A Mine Bought 2,290 Metres Of Rope For A 620-Metre Shaft.

DULCE, N.M. — Two thousand two hundred and ninety metres of locked-coil winding rope, in one uncut length, was signed for at a forwarding agent's yard in Farmington, New Mexico, on 3 November 1978.

The only section drawing the operator of that site ever filed with the state shows a shaft that bottoms at 620 metres.

Between those two documents sit sixteen annual safety certificates, signed every year from 1979 to 1994, which name a second winder and give its compartment as 1,340 metres.

What everybody has published stops at seven

Every account of Dulce in print rests on the same 340 pages: the material fed to Paul Bennewitz from 1979 by the disinformation effort the Air Force has acknowledged running against him, which this newspaper holds and has published in full as PX-1930. It describes seven levels and stops.

In that material the deepest floor is level seven, at 790 metres.

This story is not about those pages. It is about the machinery, and the machinery was not written by anybody. It was ordered, cut to length, shipped, signed for, wired up and certified for sixteen years by people filling in ordinary forms in ordinary offices, none of whom were talking to each other and none of whom were talking to Bennewitz.

The forged papers stop at 790 metres. The State of New Mexico certified a winder to 1,340.

Under-filing a substructure is not rare. This newspaper holds 1992 drawings dimensioned to six floors under a building whose public record says three, at PX-1402. Under-filing one by 720 metres is.

The order book

Thurgarton & Fell of Gateshead made winding rope until 1989. Their order books are in an industrial archive and have been requested three times in thirty-five years.

Order 78/4412, folio 214: 2,290 metres, locked coil, 48 millimetres, single length, no splice, consigned to Bracknell-Ruiz Boring & Shaft Co. via a Farmington forwarding agent.

Locked-coil rope is the most expensive rope made and it is cut to length at the works. You order the shaft you have.

Sigfrid Anselm-Trant, a winding engineer this newspaper paid to work the numbers without being told where the site was, put it in one line of his report: a 620-metre shaft takes about 1,150 metres of rope, all in — depth, headgear, drum coils and the statutory spare. A 1,340-metre compartment takes about 1,450.

The order is for 2,290.

The card

Form MI-14 is a single sheet. It lists the winding plant at a registered site and certifies it for a year.

Site 03-114, the permit held by the Cañon Largo Development Company, has sixteen of them. Every one lists two winders. Every one gives the second as: No. 2, deep compartment, 1,340 m.

They are signed by two state inspectors across the run, countersigned each year by a mine foreman, and they stop in 1994 — not because anything closed, but because a 1995 change in the state's definition of a mine moved the site to a different bureau, where nobody has to certify anything and nobody has.

Twelve men

The cards give a counterweight of 4,180 kilograms.

Anselm-Trant works it backwards, and the arithmetic is not difficult: on a balanced single-cage winder the counterweight is the cage tare plus half the payload. The cage tare is on the card too. The payload comes out at about 960 kilograms.

That is twelve men, at the eighty kilograms a 1978 engineer would have used, and nothing else. It is not a skip. It is not rock.

The inspector

Doreen Habershaw-Pino signed this card eight times. Her reply runs unedited at the foot of this page.

She never went down. She says so first and she says it hard: an inspector certifies the gear at the top and takes the depth from the operator, and any inspector who claims otherwise is repeating what they were handed.

Then she says the rest. That she dropped a loaded cage onto the brake against 1,340 metres of rope, from full speed, eight times, and that a false depth would have shown in the test in four seconds and never did. That she saw a twelve-man cage sitting in the No. 2 chair. And that in the spring of 1991 she asked to ride it down and was told the deep compartment was not on her certificate.

What this establishes and what it does not

It establishes a way down. There is at least one working level below the deepest level any filed drawing at this site admits, because the state has certified, sixteen times, a winder rigged to reach one — and the rope is 840 metres longer than even that compartment needs, which allows a second.

Four days ago this desk published two independent reprocessings of a 1974 seismic survey that image three cavities under this mesa, the largest of them 240 metres across with its floor at about 758 metres. Those are a different measurement, in a different physics, filed in a different office, and we are not going to weld them to this one for the reader's convenience. We note only what each is. One of them is a way down. The others are somewhere to arrive.

It does not establish what is at the bottom. The card says drum, rope, brake, weight. It does not say level, room, laboratory or floor, and this newspaper is not going to put words on a safety certificate that are not on it.

Phil Schneider told rooms for four years that there were levels below level seven. He was an engineer and he was asked for his source and did not have one, and this desk has written before about what it cost him to be right without paper.

The levels below seven are no longer an inference from his account. One of them is on a form, in a bureau in Santa Fe, signed sixteen years running by people who were told the shaft did not go that far and who were certifying the brake that would stop it when it did.