by Gregg Olsen
Of course, things are never that easy. The back end of the process of getting ore to the milling plant was momentous. Say a mine extracted 800 tons of rock per day. That would mean hoist crews would be pulling 100 cages a day. For 100 cage loads, men had to fill 300 cars. To fill the cars, men all over the mine had to drill about 4,000 holes, and cross their fingers that at least 90 percent of them blasted. The entire process, from working area to milling plant, took five days. Mine managers looked for gaps in the production cycle and found ways to patch things up so that the steady flow of ore was never impeded.
When sirens wailed up Big Creek Road, Brown, a South African who’d immigrated to the United States through Canada five years before, thought Sunshine had had an accident. All mines did, but that afternoon the commotion that followed the first siren never let up.
Shit, he thought, something’s wrong up there.
Someone told the golfers it was a serious fire, and Brown contemplated going to help, but he thought he’d be in the way. His telephone was ringing when he got home to Pinehurst. It was Gordon Miner, Hecla’s aptly named executive vice president. Miner was a tall man with an oversized personality. His shoulders practically brushed the door frame whenever he entered a room. He was also well connected in the industry, having served on several government-sponsored mining panels. He said that he’d been reviewing safety records, and Brown’s name came up as someone with helmet training.
“Get over to Sunshine,” Miner said.
Managers from rival mines—Bunker, Crescent, Galena, and Lucky Friday—came with their sleeves rolled up, ready to assist. So many came that if smoke hadn’t been hanging above Sunshine Tunnel like a painted-on tornado, it might have been a good time for some kind of impromptu convention. Within the group of dueling alpha males, however, were a dozen plans of attack and more than a good measure of disagreement. One look around, and Hecla’s Gordon Miner questioned whether Marvin Chase was up to the task of helming the rescue effort. He might know the mining business, but he knew little about the workings of the mine. Chase was gathering data with Walkup’s help, which only irritated the Hecla men. As stakeholders in Sunshine, they had a vested interest in what was unfolding. Not so much in the men, because it didn’t seem that many could be in any real danger. Theirs was a business concern: How long will the fire halt production?
Twenty-six
2:40 P.M., MAY 2
Coeur D’Alene Mining District
BY MIDAFTERNOON, ANYONE WITH A CONNECTION TO A TRAPPED man was en route to Big Creek. Women shoved aside housework and called babysitters. Cars dripping motor oil were abandoned on lifts. Bowling and dart teams were left shorthanded. Tom Wilkinson’s wife, Frances, heard about the fire while grocery shopping. She went to their Kellogg home, thinking Tom would arrive shortly and they’d have dinner. When she realized he was still up at Sunshine, she packed three-year-old Tommy into their green Camaro. Daughter Eileen, twelve, just home from Sunnyside Elementary School, slid into the passenger seat. Sunshine’s just rock, Frances told herself. What’s to burn, anyway? She dropped the kids off with family in Kellogg and Silverton, and drove up to Big Creek Road. And if there’s a fire, how hard would it be to snuff it out? What Tom Wilkinson’s wife didn’t know was that a fire aboveground was easy to fight, because it was easy to see. A fire underground was another story. First it had to be found. And even then, sometimes the only course was just to let it burn itself out.
Over in a tidy house in Pinehurst, Lou Ella Firkins, thirty-three, spread out the fabric for a black dress she was making for a Jaycees convention that she and husband Don were planning on attending over the weekend. Lou Ella had kept the stereo on from morning to afternoon as she pinned the tissue paper pattern, cut the fabric, and put the pedal to the sewing machine. More than just a pleasant break from their busy Pinehurst household with five kids, the shindig at the Boise Rodeway Inn was the zenith of their annual calendar. Don was past president of the local Jaycees, an achievement of which the gyppo miner was justly proud. At almost six feet, Don Firkins was a confident and commanding presence wherever he went—topside or in the mine. It was Lou Ella’s stepfather, shifter Virgil Bebb, who had referred his son-in-law to Sunshine’s hiring office. Bob Launhardt, filling in for Bill Steele, accepted Firkins’s application on June 20, 1967.
