The Deep Dark (13 page)

Behind his back, McManus was called Black Mac, less for his taste in clothing—the shiny black suit that he always wore, his fly once fastened shut with a safety pin—than for his insistence that all lights be turned off unless absolutely necessary. Under the McManus regime, pens were locked in the safe and issued only by sign-out. A single pen was to be used until its ink was exhausted. When it ran dry, an employee took it to McManus's secretary and she tested it on a legal pad to ensure that it was dead before issuing a new one. Pity the poor clerk who discovered that someone had walked off with her pen. She'd be reduced to tears and left to beg for a new one. Black Mac thought the hiring office's water fountain was “wasting water” and ordered it disconnected. The tube lights in the office were so antiquated that when they were shut off at his insistence, they'd cease to function when turned on again. It got so bad that the electrician eventually moved into the office. In addition to humiliating the staff for personal sport, Black Mac could be unforgivably cruel. He once fired a clerk for taking the day off to attend her nephew's funeral. Another woman was given her walking papers because McManus consider her ample breasts a “distraction” to mine engineers and geologists.

Not until the fall of 1969, when they signed union cards, did the staff stand up to the little dictator. McManus refused to negotiate, and in February 1970 the emboldened office workers staged a strike. It lasted less than a day. The staff had feared the miners wouldn't be supportive. But miners coming for their shifts saw the office workers' signs and turned around. Talks with management, and a speedy resolution, took a sudden priority.

Six months later, when McManus was ousted, it was as if Dorothy had vanquished the Wicked Witch of the West. The McManus legacy was not how well he managed operations, but how frightened and damaged were the people who had cowered in his presence. Even with nice guy Marvin Chase in charge, the anxiety never went away. Fear lingered. When the events of May 2, 1972, began, no one thought he had the power to do a thing about it. No one wanted to lose his job by calling for an evacuation.

I
T FELL ON THE SHOULDERS OF AN ACCOUNTANT TO GIVE IN TO
what was as risky as it was right—the official evacuation order from topside. He wasn't management, and he sat in an office that had once kept pens in the safe; the likes of such autonomy had seldom been seen. Few in the office were sure what was going on underground and what, if any, evacuation plan was already under way. Some assumed the source of the smoke was above 2700, a level well above where most of the men worked. They didn't think smoke could get down to 3100 without the men knowing well in advance.

Pherigo rang the North Shore for the third time. Superintendent Walkup answered, and she patched him through to a shifter. Walkup, a bear of a man with a foghorn voice, said he'd return to the mine right away. He was unruffled. All mines had little blazes. There was always more smoke than fire.

12:02
P.M.,
M
AY
2

Safety Office

A
T HIS DESK ON THE SECOND FLOOR OF
S
UNSHINE
'
S WAREHOUSE,
Bob Launhardt unlatched his dinner bucket and smoothed out a napkin. He set out a sandwich he'd made that morning and prepared to dig into the safety rules handbook, when his phone rang. Tom Harrah's voice shot through the line with a desperate urgency that at once propelled Launhardt to his feet.

“I want you in front of the warehouse.
Right now!”
Harrah said, abruptly hanging up.

Launhardt dropped the phone and hurried down the stairs. When he found Harrah, the shop foreman was sweating profusely and breathing heavily.

“We've got a fire in the mine,” said Harrah, gulping air. “They want us to dump the stench and bring the helmets to 10-Shaft on 3100. You help our yard man get the helmets out of the safety office and into the mine.”

Launhardt, caught completely off guard, said he'd release the stench. Stench was a warning system that hardrock mining operations used to alert underground personnel to evacuate. Historically, stench was a foul-smelling liquid made from garlic and other strong aromatics. Sunshine used ethyl mercaptan manufactured by Eastman Organic Chemicals, a product similar—though not as concentrated—as that used to odorize propane, butane, and other potentially deadly gases. The compound came in a glass ampoule that, when added to a compressor's air line, sent stomach-turning fumes through the mine. In the south end of the compressor room, Launhardt broke the glass and opened three green and three red valves to release the acrid vapors into the mine. The size, configuration, and depth of a hardrock mine made the electric-powered visual and auditory warning systems used in coal mines impractical. Sunshine employed stench instead of sirens because every part of the mine was serviced with compressed air.

