Читать книгу Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917 - Michael Punke, Michael Punke - Страница 13

Helmet Men Braving Death Each Minute

—HEADLINE, BUTTE DAILY POST, JUNE 9, 1917

Cornelius “Con” O’Neill was lying in bed when he heard the Speculator whistle blow the alarm, just after midnight on June 9, 1917. O’Neill was foreman of the Bell and Diamond mines, Anaconda-owned properties adjoining the Speculator to the south. Married and a father of four young children, the thirty-seven-year-old lived with his family in a gracious house (owned by Anaconda) barely a stone’s throw from the mines.¹ O’Neill’s wife, Julia, sensing the seriousness of the emerging disaster, pleaded with him to stay home. Instead, the “big, robust Irishman” rushed to the Bell-Diamond.²

O’Neill arrived while the fire was still in its early minutes, probably around 12:30 A.M. He found himself in the midst of a chaotic and confusing scene. What was obvious, though, was that the Granite Mountain shaft was ablaze. The “flaming torch” at its collar stood only a few hundred feet up the hill. Foreman O’Neill instantly recognized the danger to his own men in the depths of the Diamond. Of particular concern were thirty miners at work on the 1,800-foot level, where there was a direct connection to the Speculator.³

O’Neill directed his men to gather the makings for a bulkhead to “keep the smoke and gas from our men.” Quickly they loaded canvas and other materials onto the cage. Two other men accompanied Con O’Neill into the Diamond shaft—Ed Lorry and “Con” Toomey (O’Neill was sometimes known as “Big Con” to distinguish him from the multitude of “Cons” among the heavily Irish miners). None of the men wore any type of breathing apparatus, but when they reached the 1,800 Station of the Diamond, the air initially was clear. They progressed some 150 feet toward the Speculator and began to make preparations to build a canvas bulkhead.⁴

When the gas came, it hit hard and fast. Lorry suddenly collapsed. O’Neill and Toomey attempted to carry the stricken man back to the 1,800 Station, but then O’Neill too went down. Though they were close to the station, only Toomey managed to crawl back. By the time he got there, rescuers in breathing apparatus had already descended to search for the three men, worried by the length of time they’d been gone.⁵

“To hell with me—I can make it,” Toomey told the rescuers. “O’Neill and Lorry are in there.” The rescuers hurried down the drift, finding O’Neill and Lorry unconscious. One of the rescuers described the scene. “The smoke and gas were so thick in the 1,800 of the Diamond that we could not see three feet in front of us. No man could live in that gas without a helmet for ten seconds.” He was right. The rescuers managed to pull O’Neill and Lorry to the surface, but it was too late.⁶

The death of Con O’Neill, “the best known of the men who lost their lives in the disaster,” contributed to the shock on that first day after the fire. His photo in the newspaper, showing a powerful man with a thick mustache and thicker neck, underscored the vulnerability of all the men. The Butte papers lauded O’Neill in the gushing tone of a less cynical age: “[H]is efforts to save his companion,” wrote the Butte Daily Post, “even when he knew his own life was in danger, were characteristic of the man.”⁷

Like the effort by Con O’Neill, other early rescue attempts were largely spontaneous, more a function of impulse than contingency plans. The main body of trained rescuers would not arrive at the mines until after dawn.⁸ Instead of waiting, early rescuers simply dived in. Some, like Con, took their chances without the breathing equipment that would ultimately play a vital role in rescue efforts.

By the early twentieth century, breathing equipment was widely used by both mine rescuers and firemen. In the trenches of Europe, the apparatus was also used in connection with the “recent introduction of asphyxiating gases for offensive military purposes.” Specifically, the helmets were worn by soldiers “setting off the gas.”⁹

Rescuers at Butte used two main types of breathing apparatus: the German-made “Draeger” and English-made “Fluess.” Both the Draeger and the Fluess looked similar to deep-sea diving equipment, complete with breathing helmets. It was the helmets that gave the mine rescuers their popular name—the “helmet men.” In addition to the helmet (or in some models, a skullcap with goggles and mouthpiece), the apparatus consisted of compressed oxygen tanks that were worn on the back and a rubber “breathing bag” that was worn on the chest. Inside the breathing bag was alkali to absorb the carbon dioxide exhaled by the user. Various tubes and valves connected the components. Altogether, the helmet men’s breathing equipment tipped the scales at a hefty forty pounds. It was hot and cumbersome, particularly in the sweltering depths of the mines.