On Tuesday, May 2, she got up with him to get him coffee and fix his lunch—a tuna sandwich on bread that she baked herself. It was an early morning that almost wasn’t to be. The night before, instead of stopping off at the Big Creek Store as was his habit, Don brought home two big bottles of beer and drank them in front of the TV, feet up on his lounge chair and a happy look on his face. He had talked Gene Johnson into letting him and his partner work that Monday and Tuesday. Foreman Johnson caught them cutting out of work early on Friday.
“He told us,” Firkins explained, “we might as well take Monday and Tuesday off, too. I’ll see if I can get him to change his mind.”
Firkins left the house with a water jug, his dinner bucket, and a pack of Viceroys in a battered tin box.
When he didn’t return on Monday morning, Lou Ella knew Don’s persuasive personality had worked its magic.
Midafternoon on Tuesday, the Firkins kids began arriving home from school. Lou Ella looked up from her sewing and adjusted the volume on the stereo when her oldest daughter burst into the house and told her there was a fire at Sunshine. Lou Ella wasn’t completely rattled by the news. Don made no bones about the dangers of the underground, but he always said fires were the least of potential perils. Rock didn’t burn. Lou Ella went to the phone and called the Big Creek Store, but no one there had any news of her husband’s whereabouts. Later she and a friend drove to the mine. It looked bad. Pulling into the parking lot, she caught a glimpse of the family’s brown station wagon. Don hadn’t made it out. A plume of smoke rose from the mountainside and formed a shelf over the mine yard. It could have passed for a light fog, if it hadn’t smelled so bad.
If only Don hadn’t been so damn convincing, he’d have been home with me.
JOANNE STROPE REICHERT SPENT THE AFTERNOON PLAYING COUNTRY music records and puttering around the Big Creek house she shared with her common-law husband, Jack Reichert. For the first time, the pretty twenty-eight-year-old, with hazel eyes and her dishwater-blond hair ratted into a “bubble,” felt settled. After a year and a half of living on the creek, they had finally set a wedding date—July 3. The road to marriage had been complicated. The pair had met in early 1968 when Jack was Smelterville’s chief of police and she was coming off a bad marriage. Reichert had told her he, too, was unhappy in his marriage. He wanted something more. Reichert wasn’t classically handsome; his eyes were pinpoints and his ears were fins. All the same, Strope fell hard. Sometimes she even walked ten miles along the railroad tracks from her Wallace apartment to Smelterville on the mere chance she’d be able to see him.
Reichert’s wife eventually issued an ultimatum—either he dropped Joanne or she’d divorce him and take their four kids away. What Mrs. Reichert didn’t reckon on—what she couldn’t possibly have calculated—was Joanne’s remarkable perseverance. She was incapable of letting him go. In turn, Joanne hadn’t considered the resilient pull of a determined wife. The next thing she knew, the entire Reichert family—including Jack—had moved to Edmonton, Alberta. Joanne swallowed the entire contents of a pill bottle. After word about her attempted suicide made its way to Reichert, he telephoned to say he still loved her and wanted her to come to Canada, where he was working as a welder in the oilfields. She went. The pair went from motel to motel, from so-so to rat-trap, until their funds dried up. They ate cold soup from the can and slept in his car. When cold weather exacerbated the pain of Reichert’s varicose veins, he phoned pal Gene Johnson.
“Come back down,” the Sunshine foreman said, “and I’ll have something for you.”
The couple moved to Big Creek in 1970 with only their clothing and a guitar. Joanne immediately started using Reichert’s name.
Jack’s divorce, she believed, was only a formality. Life was good. When he strummed his guitar and played his favorite song, “Under the Double Eagle,” she was swept away.
On the afternoon of May 2, Joanne drove the new Buick Skylark they’d bought off Nickerson’s lot in Smelterville up to the mine. She had been oblivious to what had been happening up there. It surprised her when she ran into a traffic jam a hundred yards from the parking lot. She waited a moment and found an empty space and parked.
Sure are a lot of people waiting for the guys today, she thought.
She sat in the car, but none of the men came off shift. There were more people arriving in the parking lot, though. Lots more. It was strange. She asked a man waiting for his son what was going on.
