by Gregg Olsen
“I don’t need one,” she said. “My husband is going to walk out alive.”
Later, Belle Flory went looking again for her son’s young wife. When she found her, she pulled a bottle of sedatives from her purse.
“You might commit suicide,” she said, giving her a single capsule.
Myrna was distraught, but she wasn’t about to kill herself. She was sure her husband was alive. Even at eighteen, Myrna knew what love was, and how devotion could frequently be paired with gratitude. Ron had saved her in some ways, taking her from unwed motherhood to a complete family; he was a father to Tiger. He’d given her a fresh start.
Myrna swallowed the sedative and settled her thin frame into the backseat of her mother-in-law’s car. She surrendered to the sleep that her body, though stoked with caffeine, needed as much as air.
Thirty-two
NIGHT, MAY 2
Woodland Park
WAVA BEEHNER UNDERSTOOD THAT A NUMBER OF SUNSHINE miners were in serious trouble, but thankfully, Don wasn’t a miner. His silence, she reasoned, was because he was helping with the rescue. That was the explanation of why he hadn’t come home, why he hadn’t even called. She told the children everything would be fine in the morning. When the youngest, Matthew, drifted into slumber, he thought he’d see his dad at the breakfast table. His dad was the center of their family.
Don Beehner held on to every nickel and saw no need to spend money on anything he could get for free. Sometimes he took his sons to the mine yard to scavenge timbers for their woodstove. In the summer it was huckleberries that brought sons and daughters into the Idaho mountains with their father. He kept a close grip on household funds. When the family prepared its weekly shopping list, he held veto power. When his wife and kids wanted a telephone, he balked, so Wava took a job cleaning the bowling alley to pay for one herself. Daughter Nora considered her dad tighter than bark on a tree. Any extras, like bikes, were purchased with Gold Strike trading stamps. Beehner’s tightwad tendencies came from the usual place. Living in Lead, South Dakota, his dad had been a miner and a boozer, a combination that ensured instability and lean times.
Because he’d been poor and didn’t want that for his family, Don Beehner always moonlighted. In the mid- to late 1960s, when Beehner was a motorman, he had Wava and the kids making ammonium nitrate for her uncle’s explosives company in Wallace, Trojan Powder. Trojan supplied mines with blasting agents it manufactured from fertilizer. The Beehners worked afternoons and weekends in a string of old semi trailers set up to produce the explosives. It paid well, but it was very dangerous. Once, eight-year-old Matt got his hand caught in an auger and lost an index finger.
Around 1970, Beehner came up with his latest and best moneymaking idea yet. That was when he leased the historic Wallace Hotel, above the Wallace Corner where he tended bar five nights a week. The Corner was a schizophrenic place—a bar and soda fountain with a sort of convenience store housed in an obviously out-of-plumb 1890s brick building. On one side was a rack of car and porno magazines. One miner bought every skin magazine a man could flip through for a one-handed read—more than $100 each month. Beehner knew every face that came into the place. He knew whose check was good and who’d ask to carry a tab a bit longer.
Wava didn’t want to leave Woodland Park to live in the hotel, but the kids thought it was cool to live downtown, and she didn’t have much of a say in anything. The parents took the office bedroom, the girls had a room assigned to them, and the two boys slept in whichever rooms weren’t being used that night. Matt liked it. What he didn’t like—and neither did his mother—was all the work they had to do. People constantly told Wava they adored her husband, and how much fun he was to be around. Living in the shadow of a man whom others adore is seldom easy. There was even a time, about a year before the fire, when Wava Beehner felt physically exhausted and emotionally abandoned. She not only managed the hotel books, but she also had to fix all the niggling problems that went with running the place. Don got to stand around, pour drinks, and be charming. Wava felt she needed to take a stand. Accompanied only by Matt, then eleven, she went on strike and returned to the little green house in Woodland Park.
A month later, Don Beehner did a little soul-searching and reunited his family.
“I’m glad you’re back,” he said. “But you’ve been living with me long enough to know I’m not going to apologize. We’ll just change things,” he said.