The breathing apparatus of the day was also notoriously unreliable. Indeed, a 1917 report on breathing equipment by the U.S. Bureau of Mines concluded that its use in any circumstances “involves grave danger.” Citing the many deaths of rescuers wearing the equipment, the report called for a fundamental redesign. The authors noted that helmets were prone to leaking, subjecting the wearers to gas.

The 1917 equipment was also incapable of increasing the amount of oxygen made available to users during strenuous activity. Obviously, rescuers frequently faced situations demanding heightened activity. The report used the specific example of rescuers carrying injured men to safety, “an exertion of which men hampered with helmets are practically incapable.”¹⁰ Helmet men who overexerted themselves frequently passed out—and sometimes died.

Despite its limitations, the breathing apparatus was all that Butte’s rescuers had. In eight days of rescue and recovery work, an estimated 175 men used the breathing apparatus to make more than 2,000 descents into the burning mines.¹¹ Remarkably, though many were injured, none died.

The first rescue effort with breathing apparatus occurred barely an hour after the fire started. Sometime before 1:00 A.M., two men, named Harry Goodell and William Burns, entered the mine, using the Speculator shaft to access the 700 Station.¹² They recovered two bodies, carrying them to the surface at 1:30 A.M.

The name of the first identified victim was Bill Ramsey, a mucker who worked on the 700 level of the Spec.¹³ Muckers occupied a position near the bottom rung of the mining ladder, their job to “muck up” the ore that more skilled workers had dynamited from the walls. Ramsey had been busy shoveling rock when smoke from Granite Mountain began to fill the drift.

Panic broke out, with many men on the 700 scrambling to climb up a manway to the 600 level even as men on the 600 tried to climb down. One of Ramsey’s fellow miners, John “Shorty” Thomas, urged him to climb up to the 600, telling him that there was no escape at the 700 level. But Ramsey refused. Apparently there was a brief argument about which way to go. Later Thomas, safe above ground, would report Bill Ramsey’s last words: “I’m a stayin’ fool.”¹⁴

It wasn’t until 2:15 A.M. on June 9, when North Butte officials first realized how few men had escaped through adjoining mines, that the organized rescue effort began to take full shape. The officials gave immediate notice to the coroner and the hospitals. The coroner, Aeneas Lane, called the undertakers. Within twenty minutes, a small fleet of ambulances and “undertakers wagons” stood waiting inside the mine yard.¹⁵ They would be busy throughout the long night.

Two lowly timekeepers, Grover McDonald and Thomas O’Keefe, emerged as key players in the early efforts to respond to the disaster. Their prime asset was a knowledge of the names and faces in the mines, and to them fell the task of keeping a tally of who was dead, alive, or missing. An urgent call went out, ultimately picked up by the newspapers, for North Butte miners to report in.¹⁶ Many men who had emerged safely from the fiery mines hurried home so that loved ones would know they were alive. The Anaconda Standard painted a telling portrait of a group of miners brought up through the Badger. They “took one look around the mine, glanced toward the Speculator and then started at a brisk walk for town.” Once on the street, a few threw their lunch buckets in the ditch. “I’m through with mining from this time on,” declared one man. “I will never go into the hole again.”¹⁷

The call for rescuers extended, of course, to all available helmet men. The federal government provided one source of trained men and equipment. Daniel Harrington, a Butte representative of the Bureau of Mines, sent telegraphs requesting the dispatch of two specially equipped mine rescue cars. Though much ballyhooed by Harrington, who would ultimately author the official Bureau of Mines report on the accident, the cars did not play a vital role in the rescue effort. The nearest of the two was located in Red Lodge, Montana—250 miles away. The second was in Colorado. By the time both cars reached Butte, the mission had shifted from the rescue of the living to the recovery of the dead.¹⁸

The more significant source of helmet men and equipment was local—the so-called Safety-First crews maintained by all of the major mines. As the largest mining operation, Anaconda provided the largest group of Safety-First men, more than 60 percent of the 175 men who wore equipment during the disaster. Though volunteers, the helmet men were paid time and a half for their work, or $7.12 per shift.

