Operating the double-drum is Ira Sliger's job, although some days, like today, he has a partner to assist him. Sliger is sixty years old, looks, as he likes to say, "big enough to eat oats and pull a plow," but forty-four years of metal mining have left their mark. One lung is gone, and the other has been weakened by emphysema-"dust on the lungs," he calls it. All morning Sliger and his partner, Bob Scanlan, sit in the control booth in the cavernous underground hoistroom, hauling muck buckets up and down the shaft according to bell signals from the cager, who supervises the muck loading a half-mile below. Until noon it is an ordinary day. At one o'clock more than half of the crew will be dead.

Shortly after twelve Sliger gets a phone call from a shaft crew on the 4400 level. (The crew had smelled smoke in the shaft and signaled for the 3700 chippy hoist. When it didn't come, and no one answered in the hoistroom, they called Sliger to ask what was wrong.) They don't mention the smoke. Sliger figures the signal system must have gone out. It failed once before in the past week, and he isn't surprised that it has apparently happened again. Underground miners keep their sanity by not worrying too much, and Sliger is philosophical. He turns back to his controls, but immediately there is another call, this from his boss, Gene Johnson, on 3700.The Sunshine Silver Mine

"'Where's your cager at?" asks Johnson. "Get him up here as soon as you can." "What's the trouble, Gene?" asks Scanlan, overhearing. "There's a fire down there."

Those are chilling words in the confined workings of a deep underground mine, where even a small, contained blaze in an oil drum, or from a single piece of machinery, can generate enough carbon monoxide to kill anyone working "inby" or downwind. And most of the mine is inby the 3700-foot level.

Besides being the main travelway from the No. 10 shaft to the Jewell shaft, the 3700 level also houses the underground foremen's office-the "Blue Room"-and the maintenance shops-the pipe, electric, machine, warehouse, and drill shops. About 11:35 A.M., shortly after they finished lunch, two miners stepped out, of the electric shop into the drift, smelled smoke, and yelled "Fire!" Thirty feet down the drift in the Blue Room, foremen Harvey Dionne and Gene Johnson grabbed their helmets and battery packs and ran out into the tunnel. What happened on 3700 during the next thirty minutes cannot be told with any certainty. By one account it was Dionne and Johnson who finally made the decision to evacuate. By another account, it was Dionne and foreman Jim Bush: In any event, before any decision was made, the foremen looked for the fire, following the smoke west toward the Jewell shaft 800 feet until they reached the 910 raise, a vertical shaft which rose 300 feet through old, worked-out portions of the mine. There the smoke seemed heaviest, but they couldn't see where it was coming from. Dionne crawled up onto the timber supports, and from there he could see smoke pouring out of the raise. By his account, he and Johnson talked briefly and decided to evacuate the mine, Johnson. starting back to No. 10 shaft to give the evacuation orders and Dionne and two other men heading for the Jewell shaft to close the fire door.