smoke stays where it's at, we'll be all right,” Flory said.

Wilkinson hung a paper towel as an airflow indicator on a fan line across the drift. The paper stayed suspended at a thirty-degree angle toward the crosscut.

M
ORNING,
M
AY
4
Sunshine Rescue Command Center

B
Y
T
HURSDAY MORNING,
B
OB
L
AUNHARDT
'
S INITIAL SUGGESTION
of advancing the good air by sealing bulkheads and cross-drifts wasn't working. Despite the deluge of help from mines all over the country and Canada, Sunshine had more leaks than could be fixed. Launhardt was caught in the middle. He wanted the men to get to the lower levels, but if they didn't seal the leaks, they'd put themselves at great risk. Crews working from Silver Summit's 3100 level started a suction fan to draw the smoke away from the Jewell side, but it, too, failed to do the job. More sealing was needed. In the command center, someone suggested procuring a supply of inflatable rubber life rafts and using them as makeshift barriers to hasten the process. The idea was dismissed as impractical. Someone remembered how truckers used collapsible bags to protect their freight. In fact, the four-by-eight-foot oversized pillows had even been used to stop a backed-up sewer system from flooding a Minnesota town. A phone call later, a jet loaded with a supply was on its way from a Goodyear plant in Georgia to Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane.

And although Launhardt couldn't really conceive of it at the time, trapped as he was in grief and concern for the missing, he was becoming a target of criticism, especially in the death of Don Beehner. Someone needed to be blamed. One moment reran in a fuzzy replay. It had happened so fast that the mine's safety engineer wasn't completely clear on just how it was that Don Beehner had ended up passing his helmet to Schulz. Launhardt had been on the opposite side of the track from Hawkins and Beehner. Hawkins was sort of working on his hands and knees while Launhardt leaned over to help Schulz. It was possible that Hawkins hadn't seen what Beehner was doing before it was too late. Ten seconds, maybe twenty, and he was in the piss ditch.

The scene haunted him. How could that happen? How could a trained man take such a foolish risk? Launhardt sought details about what Beehner had been doing before he'd joined the ad hoc rescue crew. He learned that Beehner had been on the 3700 when the fire broke out. He'd gone directly to 10-Shaft, where he'd assisted several men with their self-rescuers. On his way up the shaft to 3100, a miner had slumped in the cage, and Beehner had pulled his self-rescuer from his mouth.

“It will help you,” Beehner had reportedly said, offering it to the woozy and scared miner.

Others reported that the sanitation nipper had left the cage, leaving his self-rescuer with the other man, and walked the smoky drift to the Jewell, where he'd eventually met with Launhardt's rescue crew. His entire system, quite possibly, had been full of carbon monoxide, leaving him impaired.

Every man in the command center knew Sunshine was on the defensive, much of it owing to Byron Schulz's accusatory hospital interview. Ralph Nader's people—coincidentally in Spokane at the time—fueled the controversy. Nader charged Sunshine with a general disregard for safety. An example that surfaced was a fire on April 22, 1971, when a power cable on 2700 had shorted and set ablaze some drift timber. Federal and state law required reporting
any
fire, but Sunshine had made no such notification. When state investigators learned of the fire, the evidence was gone. Even worse, the mine had not been evacuated. Instead, employees were put on standby while shifters searched for the source of the fire. Even the diehard company men had to concede the scenario was disturbingly similar to the events of May 2, 1972. But there was more. During that same incident, Launhardt's predecessor, Jim Atha, had refused the inspector's request to test Sunshine's stench system. Atha had insisted all was fine, but the inspector was skeptical. He didn't think the system worked at all.

Most who escaped the mine Tuesday didn't smell anything other than smoke. A few questioned whether Bob Launhardt had even released the stench in the first place.

In theory, the stench could have worked to alert the men underground because the odor in the damp, wet mine wouldn't dissipate easily. When John Brandon, Sunshine's superintendent in the early sixties, used to go underground, he'd light a cigar after getting off the cage on 3100. He never took a motor to 10-Shaft, because he wanted to smoke that cigar. It was a ten- to twelve-minute walk, and about the time he was five minutes from the blue room where all the mine bosses congregated, they'd catch a whiff of cigar smoke. “Brandon's coming. Back to work!” And off they'd scurry with logbooks and pencil stubs. Smoke didn't fade away; it hung in the air and was carried by the intake airflow down the drift to 10-Shaft. Just like stench injected into the compressed-air line, Brandon's cigar had been a warning system.

The problem with any stench warning system at Sunshine was the mine's vast size; it took about twenty-five minutes for stench to get from the surface to 10-Shaft. Launhardt doubted that even if the stench had been dumped when the first guy smelled smoke, the foul-smelling odor would have made its way to all the lower levels in time to get the men out. There was another drawback, too. One in twenty people is anosmic—unable to smell. In metal mining, where stench-warning systems were the sole means of alerting men of a fire, safety engineers like Launhardt always hoped that no two men paired in a stope shared that genetic quirk.

