by Gregg Olsen
AROUND 1:00 P.M., MAY 2
3100 Level
ROGER FINDLEY WAS FACING DEATH, AND THE SCARIEST PART WAS that he knew it. He moved in a herky-jerky, meandering fashion as he tried to navigate the length of the drift. A wet rag stayed fused to his mouth and nose. With each attempted breath, he found himself coughing and thinking how he was going to get out of there somehow. Had the men he’d seen sprawled out on the drift or in the piss ditch thought the same thing? Just past an abandoned drift with a bundle of ten- and twelve-foot timbers, a pinhole of light from a miner’s cap lamp pierced the blockade of smoke. A man had propped himself up against a timber, and was staring across the drift. When he saw it was a shift boss, Findley could have wept. He’d know what to do to get out of there.
“Hey,” he called out, “what are you doing?”
The man was mute. Findley aimed his light directly into the man’s face. His hazel eyes were an empty stare.
“Hey!” Findley tried again. A shudder of horror grappled with his overwrought emotions, chilling and escalating his own fear. The man was dead. Findley gulped for air, but there was nothing but rank-smelling smoke. He started to run. Another two hundred feet and he could go no farther. Though he hadn’t been in church in years, the young man sat on a timber and started praying. He’d set religion aside in favor of partying and carousing in the district—territory well trod by miners. But now Roger Findley was back before God, asking for a second chance. He had made it so far, it was almost as if the Almighty owed him. There could be no greater cruelty than to steal a man’s life when he’d fought so hard to live. He looked up to see the diffuse glow of a headlight and the firefly dots of three or more cap lamps. Someone was out there. It was a lovely dream as the lights drew closer. He got back on his feet and rocked his head back and forth. I’m alive.
Nineteen
AROUND 1:00 P.M., MAY 2
3700 Level, Jewell Station
THE RED LAMP ON THE BACKSIDE OF THE JEWELL PULSED LIKE A heartbeat. The Sun Con Switch light warned everyone to get off the tracks because a motor was en route to the station. Harvey Dionne and Paul Johnson watched for the motor, but none came. Some haze hung low in the drift, but Dionne didn’t consider it dense enough to be a real health risk. What had triggered the signal? He conferred with Johnson, who was back on the phone, and went to find out. It was quiet. No voices. No motors. Just the sound of his own labored breathing and his boots against the muck. About a hundred yards in, foreman Jim Bush emerged from the smoke. He staggered toward Dionne’s light, and their beams dueled.
Bush’s eyes were wild, and he all but fell into Dionne’s arms.
“Bob’s down!” he said, referring to his brother. His speech was oddly slurred, but there was no mistaking what he was saying.
Bush said he’d fought hard to bring him out, but he couldn’t even drag him to safety. But he had more bad news. Wayne Blalack and Pat Hobson had tried to help with his brother, but they were also overcome. The men had collapsed about five hundred feet past 5-Shaft.
“They’re all back there,” he said, “three down back there.”
Back on the station, Roberto Diaz, Richard Nickleby, and Ron Stansbury volunteered to help. With Dionne and Johnson leading the way, they took a motor down the drift. None wore a self-rescuer or even thought to bring one. The farther they went, the darker and thicker the smoke became. Time and space faded. None had any idea how far they’d gone when they hit something on the track, derailing the motor. Dionne jumped off and waved his lamp in the darkness. Was it a timber? His light followed a form on the track partially obscured by the front end of the motor. The foreman hurriedly traced the shape with movements of his lamp, but was unable to identify what it was until he saw the whole of it. It was Wayne Blalack. The thirty-five-year-old electrician had toppled onto the tracks and the motor had partially severed his leg. The father of two grade-school-aged kids was dead. Also down were Bob Bush and Patrick Hobson. There was no saving any of them. Fatigue, stress, and the effects of the smoke had tapped their strength. Each had keeled over in midstep. None had a self-rescuer.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. The group tried to get the train back on its rails, but it was impossible. They started to walk, but with each step, Dionne grew weaker. He put all of his concentration into moving forward, away from the smoke. When he turned around at 5-Shaft to see how the others were doing, Diaz and Johnson were gone.
