The Deep Dark (21 page)

The partners returned to their air pocket, their personal safety zone. Flory didn't say a word about it, but he was scared that the rest of the crew on their level was dead.

“What the fuck are we going to do?” he asked.

Wilkinson, who now realized how close he'd come to dying, could only echo his partner's thoughts.

“How the hell are we going to get out of here?” he asked.

B
ACK ON THE SURFACE, AT THE LANDING OF THE STAIRWAY TO THE
dry, Sunshine carpenters had built a warren of cubbyholes to hold miners' dinner buckets while they went upstairs to shower after shift. That day it was nearly empty. Most of the crew, at least the first cage load from his level, should have been out by then. They had a head start and, being on 3700, had the advantage of the man train to take them that mile to the Jewell. Bill Mitchell noticed only three other buckets. He put Waldvogel's bucket away and went up the stairs. He plugged in his lamp battery, hung his diggers on his basket hanger, and pulled the chain to send it up to the ceiling. Only two nozzles on the multihead shower pillar were running. The men showering all wondered the same thing. Where was everyone? One of the guys showering was from 4600, and said he'd seen a couple of cages go up ahead of his crew.

“Where are all those men?”

Mitchell knew that the shaft crew had evacuated, too.

“They should be out by now,” he said.

“Yeah, that's what I was thinking. What's the deal?”

“Maybe they got hung up on 3700.”

One guy speculated that there'd been a wreck.

“Pretty smoky down there, maybe two motors hit head-on.”

By then some miners from 4800 had arrived, but still none of the crew who had been on Waldvogel's cage. Mitchell dressed and went to the office to call his wife to say he was going to stay at the mine to help with the rescue. Mitchell saw a salary man at the portal and asked if he could put his diggers on and go back down.

“I can run the cage,” he said.

The offer was declined, but Mitchell decided to stay near the portal anyway. Waldvogel needed his inhalers when he got out. Judging by all the smoke coming out of there, he'd need them in a bad way.

E
SCORTED FROM THE MINE BY ONE OF
L
AUNHARDT
'
S HELMET
CREW,
Roger Findley found his way to the Sunshine personnel office. He was in shock, but he wanted to let his wife know he was alive. He also had another, far greater, concern. His older brother, Lyle, a thirty-year-old father of two boys and a girl, hadn't made it out. He was seen last on 5200.

“Does he have a chance?” Betty Larsen asked when he told her.

“No way,” Findley coughed out. As far as he knew, he had been the last one out of the mine. “And I wouldn't have made it if they hadn't thrown me on an ore car.”

Larsen sat quietly while Findley was on the phone with his wife. She wanted to cry. The nineteen-year-old miner's words pierced her heart.

I can't imagine how she feels,
she thought.
How would a woman feel if that was her husband calling?

2:00
P.M.,
M
AY
2

3100 Level, Jewell Station

S
AFETY ENGINEER
L
AUNHARDT TRIED TO COLLECT HIS FRAYED
wits. The station was wall-to-wall men; each looked down the drift, wondering what would come next.
Who
might be coming next? None were prepared to do anything. Many were without hardhats and lamps. None had any breathing devices. All they could do was talk about what they
should
do. Some came down from the warehouse and the carpenter's shop, and some from the mill. Many probably hadn't been underground in months. Some had never entered the mine before.

Launhardt checked the detector tube on the Draeger. It gave a positive reading for a slight amount of carbon monoxide. All at once, the usually reserved and laconic man found a boom in his voice.

“You guys get the hell out of here and back up the shaft, now! We
all
have to go up now. We're going to have a repair crew start at the surface and go in on each level. Need to seal where air's leaking.”

O
N THE SURFACE BY THE
J
EWELL, CLEAR AIR BLEW OVER
HIS SWEATY
face, chilling Kenny Wilbur like the abrupt gush of a slammed freezer. A cluster of men swarmed around. All had the same questions. They wanted to know what he'd seen underground. Any sign of a partner? A best buddy? A brother? Wilbur could offer nothing to console them. It was so smoky down there, he couldn't be sure who he'd really seen.

