The Deep Dark (2 page)

Initially, most men working underground passed off the smoke as a motor fire somewhere down the drift where others were mining silver ore. That happened all the time. By the time smoke made its way through the mine's vast ventilation system, its source had usually been extinguished. No one worried about a fire getting out of hand because of the mine's notoriously wet floor and sodden rock walls. In some places the mine floor was a gritty layer of mud; in others, coffee-colored water stood ten inches deep. The very geology that brought the men so deep into the earth also lessened the worry of fire. Hardrock mines were blasted through mountain walls of solid metamorphic rock to reach slightly shimmering veins of gold, silver, or copper. Unlike coal mines, hardrock mines had no naturally occurring fuel to stoke a fire.

Men working up on the 3,700-foot level observed a slim channel of blackened air start to seep through vents used to feed fresh air into the mine. They attempted to seal it off. Working quickly, the miners piled up what they could find—wood, a steel drum, and scraps of the bric-a-brac that collected in the mine. Not all of them would get out on the hoist to the surface. Only a handful could make each trip, a thousand feet up, then a long walk to a second hoist, then up again to a tunnel toward daylight.

As the veil became a dark and lethal shroud, the miner who had been working near the welding kit bought himself some time. The others began to slump to their knees as if pins that held joints together had been yanked out. But he opened the valve and put a rubber tube into his mouth and sucked like a baby, consuming the contents of a tank of clean, smokeless oxygen. Even with limited knowledge about combustion, the man correctly deduced that there was something poisonous in the air. It couldn't be the smoke alone—there was so little of that. He drew in more oxygen as the canister hissed.

Like the petrified figures of Pompeii, a bunch of men were frozen in their places. A coffee cup rested on one man's knee, his body limp on a crate that he had used as a chair. Others were stiffened in their attempts to save their own lives. One fell running, his arms and legs stuck in full stride.

As darkness slowly devoured the shrinking space of the underground, the last man standing in that part of the mine threw his hardhat to the ground, its light still casting a thin line through thickened air. He watched his fallen friends as they began to die, their skin taking on a reddish hue as carbon monoxide replaced oxygen in their bodies. His blood pressure skyrocketed. Panic seized him. The others were dying or dead, en masse, from something no one could see. A group of motionless men lay by a telephone with a direct line to the surface. Even in death, one clamped the receiver in his hand. Down in the mine, where cap lamps were eclipsed by ever-thickening smoke, the miner took in measured gasps, certain he was about to die.

E
IGHT MONTHS AFTER THE FIRE, IN
D
ECEMBER
1972
, THE
U
.
S
.
Department of the Interior declared Sunshine Mine safe to reopen. The closure had cost the Idaho panhandle communities of Kellogg and Wallace more than $3.2 million in wages, and the country's mineral supply about $11 million in silver, copper, and lead. That was nothing, of course, compared with the human loss.

There were clues everywhere that something catastrophic had taken place. Most of the reminders came in the form of who was no longer there. Unclaimed street clothes still hung on hooks near the showers in the men's dry house. No one was sentimental about a greasy pair of Levi's and a frayed chambray shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps. But there were other signs, too. Deep underground in the mine, some of the rock was now coated in thick, black, velvety soot. In other places, rock with its foot-thick vein of high-grade silver and lead had turned molten and oozed like a lava flow, until it cooled into a thick, bubbly mass that resembled the shiny bark on a fallen cherry tree.

On one of the deepest working levels, there was another memento of the fire.

Near a battery barn, not far from the station where the men gathered to yak and wait for the ride up after shift, a miner noticed that when his cap lamp was turned off, the silhouettes of three bodies would reveal themselves in a ghostly glow. Johnny Lang, a stope miner and one of the men who'd worked on the rescue and body-recovery crew, heard about the eerie phenomenon and went to take a look. He switched off his light and stared down at the damp, smelly ground. And he saw them. Three men had been splayed out there, arms and legs akimbo like fallen soldiers caught unawares and shot in the back. The only part of the human forms that didn't reveal itself through the darkness was their feet.

