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The Sunshine Mine is located between Kellogg and Wallace, Idaho. It's 6000 feet deep and was, for decades, America's leading source of silver. They call that piece of North Idaho the Silver Valley, and the Sunshine Mine is a large part of the reason why.
Let me tell you a bit about silver ore, or at least the silver ore you'll find in Idaho. It's mostly quartz with streaks of metals, mainly lead but with silver, copper and other valuable metals, throughout. (In "the day," the ore was taken to the Bunker Hill Smelter in Kellogg. There it was crushed and melted; with increasing heat the rock would liberate first lead, then silver, and finally an amalgam of metals including copper. Each was skimmed off; lead and silver were poured into ingots, the amalgam was sent to Montana to be processed at a copper smelter. The rock that remained would be saved to sand roads with in the winter. Needless to say, this isn't the healthiest job to have. ) None of these things burn and, because quartz is so hard, the place where it's dug out of the ground is called a "hard-rock mine." And, for a lot of years, it was assumed a hard-rock mine wouldn't burn.
Unfortunately, a hard-rock mine full of greasy equipment, high explosives, wooden shoring, polyurethane foam and miners burns fine.
In the morning of May 2, 1972, 173 miners entered the Sunshine Mine. That day, a fire broke out more than 3100 feet below ground (the mine is well over 6000 feet deep) which filled the mine with thick black smoke. By the time the fire was out, 91 miners had died. It's the worst hard-rock mining disaster in US history.
No one knows why the mine caught fire. No one ever will.
Their monument is the Self Rescuer. Coal miners have long carried these--they convert carbon monoxide to oxygen so you can walk out of the mine. Now all miners carry them.
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