By noon of June 9, twelve hours after the start of the fire, thirty helmet men were at work below ground. Thereafter, more than fifty helmet men were deployed during any given eight-hour shift.¹⁹

Ninety of the helmet men had received formal training by the Bureau of Mines. One goal of the training was to teach the men to avoid the types of physical exertion with which their breathing equipment could not keep pace. Thus they were taught to walk at a speed of only three miles an hour, resting at the end of each minute. The men also practiced in dark “smoke rooms.” Wearing their breathing apparatus, they engaged in activities such as carrying a dummy, crawling through a nineteen-by-seventeen-inch tunnel, and climbing over obstructions. The exercises were important and succeeded in simulating many of the physical challenges that the rescuers would face. But as the Bureau of Mines noted, “It is not possible to reproduce the mental strain, anxiety, and fear sometimes manifested in mine-recovery work.”²⁰

In addition to the helmet men, mine officials, firemen, medical teams, and undertakers—even the U.S. Army—were pressed into service. Company F of the Montana National Guard happened to be camped in Butte on the night of the fire. The Montana Guard had been federalized after the U.S. entry into the war, and Company F was stationed in Butte on “utility duty”—guarding the mines against potential sabotage. Only three days earlier, the soldiers had put down the draft riot. On the night of the fire, they formed a cordon around the mines, keeping out everyone except rescuers, doctors, and undertakers.²¹

Butte mayor William Maloney was the last major figure to join the rescue forces, awoken from his bed at 3:00 A.M. and rushed to the North Butte by car.

Many citizens of Butte first learned about the North Butte fire when they woke up on Saturday morning to find the town blanketed in smoke. The smoke “poured in a torrent, deluging the valley below and spreading out over the side of the hill like a giant shroud.”²²

From the time, minutes after the start of the fire, when an unnamed miner attempted to throw a ten-gallon bucket of water down the Granite Mountain shaft, efforts to battle the flames and fumes were continuous.

For the first five hours of the disaster, rescue officials deliberately allowed the Granite Mountain shaft to burn. Though the draft in the Granite Mountain shaft was normally downcast, the flames and heat caused it to turn upward. Officials hoped that this upcast draft would help to suck the smoke and gas from the rest of the workings.²³

Rescuers took several steps in an effort to augment the updraft effect. At 12:15 A.M., only thirty minutes after the start of the fire, North Butte General Manager Norman Braley ordered a reversal in the direction of a gigantic fan at the mouth of the Rainbow shaft. It was normally a suction fan, but Braley hoped that blowing down the Rainbow would help to push fumes up Granite Mountain. At 1:00 A.M., the same step was taken with fans at the Speculator and Gem shafts. And over the next forty-eight hours, several more mobile fans would be set up—including one so large that it was pulled into position by “eight horses and 50 men.”²⁴

The combined effect of the fans was “a cloud that blew out of the shaft like it was driven by a gale.”²⁵ The overall effect of these efforts seems to have been mostly positive, contributing to the more rapid clearing in some sections of the mines.²⁶ While this clearing did not occur rapidly enough to save the 163 victims of the fire, it would later become critically important to dozens of other men.²⁷

The fans also allowed firemen to begin dousing the blaze with water. Initially, rescuers had worried that dumping water into Granite Mountain might have the effect of turning the shaft back into a downdraft, which would in turn have sent more smoke and fumes into the workings. With the augmentation of the draft by multiple fans, however, firemen believed that they could begin to fight the fire with water. Eventually, “four pipe lines” would pump millions of gallons of water into the shaft at a rate of 500 gallons per minute. Still, it would be five days before firemen considered the fire to be under control.²⁸

The water did have some unintended consequences. It contributed, along with the fire’s incineration of shaft timbers, to the cave-in of large portions of the Granite Mountain shaft.²⁹ Another consequence was more gruesome. Helmet men found a number of victims who had apparently been scalded to death. They had been too near to Granite Mountain stations when the water was dropped. The great heat of the shaft fire instantly vaporized the liquid, creating a wave of deadly steam.³⁰

John L. Boardman was a slight man with a weighty responsibility. As the head of Anaconda’s Safety-First crews, Boardman commanded the growing army of helmet men who began descending the mines in the early morning hours after the fire. Boardman had an additional layer of accountability, having personally trained many of Butte’s helmet men.