Must be the rubber from their boots,
Lang thought.
It kept whatever leached out of them from pooling there.

The scene at once disturbed and fascinated. How could this happen? What was it in a man's body that would glow like that? Lang wasn't a biologist, but a miner with a high school education. He wondered if a man's body contained phosphorus. Or had foul secretions fed some kind of subterranean mold as the dead silently waited to be sacked up and taken from the mine?

This is the damnedest thing I've ever seen,
Lang thought.
It just isn't right.

He turned on his headlamp and left for a niche blasted out of rock that had been outfitted with a bucket for men to use as a toilet. Adjacent to the shit bucket was a drum of miracle lime used to cover excrement until the bucket was full and was sent out of the mine by the nipper. Lang scooped up a shovelful of lime and returned to the place where the three men had fallen on the day the mine coughed smoke through its miles of drifts and raises. He scattered the chalky powder. It fell like sugar off a spoon and melted on contact. He wasn't trying to erase their memory—which he knew could never be done. It was just creepy and wrong to leave the eerie traces of those three men in the sodden muck. He leaned his shovel against the drift wall and went back to his stope to blast out some more rock, going after more silver.

S
UNRISE,
T
UESDAY
,
MAY
2

Coeur d'Alene Mining District

M
ORNING RUSH HOUR IN THE
I
DAHO PANHANDLE WAS A STREAM
of primer-splattered bombers and gleaming pickups on big tires that pushed the cab halfway to the sky. All were driven by miners hurrying to get underground. Many rode together so their wives and girlfriends could use their cars to run errands during the day. Some smoked and nursed hangovers with coffee as they planned their day underground: how much they'd have to blast, and how much muck they'd haul out. Some of the best of them took the Big Creek exit between Kellogg and Wallace. Around a sharp curve on the edge of the Bitterroot Mountains, buildings congregated among the steep folds of stony terrain bisected by the rushing waters of Big Creek. A giant green structure clad in sheet metal was planted as though a twister had dropped it in on the edge of the parking lot. A few other buildings flanked the green monster, though none was nearly as commanding. On the other side of the creek was a backbonelike array of metal and wood-frame buildings that included a mill, dry house, machine shop, warehouse, hoist house, assay office, electric shop, drill shop, and compressor shop. The most visually pleasing edifice was the personnel office, a two-story, variegated redbrick structure with a peaked roof and a walk-up pay window. A sign proclaimed that the property belonged to the Sunshine Mining Company, but the biggest billboard faced the mine yard. In demi-bold letters it read,
TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIF
E
—
LIVE IT SAFELY
.

Sunshine has long been legendary, even sacred, among miners. Maine brothers Dennis and True Blake discovered what would become Sunshine in 1884 when a soft glint beckoned from an outcropping on the eastern ridge of Big Creek Canyon. Assaying indicated tetrahedrite, a superior silver ore, and not galena or lead, which was scavenged by other area mines. For a couple of decades the former farm boys worked underground by candlelight while mules hauled out ore and dragged it down Big Creek Canyon on skids. They quietly made a small fortune, calling their discovery the Yankee Lode. Later, in 1921, when they sold their stake to Yakima, Washington, interests, it was renamed Sunshine Mining Company.

I
T WAS ANOTHER DECADE BEFORE
S
UNSHINE CAME INTO ITS OWN,
when, at a depth of 1,700 feet, an ore vein of astounding breadth—23 feet—was discovered. In time, the mine would give up more silver than any other mine in the world, a distinction it would hold for decades. In addition to lead and copper, it was also a leading producer of antimony, a metallic by-product primarily used to harden lead. Sunshine's triumph was the result of the development effort led by the go-for-broke, risk-taking owners from Washington State. Most silver mines followed veins from outcroppings that eventually became stringers and petered out. Outside of the Coeur d'Alene Mining District, it was a rare operation that extracted ore at depths greater than 1,000 feet. Not only did Sunshine have viable ore below 1,200 feet, but in the decades that followed, crosscuts chased high-grade ore bodies all the way to the 5600 level. Sunshine by itself was far richer and produced more silver than all the mines on the fabled Comstock Lode
combined.