It was the only time Wava stood up to him. And if it was the only time she ever won a battle, it had been the right one to win. They’d never been happier.
10:50 P.M., MAY 2
Silver Summit Portal, Osburn
LUCKY FRIDAY’S ART BROWN, THE SOUTH AFRICAN WHO’D BEEN golfing that afternoon, arrived at the Silver Summit portal with his helmet crew. Brown was ready to get going toward 10-Shaft to reach the Sunshine men. His team finished setting up its fresh-air base and was ready to roll, but the green light wasn’t coming from the rescue command center. Two hours later, Brown’s frustration turned to anger. Why the fuck aren’t Chase and Walkup giving us the signal to get down below to get the men out? Every minute counts. As Brown viewed it, if there were guys down below, as he knew there had to be, then what needed to be done had to be accomplished in minutes and hours, not days. He could feel the urgency of the situation deep in his bones, but not a word had come from Sunshine’s side.
“Come on, let’s get on with it,” he said. “Let’s start establishing new fresh-air bases and get these men out of here.”
But the word from Sunshine was to hold off. Finally, hours after they’d loaded up a supply of USBM-procured breathing apparatus, cases and cases of cardoxide, O2 and CO indicators, and oxygen tanks for the miners trapped underground, the signal came.
“Go in.”
But after they’d sealed off a bulkhead on the Silver Summit side, deadly carbon monoxide readings hadn’t abated. Neither had Brown’s patience. Seal off the drift and move on had been the plan. But it wasn’t working.
“Jesus,” he said, “if this stuff is coming up this raise, and we’ve sealed it off, it should clean this up.”
One of his team examined Sunshine’s map and shook his head.
“Well,” Brown said, his voice muffled by the shield of his mask, “where the hell is it coming from?”
No one had a clue.
A half hour later the source was discovered—a raise omitted from the mine schematic was forcing more smoke and carbon monoxide into the Silver Summit drift.
With each small failure, precious moments elapsed. The maps were not only outdated, they were out of scale. Brown was frustrated and wasn’t afraid to say so. He wondered why Sunshine management didn’t get some men to help who knew the old workings of the mine. He immediately thought of Jim Bush. The Bush brothers practically ran the mine.
“If Bush were here,” Brown said in a cultured accent that belied his miner’s getup, “he’d say, shit, there’s an old raise that goes up here. Not on the map. It goes off to the left and the end.”
LATE EVENING, MAY 2
4800 Level, Safety Zone
FLORY AND WILKINSON HUNKERED DOWN AND WATCHED THE LIGHT of the motor bear down on nothingness. Water trickled through the piss ditch, its flow thick and white, resembling glacial runoff. No voices, no rumbling of muck cars across grit-covered tracks or the pounding sound of the grizzlyman sending fractured chunks of muck down the timber-lined chute to fill a car. And yet it wasn’t silent. The sound of air, a slow, overheated dog’s panting, passed through the drift. Sometimes they could even hear or feel the subtle movement of rock as the earth relieved its pent-up pressure, shifting its innards and sending out a shudder.
Sitting there wouldn’t get them out. They got up from their lagging to scout around the drift toward the borehole to see what, if anything could take them to the surface—either by their own efforts or by whatever the crew topside was doing to get them out. The walk was more than three thousand feet, but unlike the walk to the east and
10-Shaft, the air blew a little cooler on their sweaty and greasy faces. It felt right. It was the place to go for help. The other direction was smoky and lethal. Off to the side of the pocket by the borehole was a green canvas bag holding a field telephone, sitting there like a cherry on a dirt sundae. Flory grabbed it, only to find the line was quiet. He double-checked the cable. It looked good. It ran up from the phone up the borehole before disappearing.
“Hello? Hello?”
He tried to call again, but nothing.
“Phone’s no good,” Flory said.
The two looked up into the darkness, the light from Wilkinson’s lamp barely making a difference. Flory grabbed the one-inch cable and tugged. He pulled harder, and it seemed solid. He suggested that they could climb up the cable and get to 3700.