Photos of the rescuers taken before the disaster show men who look more like fighter pilots than miners. They model their technologically advanced equipment with an air of pride and even swagger, though a leavening of maturity is also apparent. In an era when ever-growing percentages of miners were unskilled, the Safety-First crews were drawn from the ranks of the most experienced men.

J. L. Boardman arrived at the North Butte properties shortly after the start of the fire and began an eight-day saga that would test his men’s experience. His style of supervision was described as “calm, cool, and collected.” He personally inspected each breathing apparatus before fitting it to a rescuer’s head. “Look to the valves on the helmets and take every precaution,” Boardman told them. “You must look to your own lives.”³¹

In contrast to the earliest rescue efforts, Boardman helped to organize a systematic sweep of the mines. With the Granite Mountain shaft spewing flames, he channeled the helmet men through adjoining mines—especially the Speculator, the High Ore, and the Badger. Within each mine, the helmet men descended systematically, “one level at a time,” beginning at the stations and then expanding their searches outward into the twisted braids of the workings. Because many rescuers were unfamiliar with the North Butte workings (especially those from Anaconda crews), miner-guides sometimes volunteered to lead the way.³²

They faced a pitch-black maze encompassing hundreds of miles of underground passageways—most filled with smoke that was “saturated with steam”³³ and laced with deadly gas. Each level was its own intricate maze. There were few straight lines beyond the crosscuts, the drifts instead following the haphazard path of the copper veins. For their only light, the helmet men carried “Ever Ready” flashlights. When the beams could not penetrate the murk, the rescuers dropped to their knees and followed rail lines, an action impeded in some places by the knee-deep ash on the floor.³⁴

Obstacles frequently blocked clear passage through the narrow crosscuts and drifts. In 1917, Butte mines still used a mixture of horses and electric engines to pull ore-laden “trains.” The horses, like the miners, attempted to flee the fire and fumes. Dozens of animals lay dead along the tracks, sometimes with ore cars piled up behind them.³⁵ The low ceilings forced the helmet men to pick their way over such obstacles in a flat-out position, all the while taking care not to bump the helmets on their heads, the breathing bags on their bellies, or the oxygen tanks on their backs. (And, of course, all the while seeking to avoid physical exertion!)

Air temperatures in the depths of the North Butte ranged from the low eighties to more than a hundred degrees, with humidity between 85 and 100 percent. The breathing apparatus, in addition to being extremely hot and cumbersome, raised the temperature of the air that the men inhaled by at least an additional ten degrees. The Fluess model sometimes raised the temperature of inhaled air to 140 degrees. As the 1917 study on apparatus noted: “[A]fter an explosion and fire there is often a high temperature, and the air is saturated with moisture. These conditions the apparatus can not be expected to overcome.”³⁶

Yet the helmet men forged ahead. By the time they returned to the surface, their bodies were soaked in perspiration, their clothing reeked of gas, and their eyes were bloodshot from the smoke and fumes.³⁷

For some it was worse. Many rescuers suffered injury when their helmets malfunctioned, including at least twenty “part or total prostrations.”³⁸ Charles Fredericks, one of the helmet men who pulled Ernest Sullau from the mine, remembered detecting the “sweet odor of gas.” He ended up unconscious for several hours, pulled to the surface by his fellow rescuers and ultimately hospitalized.³⁹

Another helmet man experiencing equipment problems was a Speculator shift boss named William Budelière. He noticed that his helmet was leaking while exploring the 1,800 level with four other men on the morning of June 9. He informed the others of his plight before a second man noticed that his helmet also was leaking. They hurried to the station, rang for the cage, and managed to make it safely to the surface. Within thirty minutes, Budelière was reequipped and back underground.⁴⁰

