Every May 2, the Silver Valley stops to read 91 names aloud. They are the men who went underground at the Sunshine Mine on the morning of Tuesday, May 2, 1972, and never came home — victims of the worst disaster in Idaho history, and of an underground fire that changed American mining law forever.
The Sunshine Mine, at Big Creek between Wallace and Kellogg, was one of the richest silver mines in the United States, worked since the 1880s and driven thousands of feet into the mountains of Shoshone County. On that spring morning, 173 men were underground on shift. At about 11:40 a.m., electricians working near the shop on the mine's 3700 level smelled smoke. Somewhere in the worked-out upper levels, a fire had taken hold, and the mine's ventilation system — designed to move fresh air to the working faces — began carrying smoke and carbon monoxide through the haulage ways instead.
Managers tried to pinpoint the fire and could not. At 12:03 p.m., an evacuation was ordered, but for many crews the order came too late or the escape routes were already filled with gas. Carbon monoxide is colorless and odorless, and it overtook men as they tried to climb and ride to the surface. Eighty miners escaped that day. Ninety-one died of carbon monoxide poisoning, most of them without ever seeing a flame.
What followed was one of the great mine rescue efforts in American history. Rescue teams organized by the mining industry and the U.S. Bureau of Mines worked around the clock in rotating crews, fighting heat, smoke, and bad air to re-enter the mine level by level. For days the work was recovery rather than rescue, and hope faded — until May 9, a full week after the fire, when rescuers found two men alive deep underground. Tom Wilkerson and Ron Flory had found a pocket of survivable air and waited in the dark for seven days. Their rescue, carried out about a mile below the surface, was the single bright moment in a week of grief for every family in the valley.
Investigators from the Bureau of Mines ultimately concluded that the probable cause was spontaneous combustion of refuse near scrap timber used to backfill worked-out stopes, though the exact origin was never established with certainty. The mine remained closed for seven months. At the time, the Sunshine fire was the largest disaster in the hard-rock mining industry since the 1917 Speculator Mine fire in Butte, Montana.
The disaster's reach extended far beyond Shoshone County. The fire exposed deep weaknesses in how the federal government oversaw safety in metal and nonmetal mines, whose miners had far weaker protections than coal miners. Five years later, Congress passed the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977, which created the Mine Safety and Health Administration and brought all American mines under one stronger system of inspections and enforcement. MSHA itself calls May 2, 1972, the day that changed the mining industry forever.
The men are remembered where the valley can see them. At Big Creek, just off Interstate 90 at Exit 54, the Sunshine Miners Memorial centers on a 13-foot steel miner sculpted by Ken Lonn, headlamp lit, hoisting his rock drill toward the sky as if punching for air. The names of the 91 are inscribed on the base, along with a poem by former Idaho governor Phil Batt, and small markers stand for each man lost. Every year on May 2, families, miners, and neighbors gather there for a memorial service, the roll of names is read, and the valley remembers.
Photo: The Sunshine Miners Memorial at Big Creek, Idaho. Photograph by Visitor7, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.