Over at the shifter's shack, the bosses, hoping that it would lessen smoke in the drift, wanted someone to go down to open air doors just off the Jewell Shaft on 3700.

“I'll go back down,” Wilbur said, without really thinking. As he saw it, he was obligated to go to 3700, since there was no cager there. It was his job. Another cager joined him for the quick trip. In a few minutes they'd wedged open the doors. The station was eerily quiet. On the way up, they stopped on 3100. Wilbur noticed the cars and the McCaas that Launhardt and his rescue team had left behind. They had probably done whatever they could and were out of the mine. A moment later, Wilbur was topside.

By the portal, Byron Schulz stirred from unconsciousness. The reprieve from his nightmare was over. Voices faded in and out. He could barely recall a moment after the frantic seconds of yelling when Don Beehner fell in the piss ditch. But he could not shut out what he'd experienced back at the 3100 station; each horrific image was etched in gruesome detail. Someone gave him a lungful of oxygen and loaded him into an ambulance.

E
ARLY AFTERNOON,
M
AY
2
Men's Dry House

N
O ONE KNEW WHO WAS STILL UNDERGROUND.
T
HE MINE
'
S TIMEKEEPER
attempted to track who had exited the Jewell, but the effort was wasted. Some who made it out returned underground to help with the rescue. The best record of who
started
shift that morning was in each of the shifters' logbooks—slim, pocket-sized steno pads they carried in their hip pockets. All of those were still deep in the mine, because only a few shifters had made it out.

With the exodus from the mine, the scene in the men's dry should have been chaotic. Instead, an unprecedented stillness held the cavernous room. Buz Bruhn was soaping up in the shower when partners Markve and Follette got there. Markve was still hacking and looked pale. Bruhn looked over and gave his head a shake.

“Say,” he said, “I'll tell you right now, Sunshine's gonna fool around today and kill somebody!”

Randy Peterson's cage load of guys, his company of men, showered in silence. Steam edged the ceiling, and water pooled over the slow-moving drains. As he dressed in his street clothes, Peterson processed a checklist of those he'd seen on the cage. With one exception, all had made it topside. He hadn't seen Dusty Rhoads, the fifty-seven-year-old mechanic who worked more for the fun of it than for the money.

Sometime around 2:00 p.m., Peterson returned to the portal, where he found men hovering over two supine miners strapped in rescue baskets. Someone administered oxygen, but it didn't seem to be working.

“Open it up!” a mechanic called out to a miner by the oxygen tank.
“Open it up!”

Two men carried Bob McCoy, the man who'd lit up a smoke and fallen, to the shifter's shack. His face was crimson, but his skin was icy. They stripped off his wet clothes and wrapped him in a blanket. He also needed medical attention. Metallurgical accountant George Gieser expected more trouble to emerge from the mine, so he phoned the community ambulance service. He also told employees to stick around if they drove a station wagon or camper; they might be needed to transport men to the hospital. Central Mine Rescue, whom Launhardt had sent for, had set up four first-aid stations. Each had oxygen units to take care of the deluge of choking miners.

Peterson encountered Floyd Strand, the electrical foreman.

“Where's Dusty?” he asked.

“He's still on the 3400,” the foreman said. “And we've lost communication with 10-Shaft.”

A
MAN MAKES HIS OWN CHOICES, AND THOSE DECISIONS SET THE
stage for whatever happens in his life. Bob Follette had never wanted his son, Bill, to go underground at Sunshine or any other district mine. It was supposed to be temporary, a way to earn some money to finish his college education. Some of the men underground had been there out of necessity; they had families to feed. But Bill, twenty-three, didn't fall into that category. He was married, a college kid who was bound to teach and coach basketball at some little high school in north Idaho. He had less than a year to finish his degree, but the lure of the money that came from mining sent him on a detour. Hunting, fishing, and playing around on one of the district's dazzling blue lakes was too compelling for a young outdoorsman. His father understood. Some of the best moments of his own life had been spent with his sons, hunting in the Bitterroots. The Follettes came home once with one deer lashed to the front and another to the back of their VW bug. They ate venison for a year.

