Sunshine Mine Disaster
May 2, 1972
Godspeed, Gentlemen
Megan Wagner, Northern Arizona University
On May 2, 1972, the Sunshine Mine experienced a devastating fire. Claiming the lives of Ninety-One men, the Sunshine Mine Disaster is considered one of the worst mining disasters in Idaho’s history.
The fire at the Sunshine Mine, a silver mine near Kellogg, Idaho, was first reported at about 11:40 pm after an electrician smelled smoke and warned the foreman. The foreman telephoned down to the mechanics, who were in a work room, and asked them to see where the fire was burning. When they decided to head to another tunnel to search, they found it so filled with smoke they could not enter; when they moved toward an adjacent tunnel, they found it was also filled with smoke. Simultaneously, the shaft foremen requested had the warning system activated, alerting miners to the presence of gas, and sent oxygen masks into the mine. Most of the men became aware of the fire when the smoke entered their workplaces, which they retreated from by moving toward another part of the shaft. There, miners hoisted men up to the surface. This continued until about 1:00 PM when the miner manning the lift was overcome by gas and smoke. Men on the lower levels were stuck, and while many tried to make it to where men were being hoisted to the surface or at least barricade themselves against the gas, most died from carbon monoxide exposure.
While the surviving miners and surface workers mounted their own rescues, they also called in trained rescue teams. In order to reach the bottom of the mine, rescuers and workers needed to use mine hoists to travel up and down the shafts, and that required repairing the electical system. However, with so much gas and smoke, the crew could work only for as long as their oxygen tanks lasted, about two hours at a time. With so little time, rescuers chose to focus on finding survivors rather than removing the bodies, and they forced themselves to walk past and over the bodies of asphyxiated miners every time they made the trip to the repair site. In total, eighty escaped the mine, only two survived the disaster while inside the mine, and ninety-one died.
The exact reason and location for the fire is unknown. Because the fire damaged walls and support beams, the mine partially collapsed, burying areas that might have provided clues. The Sunshine Mine’s high profile fire significantly impacted discourse surrounding the safety of hard rock mining. This disaster prompted Congress to pass the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977, improving safety standards for hard rock mining. For example, the act required mines to provide more ventilation and to create plans for guiding surface workers’ response in the event of another disaster. The act also stipulated mandatory disaster training so all miners knew what to do and where to go in an emergency, and it required miners have personal oxygen tanks with them at all times. Overall, the act created a safer work environment to help prevent similar disasters in the future.
Les Wood Shares His Thoughts
Day 1 – Thinking about the Memorial.
Each chair had the miner’s name on it and a miner’s helmet with its lamp lit, and as each man’s name was read, a child would extinguish the lamp. It was very well done. I was impressed.
I got to talk to Bob Launhardt and Stan Taylor after the ceremony. Bob was the Director of Safety for the mine, and Stan was my dad’s shift partner, and my dad taught Stan how to operate the hoist. I’d never met either man before, and I remember, as a boy, my dad talking about Stan, but the upshot of this is that, after 37 years of different stories and conjecture and investigations and lawsuits, I finally got a reasonably straight story about what happened to my dad down there.
Stan wanted to work my dad’s shift that day, but the foreman told him no because Stan had too much overtime that pay period to justify another time-and-a-half shift when Dad had no over time yet that week. According to Stan, Dad had agreed to switch with him, but the foreman said no. So, they worked their regular shifts.
Bob had just been in the No. 10-Shaft area (3700 ft. drift – ‘drifts’ are horizontal, ‘shafts’ are vertical) talking with my dad because they were hoisting some equipment into the mine and wanted to know how that was going. As soon as he got top side, the alarms went off. He missed the explosion part of the whole thing by shear minutes. Bob grabbed his breathing apparatus along with some others and headed back under ground. He got to the No. 10 Shaft area again, and almost all the men had died because the explosion happened right there. It was evident to Bob that Dad was indeed the first man killed. He found my dad about 30 feet from his hoistman’s station.
Stan came on the scene right after Bob as he just happened to be on the mine yard that day (he doesn’t remember exactly why) and was the only hoistman trained on the use of the breathing apparatus. He grabbed his breathing apparatus and caught the next cage down and came to about the same conclusions as Bob did. Stan also ran into my dad’s body. He told me he literally tripped over it in the smoke and dust.
In talking to Stan, they’d been smelling wisps of smoke coming out of that stope where the explosion occurred. He said. “You’d think you’d smelled smoke, and try to follow it but then it would seem to disappear as quickly as it came.” Also, they weren’t concerned because “…hard rock mines can’t burn.” Right.
