More than numbers: The dead of Idaho's Sunshine Mine
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The Deep Dark
Gregg Olsen, 336 pages, hardcover $24.95. Crown Publishing Group, 2005
The statistics of Idaho’s worst mining disaster
are still startling, even more than three decades after that
fateful day in 1972, when an underground fire broke out in the
Silver Valley’s Sunshine Mine: Ninety-one men dead, 77 women
widowed and 200 children left fatherless. The oldest victim was 61,
the youngest 19. More than half of the men who died from carbon
monoxide poisoning in the silver mine were military veterans. The
hardscrabble valley would never be the same.
Gregg Olsen
brings those grim numbers to life in The Deep
Dark. Never romanticizing the hard-working, hard-drinking
culture, Olsen introduces readers to the families in the tight-knit
Coeur d’Alene mining district. The men who died that day
included 38-year-old Don Beehner, who, before he hired on with
Sunshine, held "a succession of jobs with the mines, a paving
company, or the railroad, interspersed with the births of two sons
and two daughters."
Unlike coal mines, metal mines are
not supposed to burn. The wood timbers in the Sunshine were soggy
and should not have been capable of sustaining a fire for the many
days that the Idaho fire raged. The exact cause of the fire, Olsen
writes, remains unknown, but he describes one plausible theory. The
polyurethane foam Rigiseal — developed in part by Dow
Chemical and sprayed in the mine "to stop leakage and channel air
flow" — was highly flammable, and had been banned in
underground British mines since 1962. Six years before the Idaho
fire, in 1966, the United States Bureau of Mines conducted its own
test and also found the chemical a fire hazard, but oddly, took no
action. "The only proof," Olsen writes, "that polyurethane foam was
recognized as dangerous was that after the Sunshine fire, no
American mines used the product underground."
Small
comfort for the 91 miners and their families.