Launhardt never complained about the paperwork or the politics of a job he considered his calling. He worked while others yakked about ball scores or fishing trips. He worked through lunch. The girls in the office, in fact, chuckled over his dogged work ethic. He'd get to his desk and pull up his typewriter and bang out a report. As the company's safety engineer, he didn't have to press a single key; but Launhardt just preferred not to bother anyone for anything he could do himself. He also felt a need to continually prove himself to others—long after he had likely earned their respect. Much of that was caused by his failure to finish college, though he knew ten times more than half the engineers who used Sunshine as a rung up the ladder to better pay and greater prestige. He did whatever it took to get the job done, in hopes that there would be some recognition for whatever sacrifice he made. He sought to define himself by his work. Janet and the kids understood that, and adjusted their routine to accommodate him. If the TV was on or someone was playing the piano, or even in the middle of a Monopoly game, everything would stop when Dad's car stopped in the driveway. Janet would put an index finger to her lips and remind the kids to hush.

“You're father's had a stressful day,” she'd say in her soft, compassionate voice. “Go read. Leave Dad alone.”

Yet, by the third day of the fire, there was no place to retreat. The biggest rescue effort in mining history was under way, and Bob Launhardt was in the middle of it. And worst of all, he knew better than anyone else how deadly that smoke was. One breath and a man would drop to the floor.
How could the guys underground escape the poisoned air?

S
TEELWORKERS LOCAL PRESIDENT
L
AVERN
M
ELTON WALKED THE
same two hundred feet through the yard to the office and back again, nearly wearing a rut in the muddy ground. He was rightfully bitter that so many of his union brethren hadn't made it out on Tuesday. The Steelworkers had been the glue that held the crew together, and not just at contract time. It was true that some meetings were sparsely attended, but the workingmen of the underground knew that the union was there for a reason—though it wasn't the same one union leaders espoused whenever they could get in earshot of a reporter or mine management. The rank and file wanted better pay. The union leadership concurred, but it also sought improved working conditions for the last industry in which men still held power over machines.

Melton was old school in his unfettered distrust of management. When the fire erupted, he pointed the finger at the company.

“They knew this was going to happen,” Melton muttered. “We
all
knew it.”

Launhardt, who had once been president of the local, was dumbfounded by the remark. He thought Melton was cutting his own throat.

“Why would he say that?” Launhardt asked a friend. “He's saying that
he
knew. If he knew, why didn't he say something before?”

Derided by the company as a blowhard union rabble-rouser, Melton wanted tougher safety measures in place even before the last body was pulled from the mine. Melton's rhetoric became blood splashed into shark-infested waters. Ralph Nader insisted that mining companies and the government agencies were in cahoots—neither had the best interests of workingmen at heart. Data from the USBM supported Nader and Melton. Bureau statistics pegged Sunshine as one of the worst safety offenders in the country, with more than thirty-five safety violations noted during a November 1971 inspection. The statistics on injuries were even more damning. In 1970, Sunshine averaged 136.15 injuries per 1 million man-hours. The coal mining industry average was 22 per million. Workers were three times more likely to meet their end at Sunshine than at any other U.S. metal mine.

Launhardt defended Sunshine's safety training, procedures, and safety record to a bunch of reporters, but it went badly. He confirmed that Sunshine did not stage fire drills; he knew of not a single instance when Sunshine ever had. Only one mine in the entire district ever ran such a drill—the Star Mine. And that had been fourteen years ago. Such trials were impractical; it would take a man several hours to climb a series of ladders up 4,000 feet or more.
Besides,
Launhardt thought,
why would Sunshine run drills for something that until a few days ago had never seemed possible?

Sunshine's evacuation plan was also targeted after Schulz and Riley complained that men didn't know their way out on 3100. Launhardt pointed out that signs were posted all along the Silver Summit escapeway; he'd put them up himself. And the mine, he said, did have an evacuation plan. Men were told to gather on their respective stations at 10-Shaft and wait for the cage. Carbon monoxide readings would automatically shut air doors, and men would be belled up to 3100 to exit via the Silver Summit escapeway. It didn't work that way on May 2 because smoke had filled the mine so quickly.

Launhardt pointed the finger back at the bureau when a reporter told him the government considered the mine unsafe.

“If they knew, and it was true,” Launhardt said, “why didn't they shut us down?”

When his remarks were carried nationwide, they made Sunshine appear ill-prepared and oblivious to the danger of fire. But in hardrock mining, shaft fires were the primary fear. Not only were shafts lined with timber, but they were gathering places for smoking men and, when repairs were needed, workers wielding blowtorches. Those running hardrock mines of Sunshine's size took precautions to ensure that shaft fires could be snuffed out. The Jewell had three enormous deluge water rings, and 10-Shaft had one. When needed, a Niagara was unleashed by the hoistman. But neither shaft was burning.

The self-rescuers. The safety training. The escapeways. Each had to be answered. Federal law required two such escape routes, and Sunshine met that on a technical level, with the Jewell and the Silver Summit. But there had been a problem when the fire broke out. And it was major. The men on the lower levels were unable to use the cage to get to either of the escapeways. Launhardt ruminated over this alone. There was no waking anyone to share what he held inside or what he couldn't allow himself to say out loud.