The first thing Bob said to me when I met him was that he had known my dad quite well and my dad was a good guy. That really meant a lot. I asked him what he thought of the reports that my dad had “abandoned” the men below him. He said that was “pure bullshit,” and there was absolutely nothing my dad could do. He said the smoke and gas was so thick that my dad couldn’t see the controls to operate the hoist if he had been physically capable of doing so. Bob was surprised that my dad wasn’t killed instantly and that he had enough sense to try and get away from the area.
From here on Stan’s and Bob’s stories are reasonably close, and they both agree and disagree with the official reports from the scene. The first thing to know here is that all of the ventilation air to the lower parts of the mine flowed through the 3700 ft. level drift and down the No. 10 Shaft. The air flowed right over Dad’s space. The mined out area where the initial explosion occurred was facing directly toward my dad’s hoist operator’s station which was, again, in the flow stream of the ventilation air. When the initial explosion happened, it blew noxious gases right at my dad and into the air stream headed to the lower reaches of the mine. My dad was hit with the initial wave of poisonous gas and carbon monoxide. There was no way in the world he could have stayed at his station to get the guys below him up, and if he could have, he’d have brought them up into a death trap. According to Stan and Bob’s thinking, he probably left his station to try and clear his head like he was supposed to, but there was so much gas and smoke in the air, that he got sick to his stomach and collapsed dead. He was the most likely the very first man killed that day. Bob actually watched my dad die, I think. He mentioned something to the effect that when he got down to the 10-Shaft area, my dad was holding onto the drift wall and vomiting, and then fell down. I think Dad died that very moment
Stan was the man that identified my dad’s body and put it into a body bag. He said that from his first look at Dad that first day that his face was soot black from the smoke and gas from the explosion, and by the time they took his body out of the mine 2 or 3 days later, he noticed that his clothing was covered in the soot from that explosion and subsequent fire.
According to both Bob and Stan, they were certain that nobody had survived after about the 3rd or 4th day. In their mind’s (especially Bob’s), it had changed from a rescue operation to a recovery operation. Bob said it was an absolute miracle that the 2 miners that came out of the mine alive after several days did so. He was dumbfounded.
I’d heard accounts that Dad had tried to get men out, and that he’d abandoned his station. I was puzzled for years by this and didn’t want to believe the second account. My dad was a WWII combat veteran who had seen action all across Europe as an infantryman. It didn’t sound like something he would do. Now that I have the story from men who had been there, I understand why Dad had to leave his station. There is no way he could have operated it with smoke and gas blasting right at him. That’s why the “Chippy” hoist that my dad operated shut down almost immediately. No one could get to the operator’s station to run it. They had to try to use the ore or “double drum” hoist to try to get the guys out, but with the smoke and gas headed right to where the men were working, they were all dead within minutes of the explosion.
A few days later
I got a lot of reflection done, and in talking to Bob Launhardt and especially Stan Taylor, it really provided a lot of peace and closure to the whole ordeal. I’ve been living with a lot of strange emotions for a lot of years over this.
Many “authorities” have tried to paint Bob Launhardt as the scapegoat in all of this. I’ve done a lot of research on the accident over the years including reading through the mountains of evidence and reports on the accident. I never once thought that Mr. Launhardt could have done anything different. He was following the rules and directives that had been sent to him from the Bureau of Mines. He’s a haunted man; you can tell by looking at him. I think he feels responsible for those men’s deaths, but there’s absolutely nothing he could have done differently to prevent it, given the knowledge and directives he had to work with at the time. I looked him straight in the eye and told him that I knew for a fact that that accident was in no way his fault and given the circumstances, and he’d done everything he could to save the men on his watch. His eyes teared up and he just walked away from me after shaking my hand and nodding a silent thanks to me. I hope that helped the demons that I know must have be running wild in his head over the last 37 years.
Stan spent about an hour with me talking about my dad. Stan is a very interesting character. I really like the man. He was a young man in those days, and from what I gathered from him, Dad kind of took him under his wing and taught him a lot. I also could tell that he really admired my dad. That’s something that I’d never seen before. It felt really good. Stan had his wife and daughter (who was about a year old at the time) with him, and they felt so bad that my dad wasn’t allowed to switch shifts with Stan, thus saving Stan’s life. I’m still trying to comprehend that one. Nobody has ever thanked me for my dad before.
The Memorial was surreal for me in a lot of ways. It started out sad then grew into foreboding as the ceremony time approached. Just before the men’s names were read from the list, they asked if any family members wanted to speak their miner’s name before the official reading. I got up there and managed it. I don’t know how, but I did. Then, Bob and Stan both made it a point to track me down at the conclusion. That was REALLY a mixed bag of emotions for me. I came away from it feeling better about it all, glad to have met and spoken at length to Stan, and downright sick to my stomach for Bob Launhardt. If there’s a tragic figure in all of this, it would Bob Launhardt. Pray for him now and then.
Godspeed, Gentlemen!