“Helmet” was mining vernacular for a breathing apparatus used for underground rescue. The units kept in the safety office were somewhat similar to what firemen wore on their backs when entering a blazing building. But there was a key difference: those used by firemen were compressed-air units, like scuba gear; a mine rescue helmet used compressed oxygen in its cylinder. In essence, it was a re-breather. The air that its user expended circulated through the device and was processed by chemicals that removed the carbon dioxide by-product of respiration. A chamber in the breathing circuitry held a supply of cardoxide to absorb carbon dioxide. Without the cardoxide, carbon dioxide levels in a breathing unit would quickly reach toxic levels and the wearer would collapse and almost certainly die. The apparatus gave a man a maximum of two hours of rescue time—four times what a fireman had with the much heavier compressed air. Sunshine had ten helmets.

At no time in Launhardt's life did events melt and blur more than during the first few minutes after he released the stench. He could feel his heart pulsate against his rib cage. He returned to his office and dialed Central Mine Rescue's number in Wallace. But the director of the mobile unit that supplied rescue equipment and know-how to the mining companies of the Coeur d'Alenes was at lunch. Launhardt frantically called the Shoshone County Sheriff's Office and told the dispatcher that the rescue man and his familiar panel truck were needed at Sunshine.

A
CROSS THE YARD IN THE
J
EWELL HOIST ROOM,
L
INO
C
ASTANEDA
kept his ear attached to the phone. American-born (“Sonora, Arizona, not Mexico!”), Castaneda had picked spuds in southern Idaho before finding his way to the district and steady, permanent employment at Sunshine. His half brother, Roberto Diaz, worked underground as a motorman. Castaneda, by and large easygoing, was seriously stressed as he listened in the morning of May 2.

He heard the hoistman on 10-Shaft's double-drum say he was about to faint.

“Will you hand me one of those breather deals? I'm feeling kind of groggy.”

Castaneda hunched over a little where he stood, gripping the telephone receiver as if it weighed forty pounds. Every line that could be picked up throughout the workings of the mine had a man on it, pleading for help and offering whatever they could about the fire's location. Castaneda stood mute. When rock rabbit Larry Hawkins asked what was happening, the hoistman shook his free hand to tell him to shut up. That motion brought light to Castaneda's face. The hoistman's dark brown eyes had pooled with tears.

Hawkins left the hoist room and found Launhardt near the mine portal. The safety engineer's face was a study in anxiousness, but he spoke calmly. His reassuring tone suggested things were under control.

“I need someone to go underground with me,” he said.

Hawkins held a restricted rescue card because his weight had ballooned. He reminded Launhardt that he was allowed on the helmet crew only in the event of a real emergency.

“This
is
an emergency,” Launhardt said. “And I need you now.”

The idea that there was an urgent situation somewhere in the mine was hard to grasp. Hawkins had just come out of the mine where everybody was kicking back, relaxing. They were fine. Nothing had been out of the ordinary. How could something so dire happen so quickly?

Before the call from Harrah, Launhardt had been most concerned about a shaft fire. Smaller electrical fires or waste fires in the mine could be extinguished with relative ease. Shaft fires, however, were far more lethal. Sunshine's primary fire safety measures revolved around a series of air doors that automatically shut when sensors detected carbon monoxide, thus stopping airflow that would feed a fire. In addition, deluge rings holding hundreds of gallons of water had been planted atop the Jewell Shaft to dump a cascade of water on any shaft blaze there. But that wasn't happening today. The fire wasn't a shaft fire.

A boiling plume had erupted from Sunshine Tunnel, an air outtake vent on the mountainside above the mine yard. It looked lethal. Now, carrying a flame safety lamp, used to monitor oxygen levels, and a Draeger 1931 multi-gas detector to check for concentrations of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, Launhardt joined a group of men around Sunshine portal. For a moment he could not look beyond the men who had just made it out. Fear was imprinted on every face. He studied each one, looking for the men he knew best. Some were there. Many more were absent. Launhardt had no idea how many miners were still underground, nor did he know exactly where they would be. He knew there was only one place to go: into the smoke.

