The Deep Dark

by Gregg Olsen

  Those were fighting words to the ex-boxer.

  “Listen, pard,” Lang said, twisting a term of familiarity into an epithet. “I don’t panic! And I’m going with you on your next trip in.”

  Twenty minutes later the former boxer inched his way down the drift. It was tranquil. There was nothing to hear but the heaving of their own lungs and the sound of the McCaas as they delivered oxygen in a world without any. Roped together and feeling their way along the rails, rescue crewmen brought in plywood and polyurethane foam spray to seal around leaky air doors and bulkheads. With each crosscut sealed, Lang and crew pressed on, worrying that they might actually be creating a tomb for a man who had found refuge in a forgotten pocket of the drift. But just beyond the 08 Shop, they stopped. No one could see a damn thing. It was as though they were up against a heavy drapery that was pulled farther away just as they reached to open it. Lang removed his lamp from his hardhat and held it below his waist, sending a beam along the wet track line. Lang couldn’t draw a reference point about exactly where they were. Maps were useless. The only frame of reference that seemed relevant was the location of track switches.

  On the return to the Jewell, Lang watched a USBM man monitor air quality. Oxygen was less than 1 percent and carbon dioxide was at 19 percent. Carbon monoxide levels were still beyond the test range of detector tubes—the USBM recorded 20,000 ppm. Sunshine’s underground atmosphere was unlike any recorded in the history of the bureau.

  Topside, Lang sought out the doctor.

  “How long could a guy live in that heavy stuff?” he asked.

  The grim-faced physician shook his head and conceded that a man might be able take in two breaths.

  “But you’d never know you took the second one,” he added.

  6:00 A.M., MAY 3

  Cataldo

  THE GLASS IN FRONT OF MYRNA FLORY’S FACE WAS STIPPLED WITH A jeweled spray of condensation. It took her a second to sort out where she was and what had happened. She was in her mother-in-law’s car. Her eyes focused on the world lit by the dawn. It wasn’t the mine yard. There were no Sunshine families surrounding her. The car was parked in front of her mother-in-law’s house in Cataldo. Myrna went inside, her face red with anger.

  “Why did you leave me in the car? Why did you take me away from the mine? You know I wanted to be there.”

  Ron’s mother looked over her coffee mug and remained cool. Her mouth was a straight line, and her eyes hardly blinked.

  “I’ll take you back after breakfast,” she said.

  “No. No, you won’t.” Myrna’s voice broke again with emotion. “You’ll take me back right now.” No one was going to push her around. “Now!”

  She made two quick decisions right there. No pills. No more trusting her mother-in-law.

  In Osburn, with no word on the fate of his father-in-law, Louis Goos, or of his partner Bob Follette’s son, Bill, Howard Markve returned home from the doctor’s office. He was sure the fire had burned out his lungs, but the doctor’s diagnosis of respiratory trouble was “chemical bronchitis.” He’d told Markve to get some fresh air. Larry Hawkins also saw a doctor who told him about the symptoms of CO poisoning. Hawkins began to wonder if those guys sleeping and “kicking back” on 4600 had already begun to succumb to the deadly gas. Everybody seemed bone-tired that morning. Was that a warning sign they’d missed? Had they already been poisoned?

  Thirty-four

  6:30 A.M., MAY 3

  Sunshine Portal

  CHASE, LAUNHARDT, MINER, AND A DOZEN BUREAU OF MINES MEN took up residence in the second-floor rescue command center. It was a mix of men who were both united and at odds with one another: the locals versus the outsiders. Each needed the other’s lapse, negligence, or incompetence to be the reason for the disaster. Crew leaders from Sunshine and Silver Summit rescue operations also joined in to share reports of progress—or lack of progress. Art Brown blew a gasket when the Sunshine team reported they’d been working in the opposite direction.

  “What the hell are we doing?” He pointed at a mine schematic. “This is the end of your fresh-air base. From now on we need to go in the same direction.”

  They don’t even know their own mine, Brown thought.