Wilkinson thought it was about the dumbest idea he’d heard.
“You’ll never make it,” he said. “You can’t climb out one thousand feet on a cable.”
Flory yanked it again, testing the cable to see if it could bear his weight. Wilkinson reminded him that the borehole was full of loose rock.
Flory remained undeterred. “That’s why I’ll take a steel,” he said.
“What happens if we get up there a hundred feet and the cable breaks?”
Of course, Flory knew they’d die. At least where they stood in the muck on 4800 they had beaten the odds. They were the only ones alive on their level. Flory let go of the cable, and the pair returned to the pocket. Maybe they could make it to 10-Shaft—and, provided the smoke wasn’t bad there, one or both could climb up the manway that ran alongside the service way, and the two compartments for cages. The manway had ladders.
Again, Wilkinson’s cooler head prevailed. He remembered something about the last time the two of them had been there.
“There were a lot of broken ladders, some missing, too.”
Flory knew he was right about that.
Climbing out the stopes through the connecting raises was the only other possibility. Missing ladders weren’t so much a concern there, but the toxic smoke was.
“The air might be trapped in dead-end stopes,” Flory said, dismissing his own plan. “We’d get up there and get overcome.”
As far as either knew, there weren’t additional self-rescuers on 4800. And even if there were, neither was sure how effective they actually were. Flory had struggled with three of them, and Wilkinson’s tongue smarted from being burned by one.
They had been trapped less than a day. It was nightfall topside, but underground the world was the same as it had been at noon. Down there, there was no sense of time.
IN SMELTERVILLE, BOB LAUNHARDT’S FATHER-IN-LAW, GROCER BILL Noyen, logged the day’s events in a diary, a practice he’d followed since childhood: “A major tragedy hit the district this morning when fire broke out in Sunshine Mine. We understand Bob brought out one guy and is being kept real busy in the rescue work, but so far we’ve had no word from him.”
Thirty-three
DAWn, May 3
Pinehurst
BOB LAUNHARDT PUT HIS HEAD ON THE PILLOW IN THE BASEMENT bedroom he’d been calling home since February. His eyes stayed open, though he fought to keep them shut. Half of the mine’s day shift had made it out, leaving something in the neighborhood of eighty to ninety men trapped underground. Launhardt could trace most of Tuesday with nearly minute-by-minute precision, but other sequences were muddled by the swiftness of the unfolding disaster. His natural tendency was to keep the world ordered and neat. Everything had its place. Nothing was separate; everything was linked in some way—directly or tangentially. But he couldn’t draw connections right then. There was too much to think about. Too much to worry about.
It was dawn and a little cloudy when Launhardt dressed to return to the mine. News directors and editors outside the district led with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s death, but to the people of Kellogg and Wallace and throughout the mining industry, there was only one story that really mattered. Launhardt churned through what he’d seen and what he’d heard had gone on underground. Schulz and Findley insisted self-rescuers had outright failed. Others reported that there hadn’t been enough of them. What happened?
Sunshine stocked two types. The primary model in use since the 1960s was the BM-1447, dubbed by safety people a “half-hour” self-rescuer. For short durations, in relatively light smoke of the type caused by a burned-out ventilation fan, it was considered more than adequate. BM-1447s didn’t act as rebreathers, which would allow a man to carry on with whatever he was doing until the smoke cleared. They were only intended to buy a man enough time to exit the mine or secure himself a place of refuge. The mechanics of the unit were simple. As smoky and gassy air passed through a hopcalite bed, it oxidized deadly carbon monoxide and converted it into harmless carbon dioxide. But the by-product of that lifesaving process was heat. Launhardt likened it to heat generated by a car’s catalytic converter. Among the escapees on May 2 were men with second- and even third-degree burns on their lips and mouths.
The W-65, the “one-hour” self-rescuer, which had a heat exchanger, was a substantial improvement. Sunshine had three dozen of them. In a big mine like Sunshine—one in which it took almost an hour to get from the smooth concrete floor of the portal to the muck-encrusted working areas—a heat exchanger could make the difference between life and death.
