Trump is Going to Give Us Another Sunshine Mine Disaster

Note: I wrote this a couple months ago and wasn’t able to get it picked up by a publication. It no longer feels timely, but it still feels important, so I’m publishing it here.

On May 2, 1972, Tom Wilkerson, Ron Flory and 171 other men descended into a silver mine near the town of Kellogg, Idaho. Wilkerson and Flory would not resurface for a week. Shortly before noon, a fire broke out near an electrical shop 3700 feet underground. Carbon monoxide and smoke began to fill the 6,000 foot deep mine. Mining company personnel delayed ordering evacuation of the mine, hoping to find the source of the fire. The evacuation only began 20 minutes after smoke was first detected. 80 men escaped to the surface.

The evacuation was halted by the death due to asphyxiation of the man operating the primary hoist in the Number 10 shaft. This hoist brought miners up to the 3100 foot level where they could take trains or walk up the mile-long tunnel to the surface hoist.

Of the remaining men in the mine, 91 of them died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Volunteers descended on Kellogg from mines all over the area. They worked day and night, not knowing if any of the men still unaccounted for had survived. In order to prevent potentially killing any survivors that had found fresh air below, they had to be careful not to change the operation of any of the dozens of fans responsible for circulating air through the mine. This meant operating in tunnels in which the fans were actively drawing in toxic fumes, not knowing if the deadly gasses were being pulled away from their colleagues elsewhere in the complex.

The rescuers eventually created a plan to safely restore fresh air to the Number 10 shaft and force it down into lower levels of the mine, where they hoped their friends might still be alive. The plan involved the use of inflatable bags, sealed off with urethane foam, to block off areas of leakage, helping them to effectively control the mine ventilation.

By 3:30AM on May 5th, almost 72 hours after the fire, they completed their initial sealing work and were able to flood the central shaft with fresh air. From there, they proceeded with short rescue sorties, blocking areas of leakage and installing new fans as they went to try to force as much fresh air as possible into the labyrinthine complex. (The Sunshine Mine, which had been in operation for almost a century, had about 100 miles of traversable tunnels.)

The rescue team initially worked to reach the Number 10 hoist which serviced the active mining areas all the way down to the 6000 foot level. They planned to use it as a central element of their rescue operation. They had good records of personnel, work duties, and duty stations, and so they were able to focus their search. At each work station they passed, they found more bodies.

Upon reaching the Number 10 shaft, they found that a cave in had destroyed the power and compressed air feeds, rendering the Number 10 lift completely inoperable. They were forced instead to rig a hoist in a parallel borehole and send down two “man capsules” to rescue potentially injured miners.

On May 9th, the rescuers found Wilkinson and Flory, “alive and in good condition” at a drill station almost a mile below the ground and 1,800 feet from the Number 10 shaft. They were taken to the borehole and hoisted to safety.

They were the last men found alive in the mine.

The rest of the rescue operation revealed a litany of horrors. They discovered the bodies of men who had gone to rescue men who had themselves gone to try and rescue fallen friends. They found a cluster of 7 bodies around the oxygen cylinder from a welding unit. The men had, apparently, tried to stay alive by getting oxygen from it.

The bodies of all 91 victims were recovered by May 13th. The county coroner determined that all of them had died of “suffocation from carbon monoxide and smoke”.

In its final report on the Sunshine Mine Disaster, the Bureau of Mines noted, among other details, that “self rescuers”, breathing apparatuses that chemically convert carbon monoxide into non-toxic carbon dioxide, were available in the main shaft of the mine. However they were in locked boxes to prevent “pilferage”, which miners were forced to break open.

A New York Times article from May 17th, 1972, two weeks after the disaster, relays the words of Representative Ken Hechler of West Virginia: “Representative Ken Hechler, charged today that the 91 men who died in the Sunshine silver mine disaster in Idaho had been victims of ‘industrial murder,’ and that the Bureau of Mines had maintained a ‘cozy relationship’ with the industry ‘which dictates that profits are more important than the lives and safety of the men.’”

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Today, if you drive through the Idaho panhandle, near Kellogg, you might spot a small park just South of the highway that is dotted with old mine cars. One of them is an unassuming, yellow, dome-topped car that looks like a child’s train car from a rural amusement park. It was designed by my father. It’s probably the only remaining physical remnant of his work in the mines of Northern Idaho.

My father was primarily a safety engineer. He designed and analyzed machines to carry men and equipment thousands of feet under ground and get them back out safely. He had designed dozens of cars and hoists over the many years of his life spent in various holes in the ground. At one point, a friend of his who had been elevated to lead some of the safety efforts at the newly formed Mining Safety and Health Administration called him and asked him to take the job of setting safety standards for hoists. The MSHA was formed, in part, in response to the Sunshine Mine disaster, amid accusations that the Bureau of Mines had been captured by corporate interests.

My father turned the job down because it would mean leaving the West and moving to D.C.

