The only way to get the sand out was to dig by hand using muck sticks, throwing the sand down the manway and then shoveling it onto the track, where we would load ore cars using a mucking machine. It was going to be a slow and laborious job.
During the sand-fill operation, I had constructed an eight-foot bulkhead to contain the sand as it was pumped into the stope. We removed the bulkhead, and there in front of us was an eight-foot high wall of sand. The wall was about ten feet wide at the bulkhead but quickly spread out as the stope widened going inward.
After staring at that impressive wall of sand for a few minutes, we slowly began tunneling into it. When we got around six feet in, things got a little dicey. Now we had a tunnel with eight-foot high walls of sand on either side of where we were working. Should either of those walls collapse while were we in the tunnel, we would be buried with no hope of getting out.
We decided that from then on only one of us would dig while the other stayed back where the bulkhead had been. Should a cave-in of sand occur, the one of us who was outside the tunnel could dig out the one who was buried.
It was very unpleasant work being inside that tunnel of sand with the eight-foot walls. Sand-fill carried with it a very unpleasant odor no matter how much ventilation bag we hung. In addition, the sand got into everything on our person like, but not exactly, a day at the beach. Then of course there was the possibility of a sand cave-in. When it was my turn to dig, I was somewhat nervous every minute I was in there.
The work was very slow. We could only throw so much sand down the manway before it would rise high enough to block our exiting the stope. We were constantly stopping the tunneling and descending the manway to shovel sand out onto the track.
When we had a good-sized pile of sand on the track, I would use a mucking machine to fill ore cars with sand. Running that mucking machine was the only fun part of the day for me. I loved running that mucker.
My previous experience operating a mucker—having worked for Riordan on track drift construction—came in handy, and I was very confident in my abilities. Although I derailed the machine every now and then, thanks to having so much practice returning derailed ore cars to the track, I was proficient at getting the mucker back on track.
Other than that mucker, what we were doing was a lousy job. There wasn’t much about being underground that I disliked, but that job was one I detested.
End of the Line
Monday morning had arrived, and I was in a bad mood. I had been in El Paso again, for the thirteenth consecutive weekend, and it had not gone well.
That was the weekend Ana Maria and I had broken up with a fight starting just about the time I arrived late Friday evening. Rather than drive another four hours back to Grants, I made an ill-advised decision to stay in El Paso when I agreed to talk it over with her more on Saturday. Predictably that didn’t go well either, so I was in a particularly bad mood on the long drive back to Grants.
I had few personal problems during my time working underground, something I didn’t appreciate fully until years later. When there was something bothering me, I successfully avoided taking whatever it was to the job. Mining was too dangerous to be thinking about anything but the work.
Looking out for my partner and myself was always the main priority underground, and I had stuck to that rule. Yet here I was, distraught after having experienced a very bad weekend. I was functioning on four hours of sleep and not thinking much about the job.
My helper, Anthony Gonzales, and I had spent the past three months cleaning the sand-fill out of a very large portion of the 502. Clearing the sand-fill had been tedious, had not paid much, and was dangerous, but we had done it.
This day we were preparing to again mine the rich uranium that had been found by the geologists. We had set up our water and compressed air lines and had a nice new machine to drill with and a stack of timber waiting.
Before beginning the sand-fill operation in the 502 months earlier, I had removed all the valuable equipment, pipes, and hoses.
Among the items not removed were many scraps of wood left over from building the dozens of square-sets needed for ground support. I say scraps, but these ranged in size from small chunks to four-foot sections of twelve-by-twelve timber.
Because the sand sinks to the bottom and water stays on top, anything that floats ends up near the back during a sand-fill operation. The end result was a lot of large, waterlogged timber remnants pinned up to the back. That wouldn’t have mattered, and nobody would have cared if the mined-out stope was sealed up. But in the case of the 502, Al and I had gone back in, making it a very dangerous place with all those timber remnants many feet above our heads.
As the sand was being cleared, we constantly kept an eye out for any timber scraps mixed in with the sand that could potentially fall on us. It wasn’t unusual to have small portions of the walls of sand collapse on us as we dug. They were minor, but frequent. Having the walls of sand cave in on us was serious enough, but to get hit by one of those scraps could have been fatal, so we always stayed aware of where the waterlogged blocks of wood were. Similar to scaling the back and ribs after blasts, we often induced some sand cave-ins just to remove the danger posed by blocks of wood, taking great care when bringing them down.
We were now in the stope, having removed better than 95 percent of the sand-fill we needed to remove and could see the rich uranium ore we were after. This, I thought, would provide some very good paydays.
While the uranium ore was rich in the 502, the ground was no more stable than it had been during the days when Cal and I had mined there. In addition to watching for those chunks of waterlogged wood, we had to be vigilant for signs that the ground above might give way. In fact, having had many months of experience in there, I was much more apprehensive about the ground falling in on us than what condition the remaining sand-fill was in.
I had seen this place collapse before, and it didn’t look much better or sound much different as Anthony and I prepared to drill and blast our first round in over three months.
As we got closer to the area where the ore was, I had spent some time surveying and planning. The face where we would be drilling didn’t look good to me. The ground was very uneven and would need to be blasted flat in order to install proper ground support.
The immediate area where I would be drilling was an odd shape with many angles created by minor cave-ins and the overall of deterioration of the stope that had taken place prior to the sand-fill operation. All of the places I had mined previously had a square look to them similar to rooms and hallways. We built square-sets to hold the ground up, so we blasted square patterns to fit the sets into. Fairly simple. As I surveyed the area in front of us, I was thinking of ways to make it square and pretty.
I could see that the uneven ground had the black, sandy look of good uranium ore, but it wasn’t flat, so wouldn’t do. No, that place had to be made square, so I decided to make the floor nice and flat, and since it was good ore, we would get paid for doing it.
The area of the stope that we had cleared of sand was a fraction of the overall space that had previously been mined. We were to the left of the hundreds of collapsed square-sets from the previous cave-in that occurred when Cal and I worked the stope. All we had to our right was another eight-foot wall of sand approximately forty feet long.
It was usually prudent to plan wisely and work safely underground, but having been in a hurry, I unfortunately did neither in this case, and neglected to clear a larger area to our right that would have made the site where we would be drilling much safer. So there we were, preparing to drill just a few feet from a huge wall of unsupported sand. Furthermore, I should have considered that the reverberations caused by the drill could have potentially broken the wall loose, but it either never occurred to me, or I ignored the internal warning.