The Deep Dark (6 page)

“Do you smell smoke?” he asked.

Sheppard indicated he did, but he pointed out Rudd had just lit a cigarette with a wooden match.

“That must be it,” Shoop said.

But the scent niggled at Sheppard. He knew that a match's odor could be distinguished from most any other burning smell. Miners had particularly acute olfactory senses. A man underground could tell the scent of a burning mahogany guide over one made of fir.

He shrugged. “I didn't smell any sulfur,” he finally said.

The man train continued to the Jewell, and the graveyard guys aboard walked out toward the light of a brand-new day. Topside, near the portal, they came across foreman Gene Johnson and told him about the smoke. Johnson was a breath under six feet tall, but he had the kind of personality that made him seem even bigger, the way a blowfish can puff up. Those who worked under him sometimes considered it hot air. He had the ramrod gait and air of authority that broadcast immediately that he was a military man, a man deserving of respect. His dark, curly hair crowned a ruggedly handsome face, punctuated by dark eyes that could flash fire or charm whenever he needed to summon either.

Johnson promised to check it out. No one could say for sure if he ever did, or even had the chance.

S
AFETY ENGINEER
L
AUNHARDT WAS HEADED FOR UNDERGROUND
Tuesday morning to inspect safety equipment, including any fire extinguishers and BM-1447 self-rescuers. Filter breathers of charcoal and hopcalite, BM-1447s were small lifesavers about the size of a tuna can, though twice as thick, with a rubber mouthpiece and nose clip. Used all but exclusively in coal mines, where fires were frequent and often deadly, the device chemically converted deadly carbon monoxide in smoke to harmless, breathable carbon dioxide. Launhardt had been the first to order Bureau of Mines–approved self-rescuers in the district about halfway through his first tenure as safety engineer in the mid-sixties. By the time Launhardt left for Spokane to sell life insurance, Sunshine was one of only two district mines to procure BM-1447 self-rescuers, the other being the Page Mine. Lucky Friday, Bunker Hill, and Galena—all big, busy operations—didn't have a single one.

When he'd returned to the district in February of '72, Launhardt had found many of the mine's self-rescuers in poor condition, if not completely worthless. In ideal conditions—when the vacuum-sealed lid was not popped, accidentally or intentionally, by a curious fellow testing the plunger on the opposite side—the units were supposed to last a decade or even longer. But not so, it seemed, at Sunshine. In a mine environment akin to a gigantic steam bath, moisture seeped readily into the self-rescuers' hopcalite chambers, turning the chemical to sludge and destroying its effectiveness. Storage was part of the problem. Leaky wooden doors had replaced the glass fronts on the storage cabinets he'd installed in the early sixties. Locking solid-paneled doors stenciled with
SELF-RESCUER
replaced shattered panels. Launhardt learned that during his absence, self-rescuers had rarely been replaced after being corroded or pinched by a few miners who'd take just about anything from the mine that wasn't nailed down, whether it was useful topside or not. New locks and solid wood panels weren't meant to keep men out during a fire, but only to deter the weekend auto-body painter who found the units good protection against the CO by-product of spray-painting. Besides, most miners regarded self-rescuers with little if any interest. The devices were viewed as unnecessary because metal mines had had little or no fuel to sustain a fire.

Many of Launhardt's trips underground lately had brought the same disappointing discovery. Ignored for years, some self-rescuers had been damaged in the hot and humid underground. Following an inspection on February 24, he wrote: “It is obvious that a serious problem exists in mine fire protection . . . according to the record card, the unit at #4 was last inspected on 2/5/68.”

As he worked his way through the various levels in the last weeks of February 1972, the lanky safety engineer recorded which locations were in need of a new supply. He replaced what he could from the safety office's rather limited supply and discussed ordering more with his predecessor, Jim Atha. Atha ordered three dozen of the Mine Safety Appliance Company's W-65s—an improved one-hour unit that was in the works. But there had been a delay. The government had recently mandated that all coal mines use the newer, longer-lasting self-rescuers. To meet the requirement, the Pittsburgh-based manufacturer had diverted its production to coal mining companies. Sunshine's purchase order was on hold. Launhardt was as troubled by the quantity ordered as by the delay. He wanted every Sunshine man to have access to a self-rescuer. An additional three dozen would hardly do it.

