Spooky Jobs: Work in Underground Mines is Dark, Loud and Cramped

10/26/2009

Some jobs require special endurance. Some jobs are just plain creepy. In this week before Halloween, our correspondents have been finding the spookiest jobs in the Northwest. Today, we go deep underground, for a job only a few can do.

At the Galena Mine in Wallace, Idaho, we're going where few people get to go deep underground with foreman John Weinkauf.

Weinkauf: "That bucket right there's called a sinking bucket. We're going to ride down in one of those buckets."

The open–air bucket is tiny, just four feet square. We can feel the chill as it drops us more than 3,000 feet underground. We're wearing hard hats with bright little lamps to see in the dark passages. Once we're underground, the closer we get to the earth's core, it warms up. In some places, it's downright hot; the miners who drill for silver are sweating.

It's dark. It's loud. And Weinkauf says it's cramped.

Weinkauf: "We have some areas that are very narrow, very small. I mean, head height and three feet wide. And a lot of people are claustrophobic about that."

Weinkauf says they don't last long as miners.

Weinkauf: "Most people, when they come underground, you know within the first week or so if they're going to make it underground or not. I mean, we've had people that don't. They just they come down and they're scared of it. They're scared of the environment."

Perhaps some of the fear comes from stories about terrible mining accidents. Many in north Idaho still remember that 91 men died in a fire underground at the nearby Sunshine Mine in 1972. But Weinkauf says spooky doesn't necessarily translate into danger, unlike back then.

Weinkauf: "Everybody had one safety guy. You might see him. You might not. Now, I mean, our safety is underground every day."

Doug Nadvornick, Spokane Public Radio.

© Copyright 2009, Spokane Public Radio