“Fire in the mine,” he said, indicating the smoky tower.
“Oh God, no,” she said, really aware of the smoke for the first time.
Only a few weeks before, Joanne had been in the mine because Reichert wanted to show her where he worked. He helped her put on a hardhat and escorted her onto the cage, opening the gates as if they were on a date. She recalled how he’d switched off their lamps as they descended to 4400. It was so dark, and the motion of the cage was so disorienting, that Joanne didn’t know whether she was standing, falling, upright, or upside down. But she wasn’t frightened. Reichert made her feel safe.
LATE AFTERNOON, MAY 2
Sunshine Mine Yard
NO ONE KNEW FOR SURE WHO WAS TRAPPED IN THE MINE. SUNSHINE Mine manager Marvin Chase led a nervous discussion in front of the shifters’ shack; his face was suddenly pale and haggard. Some men ignored reason and insisted that most of the miners had made it out, but Chase put the number at fifty or sixty missing. The figure troubled Kenny Wilbur.
“How come you keep saying fifty men?” Wilbur asked. “It’s eighty or ninety, give or take a few.”
Chase looked over at Wilbur. “How do you know that?”
“I’m the cage tender. I know. I loaded them up every morning and sent them out. About half made it out.”
The mine manager went quiet. “Well,” Chase finally said, “I’ll look into it.”
The mine bigshots should have a better idea where their men are. A man’s life could depend on whether someone knew whether he was trapped or not, Wilbur thought.
Meanwhile, calls jammed Sunshine’s switchboard. Family members could only be told that all mine personnel were focused on the rescue effort, and the switchboard operators could not confirm exactly who hadn’t made it out. Sunshine was a gas-guzzling jalopy when it came to labor. The workforce was so erratic, so much in flux, that the mine kept more than five hundred on payroll. Three hundred were steady; the other two hundred were the ebb and flow of a workforce that seemed to turn over every two or three months. In the late sixties, when metal prices were good and manpower was relatively cheap, Sunshine kept men around as backup for workers who dumped shift. On May 2, 1972, 429 employees out of 522 worked on varying shifts.
Knowing exactly who was underground hadn’t been a pressing concern of Sunshine management until then. Many mines used brass tags to keep track of men. A tag dangling on a rack indicated that a particular miner hadn’t gone underground. Sunshine underground workers were assigned cap lamps and batteries, each numbered and stored at the end of the day in the lamp room to recharge overnight. A missing battery pack meant a man was underground. That system was seriously flawed—anybody could take another man’s lamp. The only safety net was the pocket-sized notebooks shifters carried underground. But those books were still underground.
Accountant and twenty-five-year Sunshine employee George Gieser went to the men’s dry to conduct a count. The big room was almost tranquil. Nobody was snapping towels. An unprecedented stillness filled the enormous space. Suspended from the ceiling were the first hints of who was missing—street clothes hanging in the hot, blowsy air. Hangers belonging to partners, sons, and fathers were frequently consecutively numbered—the missing came in pairs. Gieser put a pencil to his findings and came up with a number that fluctuated all day before settling at eighty-two. Kenny Wilbur knew even that number was wrong.
DON BEEHNER WAS DEAD, AND SAFETY ENGINEER BOB LAUNHARDT was running on autopilot. He felt emotionally numb as he moved through the afternoon, coordinating with the rescue teams. His mind could not let go of the astonishing carbon monoxide (CO) readings that he’d recorded—or at least tried to—on 3100. The miners who had continued working, thinking the smoke was nothing more than an inconvenience, were likely doomed from the onset. Unlike many lethal gases, CO is tasteless, odorless, and colorless, devoid of any telltale characteristics that make its detection possible. It kills by inhibiting the blood’s ability to carry oxygen. When CO is inhaled it combines with the oxygen-carrying hemoglobin of the blood to form carboxyhemoglobin. At that point, blood is unable to transport oxygen to the heart, brain, or any other organ, causing asphyxiation.