On the morning of May 2, Launhardt was a man with little time to spare. He had a lot of ground to cover in the mine, and adding to his workload was a big project waiting on his desk. Launhardt was in the process of redrafting Sunshine's decade-old safety rule book, and its deadline loomed. The draft was due before the joint safety committee on Friday, and the following week it would be shared with representatives of the union for their comments. Launhardt and development foreman Salyer rode down the Jewell in a cage to the station at the 3700 level. The trip took less than five minutes, the cage traveling through the shaft at almost 1,000 feet per minute. From there, they took the man train for the mile-long ride to 10-Shaft. At 10-Shaft, they climbed on the cage powered by the chippy hoist. “Chippy” was the term used in the Coeur d'Alene Mining District to denote an auxiliary hoist, one that carried men and materials, not ore or muck. Sunshine's chippy could haul as many as forty-eight men at a time. The other hoist, the double-drum on the 3100 level, was used to haul muck, ore, and rock. The double-drum hoist was also outfitted with a twelve-man cage.

The chippy moved miners at a decent clip, between 500 and 750 feet per minute, depending on the hoist operator and the need to get the men down or out. Ten miners was considered a full load on a single deck of the chippy, but at that time of the morning Launhardt and Salyer were the only two passengers for the ride down to the level Launhardt had targeted for inspection—5600. Launhardt's cap lamp illuminated the blur of the shaft's timbered walls as the hoist dropped into the darkness. Every 200 feet a strobe would flash as the cage passed through a lighted shaft station on its way down, about a mile underground in the deep dark of the mine.

A man's senses were bombarded underground. Sunshine, like all deep mines, was damp and musty, accented with the stink of powder smoke from explosives. Some thought parts of the underground where timbers rotted and sent off methane gas reeked like sneakers stored in a plastic bag, or like the foulest, wettest farm dog. Others—owners and top gyppos—smelled money. Beyond the intake air shafts, humidity at Sunshine was at 100 percent, and whatever odors percolated through the underground hung heavy in the moist air. Bob Launhardt, for one, could even detect the tang of specific chemicals found in the sandfill. All tailings, and therefore all mines, were unique in their odor because all companies used different chemical combinations to process ore.

Outside might be cold, but the underground was always hot. Outside dry, inside the mine, dripping wet. Fresh air versus the heavy smell of blasted ammonium nitrate powder. A thousand miner's lamps could never capture the light of the sun. It was easy for some to forget worries and phobias because their work world was always on sensory overload. All around were enormous pieces of heavy equipment that seemed incongruous, given the space around them. It was a ship in a bottle. Outsiders expect working in a mine to be claustrophobic, but that phobia was rarely the reason men quit. Certainly the back end of a stope could get tight, shrinking down to maybe six feet in height, but it wasn't nearly as tight a squeeze as coal miners faced. They were often forced to crawl to chase a coal vein. In hardrock mines, vast sections of the underground were blasted into cavernous spaces that miners referred to as “rooms.” There were hoist rooms, machine shops, and storage places scattered throughout hundreds of miles of working levels. Underground, coffeepots with stains so deep and dark no bleach could clean them perked all day long, and newspapers and magazines were stacked with the precision corners of a neat freak. Launhardt knew of one hoistman who actually waxed the floor every week. Pity the miner dumb enough to enter without making sure his boots were clean. Another man whose job was to service a hoist carried a grease rag in one hand and a polishing cloth in the other.

Some guys figured they could almost live down in the mine, and it was true. In the days before muck cars and rails, mules actually
did
live underground. Stone corrals beneath the surface contained the animals used to pull carts of muck to the hoist. Once pressed into such service, most mules never saw daylight again.

