R. Saunders - Underground and Radioactive

By this time, I had gotten some new, durable mining clothes including, denim overalls and a denim Wrangler shirt. The overalls had a lot useful pockets and were tough, as was the shirt. My clothes had already taken a beating, so much so that I felt I was beginning to look like a miner. One thing about well-worn, dirty, and beat-up clothing was that it was incredibly comfortable to wear. My helmet was getting nice and beat up too and was no longer shiny. All in all, I was starting to look the part of an underground worker.

I was feeling more confident too. My strength and abilities had improved considerably, so much so that I sometimes felt a little cocky about what I could do.

Frankie pulled me and my partner aside one morning just outside the lunchroom and explained that one of the pneumatic doors on an ore chute was stuck.

“The door on 907 is stuck closed, and I want you two guys to get it unstuck,” he said. “I don’t care how you do it, just get the chute open.”

He went on to explain that he thought the chute was full of ore, but he wasn’t sure, and he added a harbinger: “If the goddamn chute is full of water, it’ll flood the drift. If it is, don’t let it all out at once. If it’s full of ore, get back to the station and get a motor to pull it.” Then looking directly at me, he said, “You’re in charge, pard.”

I was on my second partner now. Grimm was still back at the station, and I was now working with Anthony Gonzalez. Anthony was around eighteen or nineteen, and I’d seen him, knew he was more of a greenhorn than I was, but didn’t know him at all.

There was a rumor floating around that he had been arrested going 150 miles per hour on I-40 in his new Pontiac Firebird, so the first thing I did was ask about that. Sure enough it was true, and he no longer had a license. Although I was not in the market for a new Firebird, I knew where I could get a good deal on one.

Frankie, saving his best surprise for last, walked us over to a powder box by the cage door. Handing me about ten sticks of TNT and several fuses, he said, “Use this if you have to.”

I accepted the TNT and advice with the most nonchalant posture I could conjure up and a nod of my head, all the while thinking, I’m in charge? I was amazed that Frankie thought I knew anything about TNT.

To the first question: sure, being in charge made sense. Anthony, as a recent high school graduate and only a couple of months out of school, had started at Section 35 a couple of weeks after I had, making me the senior laborer.

As to my lack of knowledge of TNT, I think Frankie was well aware of it but didn’t care if I knew anything about it or not. He just expected the job to get done.

At the time I didn’t know it, but the stick form of TNT, universally referred to underground simply as powder , is an extremely stable explosive made up of a silica-and-clay compound soaked with nitroglycerine. It takes a small but powerful primary explosion, in the form of a blasting cap, to set it off but can otherwise be thrown around or used to pound nails, for that matter, without fear. When it was stored too long in a powder box, it could liquefy, and that, as I found later, presented an unpleasant predicament.

When Frankie Garcia handed me that roll of fuses and box of powder, the wise thing to do would have been to emphasize to him the obvious: I had little knowledge of what these things were or how to use them.

Regrettably I stayed silent but was thinking, Frankie? I, uh, really don’t know anything about, you know, dynamite. Not emphasizing that fact more emphatically wasn’t a fatal mistake but could easily have been.

Frankie’s motivations aside and despite my own misgivings, I was proud to be in charge of something this early in my underground career and was determined to get the job done. Anthony and I would get that ore chute open no matter what.

I had hoped that Frankie, at a minimum, would have taken us back to the chute in question, but he turned away and walked back into the lunchroom without further comment. With that, Anthony and I headed down the main track drift on our way back to the 907 chute that might be full of water or might be full of ore.

As we were making our way down the main drift, I kept thinking of Frankie. What in God’s name is wrong with this guy? Does he really not know how clueless we are? Is he hoping we blow ourselves up, or is this how you learn to be a miner?

It was true that I’d gone underground in part to be able to legally blow something up, so I was excited, but this was ridiculous. Working around powder and learning through trial and error was really not the way to go, because we were probably only going to get to make one mistake with it. Luckily enough that turned out to not exactly be true.

All along the main track drifts were chute openings, over which was an eight-to ten-foot diameter tube bored vertically up to a stope. These could be short tubes of ten feet on up to two hundred feet.

The ore chute was a hydraulically operated apparatus. A motorman pulled an ore car up to and just under a chute, then pulled a lever that opens the chute lip and released the stacked-up ore. When the car was full, he closed the chute lip, pulled the motor ahead, and repeated the process.

Occasionally a chute would jam and refuse to open. Usually this was due to rock being wedged in at just the right angle to stop the door from opening. Once the chute was full of ore and the door was jammed closed, production would stop until it was fixed. That was our assignment.

Every stope was given a number: the farther back into the mine, the higher the number of the stope. Even for us, finding 907 was easy. All the chutes that ran the length of the main track drift had large white identifying numbers painted on the sides, making it easy for the motormen to identify them.

When we arrived at our stuck chute, I immediately noticed dripping water. There was a slight opening, and I could see there was also some ore in there.

Apparently it had been some time since 907 had been in production, so nobody knew if the chute was full of ore or full of water. In retrospect I think someone should have known before sending a couple of inexperienced knuckleheads in to find out.

It wouldn’t have been that difficult to shine a light into the chute from above or just drop a rock down and listen for a splash. Either nobody thought of that or they were too lazy. I should have known to do it myself, but I was just focused on what Frankie had assigned me to do.

I stood there in the drift, assessing the situation. If the chute really was full of water, it would be a lot of water, considering it was a ten-foot-diameter tube running 150 feet high.

On the other hand, maybe the chute was mostly filled with ore. Had I known then what I later learned about miners and ore production, there was close to zero possibility that any miner would have left a 150-foot chute full of ore without getting paid for it. I would have then assumed it was full of water. But at the moment, I knew none of that.

My instructions were to get the chute to open. Frankie had made it clear that should the chute be full of water, under no circumstances were we to let the water flood out, as it would swamp the drift. If there was ore in there, a little on the track would have caused no harm and could be cleaned up quickly.

It seemed that Frankie forgot that in addition to flooding the track, should all that water flood out it could quite possibly drown us. But at the time, Anthony and I hadn’t thought about that. Our instructions seemed clear enough, and as new laborers we didn’t ask any questions of our shift boss.

Trying the chute lever confirmed that the chute lip was stuck, as the door never budged. Along with the powder, all we had were a couple of pipe wrenches and a double jack. It was obvious that a puny pipe wrench would be of little value on this job, so we figured if we pounded on the chute with the double jack, it might loosen up enough to where we could work on prying the door open. Although we had nothing to pry with but our pipe wrenches, this seemed logical. So we took turns pounding on the chute and kept trying the lever, but the door never moved. It was then that I turned my attention to the powder as the solution.