  Engineers unfurled more schematics of Sunshine’s ventilation system—to fight the fire they had to know which way the airflow traveled. At Sunshine, fresh or intake air came in the same way the men did—through the Jewell. From there it traveled eastward the long, dark mile to 10-Shaft—primarily coming in on 3700, though some came in on 3100. The intake air dropped down 10-Shaft to the working levels. This wasn’t a magic act or even God’s work; air doors and booster fans pushed the fresh air on its way. Exhaust air traveled through vertical ventilation raises to 3400, the main exhaust airway of Sunshine. From 3400, air flowed west to No. 3 shaft, then on up to 1900 level. Once there, it went out through the old incline shaft old timers called the Big Hole. The 3100 and 3700 intake air moved easterly to 10-Shaft. And between those two intake airways was the 3400 exhaust airflow moving westerly. It was a battle of pressure and flow; the exhaust airway naturally sought the path of least resistance, like any force of nature. If, for whatever reason, the airflow was stymied, the bad air remained in the mine and recirculated.

  Even before USBM investigators put a pencil to any hypothesis, Launhardt was concerned about the ventilation scheme’s role in the disaster. From the accounts of those who’d escaped, he surmised that crews on 3700 had had about twenty minutes before the deadly smoke hit the drifts on 3100. Hoistman Don Wood, Launhardt believed, was in dire straits before miners on 3100 even knew they were at risk. Wood was dead before he could hoist anyone. Big as Sunshine was, with its hundreds of miles of workings, on May 2, Launhardt saw it as a very small space, one without retreat.

  The fatal flaw of Sunshine’s ventilation system was the location of the pair of 150-horsepower fans upstream from the 3400-09 ventilation bulkhead. After the bulkhead burned through, it released smoke, gases, and carbon monoxide that were pushed out by the 300 horsepower of the combined fans through the mined-out 09 vein. From there, the cloud must have made its way through a sequence of ladders to the 4000 level, and west to 5-Shaft. Once there, it moved upward to the main intake airway on 3700. Then the smoke stormed toward 10-Shaft and, from there, down to the production areas where most of the men were. The entire ventilation system had been short-circuited.

  If we had only shut off the fans on 3400. That, Bob Launhardt knew, could have put an end to recirculation of toxic smoke. There had probably been enough time, too. Arnold Anderson and Dusty Rhoads were standing by, waiting for the order to pull the power. But the command never came, and both were presumed dead.

  Most believed it was Gene Johnson who had the primary authority to shut them down. Certainly, Johnson had the greatest understanding of the ventilation scheme and how the electrically powered booster fans maintained pressure and moved air through the mine. He knew the route of the airflow because he double-checked each level weekly to ensure that the system on which they all depended was in working order. A small fall of rock or a damaged bulkhead could upset the flow. Beyond that, Johnson was without question the alpha male of Sunshine miners. Love him or hate him, all men respected him. Whatever Johnson said, there’d be no argument.

  There was only one problem, and Chase considered it quietly. Maybe Gene didn’t know he was in charge that morning. No one told him that he was. And everyone else was at the stockholders meeting in Coeur d’Alene.

  The office staff also wondered what had prevented getting the men out sooner. The difficulty in reaching Chase or Walkup at the shareholder’s meeting certainly didn’t expedite things. Some thought that Harvey Dionne should have gone ahead and made the evacuation call earlier, but had been paralyzed by the residual impact of the Tom McManus years. If a man made the wrong decision, and there wasn’t a real danger, it could cost him his job.

  “If nothing is wrong, who are they going to thank? You know who they’re going to bl
ame,” Betty Larsen told a friend.

  Something also puzzled the clerks, accountants, and engineers. Just how long had the fire smoldered? Larsen recalled an industrial claim submitted by a miner a day or two before, complaining of dizziness. Had that been a warning?

  The personnel office stayed at capacity all morning as rescue workers lined up for physical exams, and reporters commandeered telephones and desks. Silvery-haired and in his mid-fifties, personnel director Jim Farris tried to maintain control of what had once been his sole domain. The former Wallace High School star quarterback was used to putting on a game face and getting the difficult things done. He needed to. He had the worst job in the industry. It would fall on Farris’s shoulders to contact a family to say their husband or son had been injured or killed. Some saw him as the district’s Angel of Death. Whenever he telephoned or stepped onto someone’s front porch, hearts sank to the floor. He never brought good news.