T
HE DEEPER
L
AUNHARDT DESCENDED
T
UESDAY MORNING, THE
hotter the rock became. Each hundred-foot drop brought an increase of one degree. At the surface, just past the opening of the Jewell Shaft, the temperature held steady at about 55 degrees, whether it was a hot summer day or a frigid Idaho winter. At the deepest part of the mine, the 5600 level, it was a sweltering 127 degrees. Mammoth booster ventilation fans and refrigeration units pushed more than 130,000 cubic feet of air through the mine to keep the conditions bearable at the lower depths. Cold water from Big Creek pulsed through the mine and emerged as hot as coffee when discharged into a tailings or waste pond on the surface. Even with all that had been learned in a century of mining at that location, the cooling system was far from perfect. Miners knew where the hotspots were at Sunshine—or at any other hardrock mine, because all mines had them. Only unlucky or inexperienced miners got stuck working in the devil's breath. Whenever the ventilation system failed, temperatures rose quickly and the air grew uncomfortably thin.
Rapidly.
Miners working farthest from a ventilation or intake airshaft to the surface, especially those in Sunshine's deepest reaches, would be in unbearably sweltering conditions in less than half an hour. The air temperature would surge to rock surface levels. Enduring temperatures close to 130 degrees for any amount of time was very risky.

Miners heard bosses talking about the importance of ventilation. But for those guys underground busting rock, the very idea that there was some great ventilation system bringing air throughout the working areas was nearly a joke. Large fans—the kind that made hurricanes howl on movie sets—huffed and puffed air through the mine the best that they could. But the air in the stopes and raises sometimes forced the thermometer to 115 degrees. A 50-ton chiller was installed on 4600 to cool ventilating air, but it didn't do all that was hoped—or promised. Men working in the lower levels used whiz-bangs—blowpipes with broad nozzles punched with holes—to spray cool compressed air into stifling work areas. Many actually preferred stope fans shut off because all they accomplished was to blow hot air at them, dry them out, and sap them of their strength. Fans also kicked around dust, which was bad enough without the high velocity of a blower. Many times, a foreman would return to a stope to find fans off and the men using compressed air. He'd raise a big stink about it, ordering the fans turned back on.
The goddamn compressed air is to run the machines. The fans are to cool off the men!
The minute he'd disappear down the raise, the fans would be shut off again.

Besides a money-producing ore body, nothing was more important to the workings of a hardrock mine than fresh air. Before compressed air, men collapsed from what was assumed to be heat and exertion, but was actually oxygen deprivation. Even with compressed air, the air in deep mines was thin and replete with residual gases from blasting.

6:30
A.M.,
M
AY
2
Smelterville

C
ONTRACT MINER
R
ON
F
LORY STOPPED IN AT
H
APPY
L
ANDING IN
Smelterville, a town surrounded by a dead ring of skeletal vegetation from Bunker Hill's towering and noxious lead smelter. Flory, a big man with a gate-jaw and a goatee, filled his water jug with ice from the bar's icemaker before catching a ride with his partner Tom Wilkinson. Over in Woodland Park, outside of Wallace, mine sanitation nipper Don Beehner picked up three Sunshine miners in his red-and-white Volkswagen bus. Buz Bruhn's Mullan carpool pulled over to give a lift to a Sunshine miner hitching to work on the highway to Big Creek. Though it was only Tuesday morning, day-shift silver miners had already discussed what they would be doing on the weekend—or even
that
day, instead of working.

Wilkinson, Flory, and the others changed from their street clothes to their diggers in Sunshine's dry house, usually called just “the dry,” an enormous building of lockers, urinals, toilets, and communal showers. Wet boots, diggers, and towels were suspended on hooks and raised up to the ceiling by chains and pulleys, making for a kind of hanging garden of miner's gear, drying in the breeze of a forced-air furnace. Each shift was bookended in the dry. It was the place where the men lightened the prospects of the day ahead, or blew off steam from a disappointing dig that had yielded fewer muck-car loads than expected. An average blast typically dumped thirty to forty tons of ore and rock to be hauled out; anything less was a frustrating money loser. More so than any other place outside of the bars, the men's dry was the place where miners could get to know each other. Snippets of life echoed through the mammoth room. Sometimes there were fistfights and angry altercations. A few times, things were revealed that no one expected. A man who had custody of two preschoolers worked a shift opposite his father, the kids' grandfather. Every day the dad brought the kids into the dry. They'd sit and wait under the hangers while the shift diggered up. Then their grandfather would come out of the mine, shower, change, and take them home. This routine went on for quite some time. One searing summer day, a cager asked the kids if they wanted to cool off in the shower.