KENNY WILBUR RETURNED FROM THE BOREHOLE TO THE STATION to find Dionne and Johnson had vanished. In their place were an old Okie miner, an anxious motorman, and an electrician named Norman Ulrich. Another motorman took a rescue crew toward 10-Shaft.
“They ain’t come back,” Ulrich said.
Ulrich, who’d been left to monitor the station phone, handed the receiver to Wilbur.
“Two minutes ago the guys were all talking and all of a sudden, nothing.”
Wilbur held it against his ear. Nothing. The cage tender wanted to believe that the lines had been cut by falling timber or maybe burned by the fire. But after listening more intently, he heard a muffled popping noise and it scared him. The lines were good.
“Anyone there?” he asked.
No answer.
Wilbur fixed his blue-green eyes in the direction of the drift, and the Okie shook his head.
“I’ve been in there. I ain’t going back in that.”
But something had to be done to get Harvey Dionne, the Bush brothers, and the other men back to the station, where they could breathe. It had been taking too long. Wilbur was hopped up. He was ready to do something—anything—to help the trapped men. He and Ulrich took a motor and went down the drift. Near 4-Shaft the smoke thickened to a boil, forming a more or less solid plug. It was as if the motor’s headlight had been swallowed. Ulrich stopped and fished out a pair of self-rescuers that had likely been discarded by escaping miners. He put one in his mouth.
“This is great,” he said, pulling it out. “Try it.”
“That’s okay. I’ll get another one.”
“No, you gotta try this one.”
The thought of tasting that slimy mouthpiece made Wilbur nearly gag, but the electrician was so damn insistent. The cager acquiesced.
“Yeah, great.”
Ulrich stayed put, and Wilbur started walking. Visibility was so poor that he couldn’t even see his feet. He stayed on the track line by sliding his boots at a blind man’s pace. Fifty yards down the drift, an epiphany hit him. What am I going to do when I get there? How can I pack a man out of here? He returned to Ulrich, feeling completely defeated.
Ulrich dismissed the younger man’s attempt at valor and announced he’d get the missing men himself.
“I don’t think there’s any sense in it,” Wilbur said, but the headstrong electrician ignored him and retreated into the smoke. He stared at the black wall. In the nothingness of what was being accomplished, time raced.
How much longer should I wait? Should I go after him?
And when he could no longer put up with idleness, Wilbur started through the smoke a second time. He knew that what he was doing was pointless, maybe even stupid. He slowly edged about twenty yards when he saw a feather of light coming toward him, moving with the cadence of a man’s hurried stride. Norm Ulrich had also given up.
A few minutes later, both men were on the cage to the surface with nothing to show for their heroics. Not long after, Wilbur saw Harvey Dionne out by the portal. But what happened to production foreman Bob Bush and shifter Paul Johnson? They’d gone into the drift and disappeared. Where were they?
MINE SUPERINTENDENT AL WALKUP DROVE HIS COMPANY CAR, A blue El Camino, over Fourth of July Pass to Big Creek as fast as the car/pickup crossbreed could go. He was new to Sunshine, having been hired in September 1971. At thirty-five, Walkup not only had a college degree from the school of mining at the University of Montana at Butte, but he had done his share of mining, and had a genuine love for the underground. His dad was a miner, and he knew that whatever
he’d do with his own life, it would be related to digging for ore. Walkup and his wife and son moved from Montana to Mullan and soon found that despite snowy winters that left the front windows of their house blocked of all sunlight, it was a pretty nice place to live.
Sunshine was head and shoulders above the others where Walkup had mined. He’d worked at some rinky-dink outfits in Montana where the owners didn’t have a pot to piss in and where miners didn’t know a pick from a shovel. Sunshine had financial resources. And despite the corporate backbiting, the company had mined more than 8 million ounces of silver in 1971. The plan for 1972 called for an astounding 10 million.
When he pulled into Big Creek, a turgid column of smoke was rising from the ventilation shaft, the likes of which Al Walkup had never seen. It filled the sky. He found his buddy, Jim Bush, in a small group near the shifter’s shack. Bush had taken in a lot of smoke and was in a daze. He was also sweating profusely.
He’s going to collapse any moment, Walkup thought. A couple of miners stood ready in case he fell. His words spilled out of his mouth.