Passing through the panhandle when I was a kid, my father always pointed out that car. He talked about the simple design with pride and crowed about how the men liked riding in it far better than the open-topped car it had replaced. Then, almost invariably, he would get quiet. He was not much given to displays of emotion, but when he talked about his time in mines, the men who died in them were often close to his thoughts.

I will always remember my father, bombing down the highway in our ancient RV, his voice quavering as he talked about men found next to their equipment, as if they’d nodded off on shift. Or of men who, seeing a comrade lying in a side tunnel, rushed to help them, only to join them. Of men who then saw two men down and went after the men who died trying to help.

My father had designed one of the main hoists in the Sunshine Mine. After the disaster he drove out from Spokane (70 miles west along I-90) to help with the rescue effort. I would only learn this years later from my older brother, who was born in Northern Idaho during my Dad’s time there. My father’s exact role in the response seems to have been lost to history. All of my older siblings were too young to understand the details at the time.

As far as I can recall, he never talked about his role in the rescue efforts. His thoughts were only with the men who died. My sister, when I asked her about Dad’s relationship to the disaster, was able to give me a clue. She said that two of the men who died were surnamed “Kitchen”. Dad had been close to them and their family.

Elmer Kitchen and his sons Dewellyn and Delmer were working in the mine that day. Only Delmer made it out alive. The official report provides the final disposition of my father’s friends. Elmer Kitchen’s body was found at 3100 feet near the Number 10 hoist station. His son Dewellyn was found nearby. Delmer had been able to go from there to the Jewell hoist station and escape to the surface. We’ll never know exactly why his brother and father weren’t able to make the mile-long trip to the Jewell hoist and safety.

The two sons were listed as having used air-purifying self-rescue devices. Their father did not. There weren’t enough self-rescue devices for everyone in the mine.

In a retrospective article in the Everett Herald from 2005, Delta Kitchen Kirpes, daughter to Elmer and sister to Delmer and Dewellyn, said of her family: “They had a reputation. They did drink. They did carouse. They earned good money and spent good money. My brothers were lucky if they finished seventh grade. All they knew was mining.”

***

Donald Trump, in the midst of a poorly-conceived, ego-driven trade war, has apparently decided that he wants to bring back mining. Of coal mining, specifically, Trump said “one thing I learned about the coal miners is that’s what they want to do… They want to mine coal, that’s what they love to do.” There was no coal in the Sunshine Mine. I can’t say whether the men there wanted to mine. But I know it was thankless, hard, dangerous work and that none of those men wanted to die down there. And I trust Delta Kitchen Kirpes when she says that, for men like her father and brothers, it’s all they knew.

Whatever the motives of individual miners (who, I should note, don’t seem to have gotten much coverage themselves in this discussion), Trump seems dedicated to ensuring that more of them die on the job. According to the AP, more than 34 Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) offices are slated for closure.

In Spokane, just across the state border from Kellogg, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s (NIOSH) Spokane Mining Research Division is being gutted. Trump has issued executive orders seeking to remove “woke” barriers to mining more coal and empowered an unelected billionaire with his own track record of safety lapses to slash safety regulators. While Trump’s obsession seems to be narrowly focused on coal (he is, as ever, monomaniacal) his efforts will undoubtedly make all underground mines more dangerous.

Mining is still an active industry in Northern Idaho, and it’s gotten much safer in recent years, largely due to the efforts of the very organizations that the government is now gutting. About 3,400 people are employed as mine workers in Idaho, according to the National Mining Association. Those are 3,400 people whose jobs are going to get more hazardous, whose equipment will have to go longer between necessary safety inspections (one function of the MSHA and NIOSH), and whose safety concerns and reports will be handled by fewer and more harried personnel.

It’s not just that mine safety stands to lose over 50 years of progress, but it will be harder to claw back any wins the miners might fight for. The history of mine safety and that “good money” that Delta Kitchen Kirpes mentioned runs through extensive union organizing. One of the largest labor actions in the history of the United States was the Battle of Blair Mountain, in which ten thousand miners fought strikebreakers for their right to unionize and improve their conditions.

Trump is, of course, gutting the National Labor Relations Board. According to one whistleblower, his flunkies in DOGE have already been maliciously exfiltrating data from the agency for unclear purposes.

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It certainly seems that Trump and his appointees are setting the stage for another Sunshine Mine Disaster. The reason seems clear enough to me: safe mining jobs are more expensive for oligarchs than dangerous ones. And organized miners demand higher wages and better conditions than non-union ones. The line for Trump and his billionaire pals to maximize their profits runs past the bodies of men dead from poisonous gasses a mile under the earth.

Months after reading the official Bureau of Mines report on the disaster for the first time, one line keeps coming back to me. When discussing why the people whose job it was to issue evacuation orders and shut down the mine in event of emergency weren’t on site on the day of the disaster, the report simply observes that “the principal operating officials of the Sunshine Mining Company were in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, about 45 miles away, attending their annual stockholders' meeting.”