--- title: "A Mine Bought 2,290 Metres Of Rope For A 620-Metre Shaft." dek: "A 1978 order book, a filed section drawing and sixteen state inspection cards disagree about how deep one shaft goes. The cards name a second winder and a compartment at 1,340 metres. No filed plan shows it." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: Off-World author: Ambrose Teague (fictional) published: 2026-08-23T05:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/deep-compartment-1340-metres tags: Dulce, Archuleta Mesa, winding gear, mine inspection, New Mexico, Phil Schneider genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # A Mine Bought 2,290 Metres Of Rope For A 620-Metre Shaft. *A 1978 order book, a filed section drawing and sixteen state inspection cards disagree about how deep one shaft goes. The cards name a second winder and a compartment at 1,340 metres. No filed plan shows it.* 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. > **Figure:** One site, three documents, and the three points that appear in only one of them — see https://theyburied.com/article/deep-compartment-1340-metres ## 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 weight is the only one of the four that knows anything about people. > > — Doreen Habershaw-Pino, state mine inspector 1985–1998 ## 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](/article/three-cavities-six-kilometres) 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](/article/sixty-one-names-eleven-weeks) 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. ## Sources (invented) - Thurgarton & Fell Ropeworks order books, volumes 1976–1981, Industrial archive, Tyne and Wear — Inspected in person and photographed; order 78/4412 is on folio 214 of the 1978 volume (2 July 2026) - New Mexico Mine Inspection and Reclamation Bureau, Form MI-14 annual winding certificates, site 03-114, 1979–1994 — Obtained under the state Inspection of Public Records Act; sixteen cards released in full, $61 in copying (June 2026) - Doreen Habershaw-Pino, State mine inspector 1985–1998; signed this card eight times — Interviewed at her home in Los Lunas, twice, the second time with the cards in front of her (21 July and 11 August 2026) - Sigfrid Anselm-Trant, Consulting winding engineer, thirty-one years on deep shafts in South Africa and Saskatchewan — Paid £3,200 to work the rope length and the counterweight from the cards alone, told only that the site was a North American shaft (July 2026) - State permit file, Cañon Largo Development Company, Surface permit and filed section drawing S-3, 1977 — Inspected at the state records centre; sheet S-3 photographed (June 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-1930: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1930 - PX-1402: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1402 ## What we could not confirm - The figure itself, to the metre. Form MI-14 certifies machinery — drum, rope, brake, counterweight — against a design depth the operator states, and the drop test Habershaw-Pino ran eight times will catch a wildly wrong depth inside four seconds but not one out by forty metres either way. That the compartment goes a long way below the filed bottom is settled three times over by the rope, the brake and the counterweight. Whether 1,340 is a surveyed number or a rounded one is a question for a plumb line and a tape, and the present permit holder refused us the collar in writing on 29 July, in two sentences, giving no reason. - Who kept the No. 2 rope register. A winding rope in service is changed every three to five years and the change is entered on the card. The No. 1 entries are all there, six of them. The No. 2 column is blank on all sixteen cards. Habershaw-Pino says she watched the No. 2 rope tested, which means the changes were entered somewhere. We have not found the book they went in. - What is at the bottom. This is the specific door still shut, and we want to be exact about it. The card certifies a way down and a cage sized for twelve men. It does not certify a room, a workforce or a purpose, and it does not name one. Everything anybody has ever published about what is done down there remains unsourced, including in this newspaper. ## Right of reply **Doreen Habershaw-Pino, state mine inspector 1985–1998** (Replied at the second meeting, recorded with her consent, and asked that it be printed whole. It is.): > You have got the machinery right and you have got what I was doing wrong, and I want the second part in print as firmly as the first. > > Form MI-14 is a winding certificate. It certifies the gear at the top of a shaft. I climbed the headframe, I put a gauge on the drum, I watched the rope run through the detaching hook, I dropped the cage on the brake from full speed with the counterweight loaded, and I signed. That is the whole of my statutory duty and I discharged it eight times at that site and I would sign every one of them again tomorrow. > > I never went down the No. 2 compartment. I never went down any compartment at that site. An inspector is not a surveyor. The depth on the card is the depth the operator declares, and I had no instrument, no budget and no authority to check it. So when you ask me whether there is a working level at 1,340 metres under Archuleta Mesa, the honest answer is that I do not know and never did, and any inspector who tells you otherwise about any site in this state is telling you what they were handed. > > Now I will say the other half, because you have sat in my kitchen twice and been fair with me. > > I certified a brake capable of arresting a loaded cage against 1,340 metres of rope. That is not a formality. You calculate it, you test it, you watch the drum, and if the number the operator gives you is nonsense the test tells you inside four seconds. The test did not tell me that. Ever. In eight years. > > I certified a counterweight of 4,180 kilograms. Your engineer has worked back from it to a cage carrying about twelve men and he is right, and I could have told you that in 1987 because that is the size of cage I saw sitting in the No. 2 chair. > > And I asked, once, in the spring of 1991, whether I could ride it down. I was told the deep compartment was not on my certificate. I remember the sentence exactly because it made no sense to me then and it makes less now. The compartment was the only thing on my certificate. It was the reason there was a certificate. > > I let it go. I had eleven other sites that month and a supervisor who did not want a fight. That is what I have to say for myself. > > What I will not have is your Meridian Telegraph counting floors. There are no floors on my card. There is a drum, a rope, a brake and a weight, and the weight is the only one of the four that knows anything about people. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.