“I tried to get Bob out, but I couldn’t,” Bush said. “There were bodies everywhere. Tried to drag him out.”
Walkup felt tears welling up. Bob Bush had been his mentor.
“Some guys that went in for my brother didn’t come out.”
“Jesus.”
The smoke was churning in the sky. No one had a plan. What could they do? The smoke had become an impenetrable barrier. Where did that leave them?
“Where are the others?” Walkup asked.
“Still down there,” someone said.
And then the kicker.
“The hoist room is down on 10-Shaft. No one’s answering.”
The men faced the portal. Its concrete header spelled out JEWELL SHAFT in big block letters, making the entrance resemble some kind of underworld monument.
Twenty
1:05 P.M., MAY 2
3100 Level
THE APPROACHING CLOUD REMINDED SAFETY ENGINEER BOB Launhardt of a column spewing from the chimney stack of an old steam locomotive. It rose up black and thick, and rolled down the drift. He estimated visibility at five feet, though it was tricky to approximate. The heavy curtain kept heaving. Launhardt held a Wolfe flame safety lamp and a Draeger gas detector. Looking a bit like a tall, thin, brass seaman’s lantern, the safety lamp indicated when oxygen was adequate underground. Launhardt noted that the flame slightly diminished in size, but there was still enough oxygen in the air to sustain life.
Next he prepared the Draeger to test for carbon monoxide. Developed by a nearly century-old German company, the Draeger detection tube had become an indispensable tool of mine safety, so much so that in the 1930s, mine rescue men were called “Draegermen” and were featured in the Superman comic book series. The Draeger came in two parts—a glass tube filled with chemical reagents and a small bellows to force air through the tube. The tube was etched incrementally from 1,000 to 3,000 parts per million (ppm) to measure the magnitude of the danger. Launhardt broke off the tip of the tube, put it into the chamber, and worked the bellows, passing about 50 cubic centimeters of mine air through the tube. Usually it took a minute or so for a dark stain to appear, thus giving a reading. Certainly it took a full air sample. Not this time. Launhardt stared at the tube, his light flashing against glass and smoke. With only one-fourth of the sample air through the chamber, the stain had gone beyond the manufacturer’s calibrations. The tube went completely black. The mine was poisoned with more carbon monoxide than his instrumentation could record.
As Launhardt warned his crew of the air’s ruthless toxicity, a light from a miner’s lamp approached from down the drift.
A moment later, Launhardt fished through the smoke and grabbed a hand and pulled. It was Roger Findley, the cager who’d prayed for a second chance after running from the chaos of the station only to find a dead man propped up in the drift. Shaky and near collapse, but alive, Findley was wearing a BM-1447. Launhardt felt a small surge of hope. More would come out.
The young man was in shock, but he rattled off the names of dead men he’d seen back at the station. He also had a warning.
“Be careful with the motor,” he said, “when you get back just before the crosscut. You’ll run over those guys. They’re laying all over the tracks.”
Findley needed medical care, and Zingler asked Beehner to take him topside.
“No, you go ahead and take him out,” Beehner said. “I’ll go in with Larry and Bob.”
“We’ll head for 10-Shaft,” Launhardt said, his rescue party now down to three. “But we’ll take it slow.”
Six hundred feet later, another light came down the drift. It zigzagged and moved with the trajectory of a ricocheting Ping-Pong ball, side to side and up and down. To the unfamiliar, it might have resembled a flashlight carried by an exuberant kid or a sloppy drunk. Launhardt knew it was a cap lamp. And its erratic tempo meant trouble.
A frantic voice called out.
“They’re all dead back there!”
It was Byron Schulz, the cager who’d escaped from the hoist room after Doug Weiderrick determined that he couldn’t make it out alive and fell to the floor. Schulz stumbled at the motor, his wet shirt and W-65 self-rescuer hanging at his side. He was crying, and his sweaty face was red from his frenzied run in the dark. His deep-set eyes were a study in panic.
“They’re gone! All of them,” he said. “I need oxygen!”