The image of his son, as he'd seen him that Tuesday morning, stayed with Follette. The thin six-footer had been fighting a cold. His skin was chalky and his eyes rheumy.

“You don't look so good,” the father had said as they waited for the cage. “I wish you wouldn't go down today.”

“Oh, I'll make it all right,” the young man had answered. He knew that his partner, Louis Goos, couldn't get a decent guy to fill in. A partner's missed shift could knock a hole in their entire week.

Bob Follette was stoic when he called home. He doubted his boy would come out alive, but he didn't say so to his wife.

2:45
P.M.,
M
AY
2
3700 Level, Jewell Station

W
ITH 3100 A VERITABLE DEATH CHAMBER,
B
OB
L
AUNHARDT
KNEW
that the only other route to 10-Shaft was by 3700. Three new volunteers suited up. One, a squirrelly fellow who shaved about every two weeks, Stanley “Talky” Taylor, was a volunteer fireman in Wallace. Taylor, twenty-six, knew fires took on lives of their own, crawling through houses and sneaking into bedrooms, filling them with smoke while kids and family pets hid under beds. He knew smoke could hang in layers and filter through the thin spaces between doorjambs. But conditions on 3700 were totally foreign. The smoke was thicker and darker than a nest of burning tires, and its oily plume literally churned through the workings of the mine. Taylor was astonished.
What could be burning that would make a smoke like that?

Launhardt's team advanced on the seldom-used 5-Shaft. Launhardt checked for carbon monoxide. The shaft was lethal; no one could survive without respiratory protection. That wasn't the worst of it. Launhardt studied the airflow and, even in the heat of the mine, felt a chill on the back of his neck. The drift's intake airflow was carrying the black smoke eastward toward 10-Shaft. The poisoned air was pushing back to where the men were waiting for help.

When the mine's safety engineer and the group came across the lifeless forms of fallen men, they knew there was nothing they could do for the men down deep, barricaded in drifts and waiting. They retreated from the mine.

Launhardt did his best to maintain focus, but the madness of the situation kept coming back to him.
Rock doesn't burn.
Sure, every man, woman, and child old enough to spend a silver dollar knew that basic truth. That made hardrock mining eminently safer than, say, coal mining. Coal, after all, was mined because it was a
fuel.
Launhardt, Chase, Walkup, and the others all knew that. But they also knew something else. There was a silent forest underground, too. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of board feet of wood had been used to shore up the mined-out areas—the old country, as miners called it—for decades. Rock bolts and steel mats had reduced the amount of wood brought underground by far, but in decades past the mine had been filled with timbers.

Launhardt thought back on the Draeger and how it went black in an instant. How could that be so? And if timbers and gob had somehow ignited in the dank recesses of the mine, how was it possible that the enormity that was Sunshine underground be filled so quickly with so much carbon monoxide?
It couldn't be a wood fire,
Launhardt thought. A wood fire underground in a wet mine couldn't rage like the one that was sucking the life out of this mine.
What was burning?

M
INER
A
CE
R
ILEY SHOWERED AND DRESSED AS QUICKLY AS HE
could and went looking for Joe Armijo. Riley called out his partner's name, but no response came. At the shifter's shack, he saw men huddled in conference. Among the group were safety engineer Bob Launhardt, a shaken Jim Bush, and graveyard shift foreman Ray Rudd.

Riley asked if rescue crews were making progress.

“There's nothing more we can do,” Bush said.

Riley's blood heated up. “Get your goddamn ass down there and get that man,” he said, referring to Armijo. Launhardt was white. Bush, who'd just lost his forty-five-year-old brother, was in worse shape.

Riley didn't care about any of that. Not just then. “It's your fucking job!” he said to Bush.

The foreman didn't blink, but it was Launhardt who spoke up.

“We need to start building a seal,” he said, “level by level.” He told Rudd that they should start on the 500 level and work down to seal off drifts connecting with the Jewell. He was concerned about old crosscuts and corroded bulkheads—anyplace where seepage probably occurred.