  Betty Larsen burrowed her way through the crowd and sat down at her desk, and Farris abruptly handed over a handwritten paper to type. The heading took her breath away:

  MISSING MEN BELIEVED TO BE TRAPPED

  A hundred names, and Larsen knew every one: a man from her church; a couple of pairs of brothers; shift bosses who had been there forever. As she typed, she could barely see for the tears in her eyes.

  TESTOSTERONE AND HOT TEMPERATURES MADE SKIRMISHES AND hand-to-hand combat common among Idaho miners. There’d also been sabotage, bombings, and vandalism when district mine owners and workingmen tried to settle union contracts. So when Stan Jarrett and the USBM first suggested the possibility of arson, most Sunshine men saw it as loathsome opportunism; the USBM, they believed, had to come up with some reason to blame the miners for the fire, to blame anybody but itself.

  While there were arson-related fires in other mines, Sunshine miners would never knowingly endanger the lives of their brothers. They’d dangle a man over the open shaft by his ankles as a prank, but they’d never actually try to kill him. Launhardt knew of one arson case in which a disgruntled miner had set a fire, but that was in Mexico’s Delores Mine. The chimney effect of a fire in the shaft had accelerated the blaze into a firestorm. Thirty-five men had died.

  Among Sunshine men who felt the fire was deliberately set was Marvin Chase. Sunshine’s manager thought it could be a prank that had gone tragically awry. Miners did things like that, not to be malicious, but for fun. The timing of the fire was the reason for some of the suspicions. In the eyes of some miners, the bigwigs were off at their annual meeting, whooping it up at a resort in Coeur d’Alene. Why not embarrass management with a little fire? Chase could buy into the idea that a miner wanted to cause a little trouble by igniting a small fire. But quickly—and unthinkably—it went out of control and sent a toxic cloud throughout the mine.

  Another plausible theory making the rounds had a mechanic welding a broken grizzly on 3400 near 4-Shaft, starting the fire when a spark flew into the old workings, where it smoldered. Another rumor had it that an old miner on 3400 had dropped a cigarette. Because the fans on that level blew like jet engines, a man had to seek refuge in the old workings to smoke or take a nap. That’s what this old miner did on a routine basis. Some thought he’d found someplace and bedded down with a smoke.

  Launhardt certainly cared about the cause of the fire, but what baffled him was the volcano-like eruption that had sent the smoke so quickly through the mine. He’d never heard of a fire like that. No one had.

  TIME UNKNOWN, MAY 3

  4800 Level

  RON FLORY AND TOM WILKINSON HUNKERED DOWN AND WATCHED the smoke shimmy down the drift. It expanded and contracted like a living and breathing being. The toxic cloud had stolen the breath of seven miners on their level and carried on, rolling and boiling, taking and killing. Hunting for more. Wilkinson knew he and his partner were alive because of each other. Flory had saved his life by bringing him to fresh air. But Wilkinson had also saved Flory’s life. Flory knew that if his partner hadn’t fallen victim to the deadly air when he did—when others could see there was a problem and still take action to save his life—neither man would have lived.

  Tom Wilkinson had been a canary.

  Thirty-five

  AFTERNOON, MAY 3

  Portal

  WITH THE PRECISION OF A DRILL TEAM, MINERS HAULING SIX bodies on a trio of timber cars rounded the tracks to the supply warehouse to the right of the portal. The procession was as discreet as possible. Each body was cloaked by an Army blanket. Marvin Chase wanted dignity and order to reign where he knew emotions were raw.

  “We don’t want to see pictures of this in the paper tomorrow, either,” he said.

  Onlookers could see that the timber trucks weren’t ferrying rescue equipment. One of the swathed figures revealed a miner’s hat. Worn black rubber boots rimmed in yellow protruded from under the twisted fabric. Rolled into the warehouse, illuminated by overhead lighting, the dead appeared as though each had been dipped in a dark stain. The color surprised Keith Dahlberg, the Kellogg doctor enlisted to pronounce them dead. He’d been taught that CO poisoning flushed a victim’s skin with a Kool-Aid red hue. What tainted the skin of the dead was far darker, resembling the darkest tan overlaid with second-degree sunburns. Rigor mortis had turned their lifeless bodies mannequin-stiff. In a few hours the muscles would relax. One of the six was Bill Hanna, the husband of the woman he had consoled at the hospital. Don Beehner was also among that first group.