Hawkins reversed the motor, pulling away from a particularly tight stretch of track, and Launhardt jumped from the car. Schulz’s arms were flailing in desperation, and it seemed that he might grab at Launhardt’s face mask. The air was reasonably clear there, but Hawkins decided to err on the side of caution and kept his mask in place. Launhardt did the same. Hawkins remained on the motor because, from the way Schulz was carrying on, it seemed a good bet they’d be returning to the Jewell.
“I need oxygen. Get me oxygen, please,” Schulz said.
Launhardt told him that he’d be all right, but the words did little to soothe. He tried to hold Schulz’s convulsing torso, like a baby that couldn’t stop crying. The younger man struggled. He had been within a minute of dying, and fear had taken over reason.
Don Beehner got off the motor to help.
About that time, Hawkins’s light cord caught on a timber, forcing the ray of his cap lamp askew. His stomach roiled and his heart rate escalated. This looks very bad. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Beehner fiddling with the hose that ran from his McCaa pack, still not on his back but resting on the back of the motor.
“Let’s get a helmet on him, so he can get some oxygen,” Hawkins called out, his words muffled through his face mask.
Schulz was in that place halfway between passing out and being totally scared stiff. The self-rescuer plugged his mouth, stifling his words. His eyes were watery pools, with big dark pupils awash in fear. As Launhardt prepared a McCaa by clearing the hose and releasing the flow of oxygen, Don Beehner removed his own mask and held it over Schulz’s face.
“Here,” the nipper said, “breathe this. This is fresh air.” After giving Schulz a shot of oxygen, Beehner returned the mask to his own face. He repeated the switch several times.
When Hawkins saw that Launhardt was ready, he pulled the BM-1447 from Schulz’s mouth.
“You put the mask on his face,” he said.
“They’re all dead back there,” Schulz repeated.
Launhardt tightened Schulz’s head straps while Hawkins continued to brace him so he wouldn’t fall. Launhardt told Schulz to be calm. He hoped that the Wardner kid wasn’t in so much shock that he didn’t understand that they were trying to save him.
“Breathe through the apparatus,” the safety engineer said. “We’ll get you out of there.”
Launhardt turned around to tell Don Beehner things were under control, but he was gone.
1:05 P.M., MAY 2
Jewell Shaft Portal
FOREMAN HARVEY
DIONNE ASKED IF ANYONE HAD SEEN HIS SON. Many had, of course. Greg Dionne was the sole reason miner Bill Mitchell and others on his cage had escaped. Certainly, Harvey Dionne had a job to do, but he was also a father, and his son was missing. The Dionnes had been one of at least a dozen pairs of fathers and sons underground Tuesday, including the Kitchens, Delbridges, and Follettes. Besides worrying about his boy, something else found room to lurk in the foreman’s thoughts—the borehole on 3700. He wondered what had happened after Kenny Wilbur stripped the hole of its lagging stopper. Did it work? Did it allow for good air to course down to 4800? And where was Greg?
Twenty-one
1:08 P.M., MAY 2
3100 Level
LARRY HAWKINS’S LAMP, NOW HASTILY RETARGETED TO HIS LINE of vision, illuminated the rib of the drift. Nothing. Where was Beehner? He lowered his gaze to track level and, with the rapid swipe of his light, saw Beehner’s feet, legs, torso, and head. He was facedown in the piss ditch. Schulz was screaming again, and Launhardt was doing his damnedest to calm him. Hawkins knelt down and grabbed Beehner by the shoulders and rolled him over. He shifted his weight and pulled him upright; suction from mud threatened to pull off his boots. Hawkins knew there wasn’t enough time to get a helmet on Beehner.
What am I gonna do? There’s only one mask right here—and there’s two of us.
Beehner felt heavy and startlingly lifeless. Hawkins returned the mask to his own face, breathing in quickly and deeply. He’d just come up from the bottom of the ocean, and this was the only oxygen he’d get. This, he thought, could be my last breath. He positioned the mask on Beehner’s face. Blood had begun to fountain from Beehner’s nose and mouth, splashing the inside of the face mask. Hawkins held his breath. It’ll be all right. We’re gonna make it. And then Beehner’s body made a strange movement—a strong, then slightly fainter, twitch. A shudder, perhaps involuntary, possibly the man’s last fight to live.