12:10
P.M.,
M
AY
2
5000 Level

T
OM
W
ATTS AND HIS PARTNER,
J
ACK
L
OVESEE, WERE IN THE
middle of lunch at the timber station on 5000, just east of the No. 7 raise. Usually by that time of day they'd be done and headed back to the stope to set off their rounds before calling it quits. Lovesee was still nursing his coffee. He offered his partner a cup, which Watts drank down in a few gulps.

“Where are you going?” Lovesee asked. “Back to work?”

Watts was impatient. “Well, it's about time, isn't it?”

“Hell, it's only ten after twelve.”

Watts hesitated a moment and started down the drift and back to work. He picked up his earplugs and gloves from the water line, where he'd hung them. Lovesee caught his partner's attention and pointed down the drift.

“What the devil is that?”

“It's smoky in the drift,” Lovesee said.

Watts thought someone must have blasted, but Lovesee wasn't easily convinced. He hadn't heard any explosion, and the smoke didn't look like powder smoke.

“I mean to go find out what's going on,” he said.

Lovesee left for the station and Watts resumed drilling, the roar of the compressed-air drill's steel against rock, shutting out the world. A moment later he saw a light bobbing back and forth.

It was his partner, Lovesee.

“Smells like a fire!”

Watts put down the jackleg, and the two disappeared down the drift toward 10-Shaft. The smoke grew heavier and seemed infused with a heavy, acidic odor. It smelled like a burning plastic ventilation line, like the fire that had burned at the Star Mine not long ago. They thought it was likely electrical in nature, but whatever its origin, the odor was unlike anything either man had ever smelled—thick, plastic, acid.

On the station, a miner repeatedly belled for the cage. Others just called out from the dark.

“Come on, get us out of here!”

Watts asked Bob McCoy if he knew what was going on. McCoy indicated he'd called the blue room and was told by a foreman to sit tight, help was on the way. But if help was coming, the men wondered, why was it taking so damn long? Several men began to strip self-rescuers from their cellophane bags and began to read how they operated. Watts and others left the station for clearer air near the grizzly, a thick steel grate with eight-inch holes, mounted over a chute that fed muck cars waiting below. The grizzlyman pounded the rock to a size that would fit through the huge grate. It wasn't easy. Sunshine rock was hard. Sometimes hammers bounced off without so much as leaving a mark. The effort helped prevent the chute from clogging, and, to a lesser extent, ensured that ore was of a manageable size for milling. A grizzlyman's job was hard physical labor, the kind of work that faced prisoners with no hope for parole. No man liked working the grizzly.

Yet on 5000, just then, the grizzly was a little bit of heaven.

12:15
P.M.,
M
AY
2
5000 Level

W
HEN THE CONDITIONS ARE JUST RIGHT, A STORM CAN ROLL
across a landscape without a sound. Clouds can fiercely and silently churn and turn the atmosphere into a Mylar shield stretched from the ground to the blackest sky. It can suddenly become so dark that it would be impossible to read a line of text, yet within the formation of the swelling storm there are tones of black, and amorphous shapes of varying darkness. The black shield can seem alive, like the sea on a moonless night. The smoke coming at the twenty-five men working on the 5000 level was like that when it rolled through the drift.

Delmar Kitchen and his partner, Darol Anderson, were fifty-one feet above the floor of the drift in a timbered raise, preparing it for mining. Water lines and air hoses snaked up from track level. They liked to keep the water flowing nonstop; it minimized the dust and cooled the air. Shifters didn't like the practice, so they'd come through the mine complaining that water was backing up and the pumps couldn't keep up with it. Whiz-bangs hooked to a compressed-air line were never turned off. Not by Kitchen, anyway. It was too hot to work without compressed air blowing air into their stopes.

Of the Kitchen boys, Delmar, with his black hair swept back so that he looked like a subterranean Elvis, was the softest of a pretty sturdy bunch. His twin, Dwight, and their older brother, Dewellyn, were the kind who thought it wasn't a good night around town if there wasn't a fistfight in Happy Landing's parking lot. Delmar had always hated going out with his brothers for that very reason. The fact that nine times out of ten his brothers would come out on top in an altercation offered minimal consolation. The single time Dwight didn't prevail ended his life. He was murdered in a bar in northern Idaho.