Launhardt drove up to Big Creek, his eyes tired from the sleepless night but his body and brain jarringly alert. Cars were parked everywhere, and people were standing all over the yard. Closer to the portal, an encampment had grown. The waiting people occupied cots, huddled in blankets, and drank from Styrofoam cups embossed with the indentations of their own gnashing teeth. And whenever the sound of the double-drum reverberated, or when a weary eye detected movement, hopes were buoyed. Someone’s coming up. Someone’s getting out. So far, it had only been a cruel tease.
Additional USBM men had already descended by early morning, as had a contingent from the U.S. Department of the Interior, its managing agency. Stan Jarrett, sixty-nine, director for metal and nonmetal mine safety, was among the second wave of bureaucrats to be briefed by Al Walkup. He candidly told them Sunshine was lacking in trained men, equipment, and firefighting knowledge. Further, Walkup admitted they still didn’t have a decent count of how many men were trapped. One number, however, he did know and kept secret—twenty-four were confirmed dead. Also present was Idaho’s governor, Cecil Andrus, a balding man with a stripe of wavy hair combed straight back. Andrus wasn’t like those political and media freeloaders who’d arrived with expense accounts and designs on getting something out of the unfolding catastrophe that they could use later—a good story or political clout. Andrus, who came with a small contingent of aides and government delegates, rightly understood the crucial role mining played in northern Idaho and in the American economy. A big fire, he knew, could devastate the district.
Meanwhile, Gordon Miner continued to exert his ever-increasing influence. Hecla’s executive vice president felt the USBM men were out of their depth. He was certain that most had never seen the likes of what was happening at Sunshine. He told Jarrett that his men were in harm’s way, and that if something weren’t done, the disaster might claim some lives of rescue workers, too.
“Stan,” Miner said, “I don’t want them down there. They don’t know this mine.”
Jarrett protested, but Miner remained undeterred.
“We’re in a crisis,” he said, “and your guys don’t want to be in any crisis.”
There was no winning against Miner, and Jarrett probably knew that. They compromised. A USBM man would accompany each rescue team. The backseat role the USBM accepted was far different from the position it assumed at a coal-mine fire. Many saw that as an admission as much as a concession.
6:00 A.M., MAY 3
3700 Level
JOHNNY LANG HAD FADED BLUE EYES AND THE BROKEN NOSE OF A boxer, which he proudly earned in his family-owned gym in the small town of Cut and Shoot,
Texas. Lean and with a powerfully built upper body, Lang always enjoyed the one-on-one aspect of a fight, and to his disappointment, he didn’t have the right stuff for a pugilistic career. He never went as far in the sport as a cousin, a heavyweight titleist who once fought Floyd Patterson. Lang still liked the challenge of pitting himself against another man, but in his mid-thirties his adversary was not another man, but the load of ore he intended to gyppo. Lang’s biceps were still bundled up tight with muscles, and he could last a good round in the mines.
When he arrived to join the Bunker Hill hotshot helmet crew, he was told there’d be two five-man teams to explore the 3700 level—one group was primary, the other a backup. Lang, the sole Sunshine man of the group, waited while the first team emerged from the mine to replace oxygen canisters and inspect rubber tubing for wear. Burlap and wood were stacked on the timber truck, along with a supply of polyurethane foam insulation. The insulation came in two heavy canisters that, when sprayed together, created a foamy material that expanded into cracks and turned solid. Crews advanced as they foamed sections of the bulkheads or around air doors that shouldn’t have leaked in the first place. The flow from compressed-air lines kicked the smoke back out of the mine.
Lang assumed he’d be in the next group, but the crew chief told him to stay put.
“Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “I want to go in. What the hell good are we as a backup crew if we don’t have any experience? We don’t even know what’s going on in there.”
“We’ve worked together for a long time,” the crew chief said. “We don’t want anyone to panic in there.”