As a shift boss at the Speculator, William Budelière had an intimate knowledge of the North Butte workings. Both his knowledge of the mines and his fortitude would soon be put to the test. Barely three hours after the malfunction of his helmet, Budelière and twelve comrades were on yet another foray into the mines—this time the first rescuers to explore the lower levels of the Speculator and Granite Mountain shafts. Miners from as low as the 2,400 level had managed to escape through adjoining mines, and there was hope that other men might still be alive below ground.

After an initial descent from the Rainbow shaft, Budelière and the others worked their way “through miles of poisonous fumes” to the 2,000 level of Granite Mountain, only to encounter a new enemy—water.⁴¹

At the lower levels of the workings, mining companies contended constantly with groundwater. Miners dealt with water problems the same way that homeowners deal with leaky basements—sump pumps. To keep the deeper workings clear of water, giant electric pumps worked twenty-four hours a day. The Granite Mountain fire, though, had cut electricity. With the electricity out, the pumps shut down, and the groundwater began to rise—augmented by the great quantities dumped down the shaft by firemen.

In the crosscut between the Speculator and Granite Mountain, Budelière and his comrades encountered water up to their armpits—rising water. Because of the crosscut’s low ceiling, only a few inches separated the surface of the deep water from the rocky roof of the tunnel. Budelière elected to keep going. For the other men, though, it was too much, and they decided to turn back.

As he slogged through the deep water, holding his head and his flashlight in the narrow band of air, Budelière reached a point where the rock above him was so low that his helmet scraped the ceiling. Incredibly, he removed the helmet and moved forward, craning his head in the narrow belt of air between the water and rock.

Budelière became the first (and for a while, the only) rescuer to reach the lower levels of the Granite Mountain workings. A Butte Miner headline hailed his courage as “Only Equaled by Those of Titanic Disaster.” He found no survivors, instead only “scores of bodies.”

Dozens of other helmet men would also play vital roles in those first hours after the fire, “assisting the almost exhausted men” who had clawed their way close to the surface. The general chaos made it difficult to estimate the precise number, though as the accident report states, the helmet men “undoubtedly saved many lives.”⁴²

An increasingly well-organized system greeted the helmet men and the wounded miners as they were raised from the depths. At the Speculator, the Badger, and the High Ore, rough mine buildings were quickly converted into field hospitals and morgues.⁴³

At the Speculator collar, a guard monitored entrance and exit from the shaft. Still, miners and rescuers rushed forward hopefully whenever the hoist was raised. As each man emerged (or was carried) from the cage, timekeepers O’Keefe and McDonald attempted to make an identification. Many miners, though conscious, clearly suffered from the effects of gas. In its early stages, exposure to carbon monoxide can cause confusion, irritability, and delirium. Miners were described as “muttering unintelligibly to all questions of the hospital attendants.”⁴⁴

A doctor with a stethoscope checked the unconscious, “determining as fast as possible the chance of a spark of life.”⁴⁵ Those with a heartbeat were usually hooked up to pulmotors and, like the ill-fated Ernest Sullau, attended by a team of physicians. Many recovered and walked home, while ambulances transported others to local hospitals.

For the first thirty-six hours after the start of the fire, the dead were carried into the Speculator storeroom (and its counterparts at the other mines). Bodies fell into two categories—those that could be identified and those that could not. The unidentified were laid out in a row until friends could come along and attach a name. Other unidentified bodies were distributed among Butte’s many funeral homes. Dozens of men would ultimately be buried, anonymous, in communal graves.

At 3:45 in the afternoon on Saturday, June 9—a little more than twelve hours after the start of the fire—Coroner Lane issued a statement to the press, grimly tolling the growing carnage. Thirty-three bodies had been recovered from the mine, with ten of those still unidentified. Between 165 and 175 men were believed to be still underground. The statement’s conclusion was grave: “[L]ittle or no hope is held out for them.”⁴⁶

In the depths of the mine, though, hope was still alive.