|
|
Executive Times |
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
2005 Book Reviews |
||
|
|
The Deep
Dark by Gregg Olsen |
||
|
|
Rating:
••• (Recommended) |
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
Disaster Gregg Olsen presents a suspenseful account of the 1972 disaster
at the Sunshine Silver Mine in his new book, The Deep
Dark. Olsen takes readers through the sequences of time and mine level
from the perspective of survivors and the 91 miners who died. Here’s an
excerpt, all of Chapter Eleven, pp.
76-79: BEFORE
NOON, MAY 2 Sunshine
Mine Yard As a
general practice, the doors to Sunshine’s milling operation were kept open to
let fresh air into the stifling building that sat on the rocky mountainside,
just west of the men’s dry house. The state-of-the-art mill used crushing,
grinding, flotation, and filtering techniques to concentrate silver, lead,
and copper ores for shipping to smelters in A
little after noontime the mill crew smelled something burning, but a quick
check showed their machinery in good order. Someone called out that smoke was
coming out of Sunshine’s ventilation shaft. A group went to look, but the
wind had shifted and the smoke had dissipated. The crew shut the doors and
everyone returned to work. On
the first floor of the engineering building, stenographer Richelle
Pherigo, twenty-two, took over as relief
switchboard operator. Pherigo sat behind the small
console and answered the mundane calls that came in at that hour—wives
wanting to get messages to husbands and inquiries from men looking for the
hiring office. Not long after she took her seat, an excited voice came from
underground. “Call
down to Marvin at the Marvin
was Marvin Chase, the mine manager. He and the company’s top
executives—including the The
mine itself had come off a good production year—though the company had lost
more than a million dollars on paper due to write-offs and other vague
financial hocus-pocus. Nevertheless, shareholders, large and small, assembled
in a banquet room to look toward the future. There were fears that the
company was running in the direction of bankruptcy, pulling money from
operations and investing in ill-conceived ventures that only served to make
the board of directors richer. Those fears were not unjustified. Turning a
deaf ear to such subjects, executives announced plans for additional ore
exploration in the coming months, as well as the continuation of the
record-breaking retrieval of the high-grade ore that made Sunshine legendary
in the annals of mining. Things had been good for the mine in 1971, they
said, and they were just about to get better. The
urgent message was a jolt, and Richelle Pherigo looked outside. Smoke rose in the sky, dark and
columnar~ like the trail of a rocket. She dialed the resort and was connected
to personnel director Jim Farris. She explained the importance of reaching
Chase. “He
can’t be disturbed,” Farris said. His
response took Pherigo aback. “Well,
we got a fire here and he needs to call back to the mine,” she said. Farris
promised to pass on the message, and Pherigo and
the others expected an immediate call-back. But none came. The column of
smoke became blacker and blacker~ now shooting straight up, like one of those
tall, black office buildings in some city far from the district. An agonizing
half hour later, there still had been no response from the shareholders’
meeting. From her front-row seat, Pherigo saw men
swarming the yard. Shifters were breathing down her neck to get in touch with
Chase or Al Walkup, the mine superintendent. Anyone who had some authority Sitting
at her desk in accounts payable, clerk Linda Daugherty, twenty-four, could
hear the buzz as the remaining office people continued in vain to reach Chase
or Walkup. The way she understood it, the guys underground wanted to evacuate,
but they wanted the go-ahead from the top. No
one, she thought, wanted to evacuate unless it was a real emergency. No one
wanted to lose an afternoon’s production. Sunshine
employees had no gripe with mine manager Marvin Chase, but after years of abuse
at the hands of the revolving door of managers, the office employees, who
paid the bills and handled the voluminous paperwork of the state and federal
governments, had been beaten down so many times that they were unsure and a
little cowed. The previous manager, Tom McManus, a former linotype machine
manufacturing plant manager, had been sent to Big Creek by the out-of-town
owners. He quickly established himself as the manager from hell. Not only
was McManus a tyrant and a mean-spirited eccentric, he didn’t think staff
people were worth a damn. All could easily be replaced. Engineers, he
habitually ranted, were “a dime a dozen.” He also remarked that he didn’t see
the value of a mine safety program. The effort stole profits from the bottom
line. Behind
his back, McManus was called Black Mac, less for his taste in clothing—the
shiny black suit that he always wore, his fly once fastened shut with a
safety pin—than for his insistence that all lights be turned off unless
absolutely necessary Under the McManus regime, pens were locked in the safe
and issued only by sign-out. A single pen was to be used until its ink was
exhausted. When it ran dry, an employee took it to McManus’s secretary and
she tested it on a legal pad to ensure that it was dead before issuing a new
one. Pity the poor clerk who discovered that someone had walked off with her
pen. She’d be reduced to tears and left to beg for a new one. Black Mac
thought the hiring office’s water fountain was “wasting water” and ordered it
disconnected. The tube lights in the office were so antiquated that when they
were shut off at his insistence, they’d cease to function when turned on
again. It got so bad that the electrician eventually moved into the office.
In addition to humiliating the staff for personal sport, Black Mac could be
unforgivably cruel. He once fired a clerk for taking the day off to attend
her nephew’s funeral. Another woman was given her walking papers because
McManus consider her ample breasts a “distraction” to mine engineers and geologists. Not
until the fall of 1969, when they signed union cards, did the staff stand up
to the little dictator. McManus refused to negotiate, and in February 1970
the emboldened office workers staged a strike. It lasted less than a day. The
staff had feared the miners wouldn’t be supportive. But miners coming for
their shifts saw the office workers’ signs and turned around. Talks with management,
and a speedy resolution, took a sudden priority. Six
months later, when McManus was ousted, it was as if Dorothy had vanquished
the Wicked Witch of the West. The McManus legacy was not how well he managed
operations, but how frightened and damaged were the people who had cowered
in his presence. Even with nice guy Marvin Chase in charge, the anxiety never
went away. Fear lingered. When the events of May 2, 1972, began, no one
thought he had the power to do a thing about it. No one wanted to lose his
job by calling for an evacuation. It
fell on the shoulders of an accountant to give in to what was as risky as it
was right—the official evacuation order from topside. He wasn’t management,
and he sat in an office that had once kept pens in the safe; the likes of
such autonomy had seldom been seen. Few in the office were sure what was
going on underground and what, if any, evacuation plan was already under way.
Some assumed the source of the smoke was above 2700, a level well above where
most of the men worked. They didn’t think smoke could get down to 3100
without the men knowing well in advance. Pherigo
rang the Executives will find the impact of past
management on workers to be frightening and real, adding to the disaster
described in The Deep
Dark. In a corporate culture rooted in fear, the avoidance of decisions
can lead to disaster. Steve Hopkins,
August 25, 2005 |
||
|
|
|
||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
|||
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the September
2005 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Deep Dark.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
||
