Idahoans still scarred by mining disaster
Book offers account of '72 Sunshine Mine fire that killed 91
But deadly carbon monoxide killed 91 men in one of the nation's worst mining accidents.
A new book, "The Deep Dark," provides a gruesome moment-by-moment account of the disaster that began on May 2, 1972, when unexplained smoke began pouring out of the mine near Kellogg, Idaho.
Three decades after the fire, author Gregg Olsen found that many residents of the Silver Valley remain scarred by a tragedy that left some 200 children without fathers and prompted big changes in the nation's mining laws.
"The most difficult thing was talking with the people and crying with those people as they told me stories they kept inside for 30 years," Olsen, who lives in Olalla, Wash., said.
The nation was gripped for a week by efforts to rescue the 93 miners who were trapped underground by the fire. People didn't realize that many of the miners dropped dead where they were working as toxic smoke overcame them almost instantly.
Only two of the 93 men trapped inside the mine made it out alive. Ron Flory and Tom Wilkinson were 4,000 feet below the surface when the fire broke out. They went lower, where they found a pocket of fresh air. They stayed there for a week, suffering from fear and hunger, before they were found on May 10.
Flory, 29 at the time of the fire, visited with Olsen at a recent book signing in Wallace.
"It's not something I dwell on. I don't have flashbacks. I never did," Flory told The Spokesman-Review newspaper in brief comments before leaving.
Flory went back to mining and retired several years ago with a medical disability. Wilkinson left mining after the fire to work for the Forest Service, Olsen wrote.
The book at times has a ghoulish quality, with horrifying descriptions of the bodies of the victims being discovered by rescuers in the hot, wet mine. Many of the miners could be identified only by their clothes or the stickers on their helmets.
For Olsen, the book was a welcome change from his previous volume, an account of the lurid affair between teacher Mary Kay Letourneau and her former sixth-grade pupil, Vili Fualaau.
Olsen had long been haunted by the mining disaster, which is memorialized by a poignant sculpture near the mine along Interstate 90. When he began researching the story, he was surprised to find that no comprehensive account existed. He spent four years interviewing 200 survivors, family members, executives, government regulators and others, and his book weaves in the story of what was going on at home while the fire was burning in the mine.
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