Idaho mines shared more than just their luminous underground Dagwood sandwich of lead, silver, and zinc. Labor strikes, chronic absenteeism, and pumped-up wanderlust made the workforces somewhat fluid. Tough and experienced miners moved freely among Galena, Lucky Friday, Star, Silver Summit, Bunker Hill, and Sunshine. But even as itchy-footed as miners could be, every man had his home mine. It was the mine to which he knew he could always return.

A
ROUND THE TIME
B
OB
L
AUNHARDT, FORTY-ONE, BACKED HIS
'68 maroon Chrysler Newport out of his Pinehurst driveway, the sun had risen, leaving the sky awash in luminous Maxfield Parrish hues. The men of Sunshine's graveyard shift were leaving the mine. As safety engineer, Launhardt made it a practice to get underground as early as possible—before the day shift rode down to their working levels. He liked to get a head start on the day. Tall and lanky, Launhardt had dark, wavy hair that he combed back with a slight swoop. Black-framed glasses made him look like a schoolteacher, or maybe a middle-aged Buddy Holly. After a five-year absence, Launhardt returned to the district in February 1972, bailing out of another job going nowhere, wanting to reconnect with a part of his life where he felt worthwhile. He was quiet and thoughtful, the kind of man who got lost in a crowd, yet Launhardt believed he stood out because of his fierce dedication to the safety of the men of Sunshine. No one questioned his passion for his work. It was apparent in every move he made. Many, however, found it difficult to connect with him on a personal level. Guys he'd known for years never even got his name right. They called him Bob
Longhart.
Part of the distance was the result of his personality, but it was also his status as a salaried man. Miners saw Launhardt, other managers, and office workers as outsiders. The fact that Sunshine's owners were now New Yorkers who hadn't blasted a round in their lives didn't help. Yet managers and bean counters were necessary. Silver mining was, after all, a business—and a dangerous one, at that. As safety engineer, Launhardt was there to make certain that each day every man who went into the mine came out alive. That involved working with national and state labor agencies and the U.S. Bureau of Mines (USBM) to ensure that safety regulations were in place. It meant seeing that equipment was up to date and miners were properly trained in evacuation and rescue techniques. Guarding miners' lives was a crucial job because so much could go wrong. Government statisticians and mining district undertakers frequently acknowledged mining as the most perilous job
on or under
the earth. Some assumed the safety engineer's position existed solely to meet government regulations, mitigate the risk of union complaints, and dodge civil lawsuits. Some mine managers considered it little more than a necessary nuisance. The workers themselves understood that there were ways to avoid injury, but they dismissed many of those measures. Many considered risk and danger essential to the job's mystique. Launhardt, a bespectacled Goody-Two-shoes among his peers, believed that if he could get men to think before they blast, to wear safety glasses, to cool it on the horseplay, just maybe he could save a life. His biggest challenge in 1972 was the same as always:
How do you convince men that accidents are unacceptable and unnecessary?
For Launhardt, who had once studied to be a Lutheran minister, promoting safety became as important as preaching the word of God.

There were many reasons for his vigilance, and all were damned good ones. Sometimes men fell down shafts so deep that nothing remained but bloody clothes and serrated splinters of bone. Rockbursts or airblasts, however, were the most feared of district hazards. Those occurred when the stone ceiling exploded under pressure and sent slabs of rock the size of camping trailers down to pulverize men into biological splat. Other times, it was the floor that gave way. The lucky ones were buried alive until someone could move two tons of rock to free them. Although Sunshine had its share, the district's Galena Mine was considered one of the worst, if not
the
worst, for rockbursts. Anyone who'd worked there longer than a month experienced the sudden and frightening reaction of rock giving way to pressure. Old hands knew that as long as the rock was talking—making characteristic popping and grinding noises—they'd be all right. When it got quiet, that was the time to think about moving to a different location or taking lunch early. Whenever it was quiet underground, look out.