The Deep Dark (39 page)

Nobody went off and left his friends,
Lang thought.
None of them guys panicked. Pretty tough men, them miners.

T
IME UNKNOWN,
M
AY
7
Wallace

I
N
W
ALLACE, 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.

I
T WASN
'
T UNTIL
S
UNDAY TH
AT 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.

T
HROUGHOUT THE DAY,
M
AY
7
Sunshine Mine Yard

B
LACK 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 longest 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.

L
ATE EVENING,
M
AY
7
Cataldo

T
HE 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.

E
ARLY MORNING,
M
AY
8

Sunshine Mine Yard

B
OB
L
AUNHARDT DID WHATEVER WAS ASKED OF HIM.
M
ONDAY
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.

M
IDDAY,
M
AY
8
3700 Level

T
HE 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. Electrician 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.