Because of its surreptitious nature, CO kills hundreds each year. In mild poisonings, a victim might recognize the symptoms of dizziness, headache, and nausea before it’s too late. Launhardt knew it was even possible for men to survive several hours in concentrations of CO of 100 parts per million (ppm). A man taking in that much might not even know he was at risk. At 600 ppm, however, noticeable symptoms are felt in about an hour. Headache and drowsiness are the most common warning signs, and unfortunately these are often ignored. Many a victim has reached for aspirin, when an open window was the true remedy. In some instances, low-level CO poisoning causes involuntary retching. At 1,000 ppm, however, the effects become severe. Victims dry-heave and stumble like drunks at closing time. Once the level reaches 4,000 ppm, death is inevitable, usually in less than an hour. Only quick thinking, clean air, and a prayer can save someone suffering that degree of exposure.
Launhardt wondered how it was that the readings could be so high. Why had no one any inkling? That afternoon he heard a story relayed by graveyard-shift employees who said they’d smelled smoke at shift’s end. Maybe there had been a warning, after all. Launhardt filed a note about the incident, and started a file that would grow by inches every day. He didn’t know whether the report was significant or just the result of the power of suggestion and the need for the miners to offer up something in order to be helpful. He mulled over the scenario. Did the scent of smoke and the fact that miners reported headaches indicate the fire had been smoldering and releasing CO for some time? He looked in the direction of the shifters’ shack. Several ambulances had lined up with back gates open. Stretchers and woolen blankets quilted the ground. All were waiting for men. By then he knew the fatality count was already high enough to be the worst disaster in the Coeur d’Alenes since 1936, when ten miners had perished at the Morning Mine. That mishap hadn’t been a fire, but a mechanical failure that occurred when a flat hoist cable rope broke apart where it had been spliced together, a practice long since abandoned with the advent of wire-rope cables. By far the worst mining disasters occurred in coal mines. Industry estimates had it that since 1900 more than 90,000 coal miners worldwide had died on the job. A 1942 underground fire in Manchuria left more than 1,500 dead. The deadliest on American soil occurred in Monogah, West Virginia, when an underground fire killed 361 in 1907.
The most devastating metal-mine catastrophe had occurred near Butte, Montana, in 1917. The North Butte Mining Company’s Granite Mountain Mine shaft caught fire when an assistant foreman’s open-flame carbide light accidentally ignited oil- and paraffin-soaked insulation material on an electrical cable. That fire took the lives of at least 167 men.
AFTERNOON, MAY 2
Interstate 90, West of Kellogg
TWO YELLOW BUSES CARRYING THE KELLOGG WILDCATS TRACK team were just outside of Coeur D’Alene, after losing a three-point squeaker against the Post Falls Trojans, when an Idaho State Police car, red light flashing and siren screaming, signaled them to the shoulder. Some kids thought one of the drivers was getting a speeding ticket—and that would have been cool.<
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“We need to get the kids back to Kellogg, back to the school,” the cop said. “Don’t send them home. The administration will make an announcement there.”
“What’s going on?” someone asked.
“There’s been some serious trouble at Sunshine.”
Twenty-seven
3:30 P.M., MAY 2
Big Creek Neighborhood
LIKE A POTENTIAL LOVER ON A BARSTOOL AT CLOSING TIME, Kellogg looked best, many thought, in the last hours of the day. The town’s smelter stacks and grimy storefronts were always a little unforgiving in the light of a sunny day. But at night, Bunker Hill operations blazed through the gauzy air of the smelter. Pete Chase was ten when his father, Sunshine Mine manager Marvin Chase, brought him from Seattle to check out the place they’d call home. The boy was awestruck by nighttime Kellogg. The smelter was a big battleship buried into the hillside, and floating on a sea of smoke. Nothing, he thought, could be cooler than that.
Although fresh from Boeing in Seattle, where he’d spent a decade working as an engineer and support manager for the aerospace company’s spare-parts division, Marvin Chase’s interest in mining was hardly transitory. From rockhounding on the modest apple orchard in eastern Washington where he grew up to earning a degree in mining engineering, Chase had always been deeply interested in all facets of the industry. Over the years, he’d worked at zinc, silver, and lead mines. At the Atomic Energy Commission, he’d served as chief of ore reserves for the government’s interests in uranium mines. Even so, to some around the district he was just “the Boeing man from Seattle.”
