Product Description

For nearly a century, Kellogg, Idaho, was home to America’s richest silver mine, Sunshine Mine. Mining there, as everywhere, was not an easy life, but regardless of the risk, there was something about being underground, the lure of hitting a deep vein of silver. The promise of good money and the intense bonds of friendship brought men back year after year. Mining is about being a man and a fighter in a job where tomorrow always brings the hope of a big score.

On May 2, 1972, 174 miners entered Sunshine Mine on their daily quest for silver. Aboveground, safety engineer Bob Launhardt sat in his office, filing his usual mountain of federal and state paperwork. From his office window he could see the air shafts that fed fresh air into the mine, more than a mile below the surface. The air shafts usually emitted only tiny coughs of exhaust; unlike dangerously combustible coal mines, Sunshine was a fireproof hardrock mine, nothing but cold, dripping wet stone. There were many safety concerns at Sunshine, but fire wasn’t one of them. The men and the company swore the mine was unburnable, so when thick black smoke began pouring from one of the air shafts, Launhardt was as amazed as he was alarmed.

When the alarm sounded, less than half of the dayshift was able to return to the surface. The others were trapped underground, too deep in the mine to escape. Scores of miners died almost immediately, frozen in place as they drilled, ate lunch, napped, or chatted. No one knew what was burning or where the smoke had come from. But in one of the deepest corners of the mine, Ron Flory and Tom Wilkinson were left alone and in total darkness, surviving off a trickle of fresh air from a borehole.

The miners’ families waited and prayed, while Launhardt, reeling from the shock of losing so many men on his watch, refused to close up the mine or give up the search until he could be sure that no one was left underground.

In The Deep Dark, Gregg Olsen looks beyond the intensely suspenseful story of the fire and rescue to the wounded heart of Kellogg, a quintessential company town that has never recovered from its loss. A vivid and haunting chapter in the history of working-class America, this is one of the great rescue stories of the twentieth century.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #261893 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-28
• Released on: 2006-03-28
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

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“Gregg Olsen is the perfect guide as he leads the reader down into a whole new world underground, with its own lore, language, and laws. The Deep Dark is as gripping and necessary as true-life drama gets.”—Stewart O’Nan, author of The Circus Fire

“Compellingly told, honestly written, The Deep Dark is a story that resonates and lingers, long after the ?nal page is read. In addition to being a gripping account of an American tragedy, it is a brutal, enlightening, bone-chilling glimpse into the underground of the nation’s mining industry. Gregg Olsen skillfully captures the details of Sunshine Mine, its ill-fated miners, the friends and family left behind, and the disaster itself with the intimacy of an insider, making you feel the smoke, the heat, the con?nement, and, ultimately, the terror of that May day in 1972. It is a story at once horri?c and poignant, wholly absorbing and extraordinarily moving.” —Jennifer Niven, author of The Ice Master

“In the tradition of Young Men and Fire, The Deep Dark is an exceptional, haunting documentary. Like an epic folk song, it crackles with the language of rough men working—and dying—in unspeakable ways and pays tribute to a community that might otherwise be bleached from our memories. This book does what all superior journalism should do: it unearths an important story and tells it with great feeling.” —McKay Jenkins, author of The White Death

“Gregg Olsen’s narrative is so riveting I had to keep reminding myself that this is a non?ction page-turner, not a suspense novel. The grit, the darkness, the stifling air and choking smoke, the fear of being trapped deep underground, the tender camaraderie between the toughest of men—I experienced all of them reading this book.” —Stephen Puleo, author of Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

“Olsen presents the extraordinary story of the Sunshine Mine disaster in gripping, heartrending prose. In Olsen’s telling, we come to see that the story is not merely a deadly disaster but rather a tale of the uncommon courage, perseverance, and heroism of everyday people.” —Edward T. O’Donnell, author of Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum

“Gregg Olsen has presented a well-researched, graphic account of the worst underground ?re in a hardrock mine in American history. When the ’Shine resumed underground operations in December 1972, I hired out as a replacement for one of the guys who died in the ?re. . . . I can tell you The Deep Dark is as real as it gets. I actually found myself short of breath as I read.” —Jerry Dolph, author of Fire in the Hole: The Untold Story of Hardrock Miners


From the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
The 1972 fire at Idaho's Sunshine silver mine was one of America's worst mine disasters, with 91 miners killed—some in mid-stride—by a "stealthy tornado" of smoke and carbon monoxide. True crime journalist Olsen (Abandoned Prayers) has the narrative chops for this story. His suspenseful account conveys the already hellish everyday atmosphere of the mine, the panic and chaos of the sudden catastrophe, the heroic efforts to evacuate, the ghastly deaths of victims, the (sometimes overdrawn) horror of their decomposing bodies and the ordeal of two miners trapped in an air pocket. But he goes further, embedding his chronicle within a social panorama of the macho subculture of the miners—whose disdain for safety precautions may have raised the body count even as their hard-bitten sense of fraternity held them together in the emergency—and of the larger working-class community that frayed and bonded in the face of the tragedy. Like Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, Olsen's is a story of male workers engaged in a primordial resource-extraction occupation, battling natural elements—earth, fire and (poisoned) air—that overwhelm the ties of masculine solidarity. In his gripping treatment, stocked with vividly drawn characters, one finds a metaphorical elegy for America's doomed industrial proletariat. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
A 1972 fire in the Sunshine Mine in Kellog, Idaho, killed 91 miners, leaving only two survivors. Personal biographies of the men and their families punctuate the narrative of the mine's history and its worst disaster. L.J. Ganser's stern voice and forceful presentation create an aura of tension as the smoke thickens and poisonous fumes fill the air. While he doesn't individualize voices, his emotional inflections suit the situations, especially in dialogue. Ganser's interpretation of the aftermath of the accident and the condition of the decomposed bodies is strong and graphic. The attitude toward disaster at Sunshine was similar to that of the TITANIC: It couldn't happen, so they weren't prepared. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

The Deep Dark
This book is a great read. Gregg Olsen really did a fine job detailing the perspective from the miners and families point of view. A book that was hard to put down.

Another world below the ground
I knew nothing about mining before reading this book. As for mine accidents, I've heard about a few, or many, but after they fade from the news in a few days, they'd fade from my mind. That will never happen again after reading this book.

The length of your life is infinitesimally small, read something of use
This book is based on a historically heartbreaking experience for many families in Idaho: a mining accident where many lives were lost. This book reads like a book of fiction where Olsen lacks character development pieces, something which is necessary to a good work written in this "style" even if the characters were real people. I am glad that the book was not written as a sort of "blood money cash-in," but it is not very useful in any sense. It was not very enjoyable simply to read the text, and I did not learn anything that I could apply to my life. There are references to the starts of mining safety programs incited by the incident - applicable today because the miners of yesteryear were the price that we had to pay to realize that safety measures are necessary in preventing accidents, but the rest is dull and uninteresting. Idaho students are being forced to read this book (if they wish to earn a good grade, that is) just because the account depicted happened in Idaho. My distaste with this fact does not influence my rating, but I must mention that I would like students to read works that teach more important ideas than what was presented in this work. Read The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan and change your life and your love for life, or read this book and feel unchanged and wholly disinterested in any mining phenomena for evermore.