  When the rumor of more fatalities became undisputed truth, it sent a wave of anguish that grew to a tsunami. And the news became even worse later that day. Chase, dressed in a cardigan with a striped tie, spoke to reporters while an office assistant distributed a news release that revealed rescue crews had counted more bodies. All had been discovered on 3100. The official total had finally been updated to twenty-four.

  “We still have hope that the other men are alive,” he said.

  Chase said rescue crews would advance the fresh-air stations on 3100 later that day. In doing so, they’d be able to send men down 10-Shaft to the lower levels, where there was the best chance for survivors.

  “If they stayed down where they were supposed to be working, at the 4800 level, they should be alive,” he told the press.

  Spokane reporter Jerry McGinn knew the fatality figure the mine was giving out was a lie. He told UPI the number of fatalities was twenty-nine and going higher. He put on his Red Cross armband and passed out blankets and commiserated with women waiting for their husbands. Many were near collapse, and McGinn offered whatever comfort a twenty-six-year-old reporter could provide. But he had a job to do, too. McGinn took a big chance and found a place to sit inside the shifter’s shack. The shifter’s shack was no more than its name implied—a metal building with windows punched out on each of its four sides. The shack’s most important piece of equipment was a wall phone facing the portal. It was the primary link to the rescue teams. McGinn tried to be invisible while he listened to everything relayed from underground. As he sat there, however, he became furious.

  This is bullshit, McGinn thought. The mine is screwing those people out there. Screwing them twice. First, their men are dead. Second, they are sitting there with hope for no reason.

  McGinn left for a bathroom stall, where he pulled out a streamer of toilet paper and began to write down everything he could remember. Later he phoned in his notes to the UPI desk in San Francisco, and the news service pushed out his story. McGinn continued to play both sides as an undercover reporter and a Red Cross worker brandishing blankets. The crowd had swelled to at least three hundred, maybe more. Some of the women had no family but their men trapped underground. And from their folding chairs facing the portal they were doing all they could to hold it together. He could see that for some the only connection to everything they had—love, finances, everything—was a life in peril underground. Whenever he could grab a phone—once even in the shifter’s shack—McGinn read his toilet tissue report. All the while, the number
of dead men climbed.

  IN THE FORMER NIGHT WATCHMAN’S HOME IN WOODLAND PARK, Wava Beehner waited for news. She hadn’t heard from her husband nor had a call come from the mine. The kids had gone to school, and she stared at the telephone that Don had refused to pay for because it was too expensive. She wished it would ring and put an end to her useless speculation. Since I haven’t heard, she thought, he’s okay.

  A hoistman’s wife, a friend of the Beehners, knocked on the door. The woman’s face was puffy and red, and she trembled when she spoke. Her words poured forth without a breath.

  “Oh, Wava,” she said, her arms outstretched. “I’m so sorry, Don’s gone.”

  Wava was unsure she’d heard right. The look on her face made it clear.

  “Both of our husbands are dead.”

  Wava ran to the phone and dialed the mine and said that a friend had just told her that her husband was dead.

  The mine operator told her that she couldn’t verify anything.

  “You can’t tell me? Is he or isn’t he?”

  “Can’t say, either way,” the operator said.

  Wava wasn’t sure what to think, what to believe. She wanted the hoistman’s wife to be wrong. She had too much at stake. She had loved Don Beehner since her family moved to Wallace from Nevada. The winter of 1948 certainly hadn’t showcased the charms of the district—certainly not to a Nevada girl who didn’t own a winter coat. Snow was four feet deep that winter. Creamy drifts buried cars, and residents with outhouses were forced to dig tunnels through the snow to take care of business. At twelve, Wava didn’t know it, but she had arrived home. A big part of that was because of a crush she developed on her brother’s new friend, Donald Gene Beehner. He was so handsome standing in a haze of cigarette smoke—blue eyes and a lazy smile. He wore his jeans tight and his white T-shirt with sleeves rolled up to show off double-dipped biceps. To increase the girth of his legs, Beehner liked to run halfway around Wallace—backwards—wearing heavy logging boots. He was a denim-clad god. Like most kid sisters, Wava suffered in silence and waited. When the sandy-blond-haired Beehner was at the Chamberses’ one evening, he turned to her as she dried dishes and melted her heart like a birthday candle.