R. Saunders - Underground and Radioactive

We were in need of a large number of supplies, but rather than have Al go back to the station, I decided to let him drill while I made the supply run. I figured I’d round up the stuff, find a motor, and deliver it to our stope myself. I could also use the then empty cars that had been full of supplies to pull some of the ore that was backed up in our chute.

We set up the drill, and Al started in on the round. Talking being impossible through the din of the machine, I signaled Al that I was leaving.

I made it back to the station but couldn’t find Bill. Seeing a couple of laborers hanging around by the station, I gave them my list of supplies and told them to stack up the materiel and have it ready to go when I came back with a motor. It would take them a while to get everything ready, so I went back down the track drift to our stope to check on Al’s drilling progress.

As I neared the manway, I heard the machine going. I knew Al was OK and still at it. I climbed the manway and then went up the ladder to the third level of square-sets.

As I looked toward where Al should have been drilling, I couldn’t see him. I heard the drill going but didn’t see Al where he was supposed to be.

I wasn’t concerned until I got close enough to where he should have been, and still I saw nothing. But the drill was going, so he had to be there. Where was Al? What I found ranked right up there with the funniest things I would see underground.

I walked up to the edge of the set and saw the blasting holes he had drilled and, still hearing the drill going loud as ever, looked down.

Having somehow lost his balance while wrestling with the machine, he had fallen over the edge of the set and dropped down just a few feet. There below I saw Al on top of the muck pile on his back, jammed between the still-running machine and some previously blasted ore, feet sticking straight up in the air.

Al lucked out. Had we been mucking and filling the chute, it would have been a sixteen-foot drop, and he could have been seriously injured or worse. But he had fallen on top of the muck pile just a few feet below.

Had the machine fallen on him rather than beside him, that could have been serious too, but it had missed him. I jumped down, shut off the machine, and pulled him out, laughing the whole time.

Al and I did a lot of productive mining during the time we were together, and a lot of the credit for that went to him. I had never seen anyone work as hard or as fast or take his work more seriously. We had a good stope with good ore and a good system working, and we made a lot of money. We shipped a lot of ore, and the bosses were happy. It was too good to last, I guess.

Three months later Mel Vigil called me into his office at the end of my shift and asked if Al was ready to mine on his own. I didn’t think I was the best judge of that, but seeing an opportunity to give a hard worker like Al a break, I said he was good to go.

Al was on his own.

Shortly after Al was promoted to miner, Mel told me I would no  longer be working twelve-hour shifts. I had enjoyed the money, but the cumulative effect of working so many hours was exceptionally draining, both mentally and physically so, I was pleased to be assigned strictly day shifts and overjoyed at the prospect of seeing the sun every now and then.

Then Mel gave me some disturbing news.

“The geologists say there is still some high-grade stuff in the 502,” he said. “What we want you to do is start digging the sand-fill out. Start at the manway, take the bulkhead out, and start digging. Go in straight about a hundred feet. Don’t worry about left or right; just go in straight until you get to the face, and that’s where you’ll be drilling. It might take a while.” I was stupefied.

This would be my third time working the 502 stope. First I was mining it with Cal when the stope collapsed. Then I was put in charge of sand-filling the place, and now I was to take the sand out and start mining it again. It sure made me wonder what was going on. There had to be some incredibly high-quality ore in there and a lot of it if the plan was to remove tons and tons of sand to get at it.

I had a lousy weekend after that talk with Mel.

When I arrived in the lunchroom on Monday, Bill had assigned me yet another partner, and it was my buddy from the stuck ore chute fiasco, Al Gonzalez.

The one tiny bit of good news was that we would be getting paid a small contract stipend for each ore car of sand-fill we removed. I think it was around ten dollars a carload, but at least it was something. It was definitely motivation to get a lot of sand out in a hurry.

The only way to get the sand out was to dig by hand using muck sticks, throwing the sand down the manway and then shoveling it onto the track, where we would load ore cars using a mucking machine. It was going to be a slow and laborious job.

During the sand-fill operation, I had constructed an eight-foot bulkhead to contain the sand as it was pumped into the stope. We removed the bulkhead, and there in front of us was an eight-foot high wall of sand. The wall was about ten feet wide at the bulkhead but quickly spread out as the stope widened going inward.

After staring at that impressive wall of sand for a few minutes, we slowly began tunneling into it. When we got around six feet in, things got a little dicey. Now we had a tunnel with eight-foot high walls of sand on either side of where we were working. Should either of those walls collapse while were we in the tunnel, we would be buried with no hope of getting out.

We decided that from then on only one of us would dig while the other stayed back where the bulkhead had been. Should a cave-in of sand occur, the one of us who was outside the tunnel could dig out the one who was buried.

It was very unpleasant work being inside that tunnel of sand with the eight-foot walls. Sand-fill carried with it a very unpleasant odor no matter how much ventilation bag we hung. In addition, the sand got into everything on our person like, but not exactly, a day at the beach. Then of course there was the possibility of a sand cave-in. When it was my turn to dig, I was somewhat nervous every minute I was in there.

The work was very slow. We could only throw so much sand down the manway before it would rise high enough to block our exiting the stope. We were constantly stopping the tunneling and descending the manway to shovel sand out onto the track.

When we had a good-sized pile of sand on the track, I would use a mucking machine to fill ore cars with sand. Running that mucking machine was the only fun part of the day for me. I loved running that mucker.

My previous experience operating a mucker—having worked for Riordan on track drift construction—came in handy, and I was very confident in my abilities. Although I derailed the machine every now and then, thanks to having so much practice returning derailed ore cars to the track, I was proficient at getting the mucker back on track.

Other than that mucker, what we were doing was a lousy job. There wasn’t much about being underground that I disliked, but that job was one I detested.

Monday morning had arrived, and I was in a bad mood. I had been  in El Paso again, for the thirteenth consecutive weekend, and it had not gone well.

That was the weekend Ana Maria and I had broken up with a fight starting just about the time I arrived late Friday evening. Rather than drive another four hours back to Grants, I made an ill-advised decision to stay in El Paso when I agreed to talk it over with her more on Saturday. Predictably that didn’t go well either, so I was in a particularly bad mood on the long drive back to Grants.