The Deep Dark
Disaster and Redemption in America's Richest Silver Mine
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- ¥2,000
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“A vividly detailed, heartbreaking tale about a dark, alien place, the people who loved working there and a town that has never been the same. He brings to life the hot, dirty, treasure-hunt environment where danger was a miner's heroin." —Seattle Times
“Investigation at its best.” —Tucson Citizen
On May 2, 1972, 174 miners entered Sunshine Mine in Kellogg, Idaho, on their daily quest for silver. From his office window, safety engineer Bob Launhardt could see the air shafts that fed fresh air into the mine, which was more than a mile below the surface. Sunshine was a fireproof hardrock mine, full of nothing but cold, dripping wet stone. There were many safety concerns, but fire wasn’t one of them. So when thick black smoke began pouring from one of the air shafts, Launhardt was as amazed as he was struck with fear.
When the alarm sounded, less than half of the dayshift was able to return to the surface. The others were too deep in the mine to escape. Scores of miners died almost immediately, but in one of the deepest corners of the mine, Ron Flory and Tom Wilkinson were left alone and in total darkness, surviving off a trickle of fresh air from a borehole. The miners’ families waited and prayed, while Launhardt refused to give up the search until he could be sure that no one was left underground.
In The Deep Dark, Gregg Olsen looks beyond an intensely suspenseful story of the rescue and into the wounded heart of Kellogg, a quintessential company town that has never recovered from its loss.
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The 1972 fire at Idaho's Sunshine silver mine was one of America's worst mine disasters, with 91 miners killed some in mid-stride by a "stealthy tornado" of smoke and carbon monoxide. True crime journalist Olsen (Abandoned Prayers) has the narrative chops for this story. His suspenseful account conveys the already hellish everyday atmosphere of the mine, the panic and chaos of the sudden catastrophe, the heroic efforts to evacuate, the ghastly deaths of victims, the (sometimes overdrawn) horror of their decomposing bodies and the ordeal of two miners trapped in an air pocket. But he goes further, embedding his chronicle within a social panorama of the macho subculture of the miners whose disdain for safety precautions may have raised the body count even as their hard-bitten sense of fraternity held them together in the emergency and of the larger working-class community that frayed and bonded in the face of the tragedy. Like Sebastian Unger's The Perfect Storm, Olsen's is a story of male workers engaged in a primordial resource-extraction occupation, battling natural elements earth, fire and (poisoned) air that overwhelm the ties of masculine solidarity. In his gripping treatment, stocked with vividly drawn characters, one finds a metaphorical elegy for America's doomed industrial proletariat. Photos.
