Infrastructure Technicians (left to right) Rodney Loup, Foreman Russ Bauer, Matt Kelly and Will Hover tie off before descending to continue top-down maintenance on the Yates Shaft.
It’s an undertaking that rivals the great architecture of cityscapes with the craftmanship of sculptors. Four crews, each with four infrastructure technicians and almost all of whom possessed limited experience in woodworking, are writing the manual on how to overhaul a mile-deep wood shaft buried in the earth at Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF).
Wendy Straub, director of hoists and shafts, leads a team tackling top-down maintenance, or TDM, of the Yates Shaft. “I’m tremendously proud of the people. There’s no book for how to fix this shaft. How do you fix a 90-year-old shaft?”
The project, now approaching 18 months in length, began when a series of challenges with the existing structure were discovered leading to an increasing number of down days to repair each area. In late 2022, the decision was made to close the shaft for all but emergency access to execute the TDM on the 20th century marvel. The around-the-clock project transformed the routine maintenance done by the shaft crews over the years into a multi-year commitment to improve the long-term health and viability of the shaft.
Yates Shaft Foreman Ashana Baumberger gives a sense of the space and time where the work is happening.
“You can only fit so many people in there. We have a four-person crew and with one more person it gets pretty tight. With the amount of space we have, and then the time we have, and because we go 24/7 now with all four crews, it’s as fast as we can go.”
The crews conduct a cross-over meeting every morning as one crew departs and the next crew arrives.
“We check all the conveyances, look them over. We see what they did last night, and what needs to be done, and what to follow up. We have a meeting amongst our crew about what we’re going to do and how we’re going to go about it,” Baumberger explained. Before descending, each shift begins with safety and preparation.
Understanding what these crews do to help rebuild one of the only wood shafts operating in the United States, includes fully understanding the space in which they work, the tasks they tackle, the skills they are perfecting, and the scope of the project they are undertaking. The voices of the infrastructure technicians tell the story of an undertaking to bring the Yates Shaft into its second century.
The only ones doing this kind of work
Tied off to beam straps which are secured to the work deck, the crew operates in a space that is segmented into several compartments: two cages for transporting equipment and personnel, two skips for removing rock and debris from the facility, the runabout, and the utility space, which includes pipes, electrical, and communication equipment for all the levels of the underground laboratory. Each section includes timber that must be replaced, abandoned utilities that must be removed, and ground support that must be installed before moving down to the next level.
Joe Sigdestad, an infrastructure technician, or an IT as the crew members are colloquially referred, described the transition to the dedicated work renovating the shaft.
“When we first started replacing timbers, you’d see the list and were like, ‘Where’s that?’”
As he neared the one-year mark in the project, Sigdestad considered the progress far more structured and routine.
“Replacing the timbers is probably the biggest difference because before we weren’t doing the timbers. It just takes a little more pre-planning on doing your sequence of events to make it more streamlined. Now you have to do things in a little bit different pattern because you’ve got to account for blocking and lacing and everything else.”
Wood shafts are disappearing structures from a bygone era, some built and discarded (like the historic Ellison Shaft at SURF) and others replaced by steel infrastructure, like the Ross Shaft in use at SURF. Perhaps as few as only two or three are still in operation in the United States.
Yates Shaft Foreman Russ Bauer recognized the unique nature of the work the crews are doing. “We’re probably the only ones doing this kind of work – the history of it.”
Rodney Loup, an infrastructure tech on Bauer’s crew, agreed, and reflected on the overall project impact.
“You’ve got 20 folks doing this, probably not nationwide, but almost worldwide. We’re tearing out something that’s kind of historical and then we’re doing the same work, so you can feel proud about that.”
Bauer describes the work as best he can to people who are unfamiliar with the scope and size of the project. “It’s just hard to explain stuff because we have terms for everything. Place and block – obviously that doesn’t mean anything to anybody who hasn’t seen it. I kind of try to explain what each piece is and kind of how you do it. Try and find pictures – that helps.”
Yates Shaft Foreman Mike Mergen, likewise explained the challenge of describing the work, even to his own family.
“We don’t talk about it much because it’s hard to explain to the outside, to somebody that’s never seen it. I try to describe it as best I can, you know, and just say it’s dark and dirty.”
“I kind of tell them more about the science aspect,” Sigdestad said about his discussions with his family. “When I first started, I showed them how you can go to YouTube and show them somebody using a jackleg and they get an idea of what some of that stuff is. It’s kind of interesting.”
To help explain the project on a singular level, Infrastructure Technician Alexis Novotny points to a permanent diagram on a dry-erase board in the work area just feet away from the main entrance to the shaft. Each level is drawn onto the diagram as the updates are in progress.
“NEP is northeast wall plate, or southeast wall plate, and then the northwest wall plate, southwest wall plate. P-eight and P-nine are panel eight and panel nine, and then there’s ten panels. D-one, -two, and -three are divider one, divider two, divider three.”
It’s a language the infrastructure techs speak fluently, and is critical to the successful planning and work for each shift, each timber, and every step of the multi-year project.
Novotny walks through the steps, the order of replacing timbers, the process of removing the lacing, and how the foursome works together to execute the steps, and then hands it off to a fresh crew 12 hours later. Plus, there’s a supply list, which requires preplacing everything needed for the shift and the transportation of the supplies to the current level where repairs are underway.
There’s a 5,000-foot hole
In describing the daily workload of the crew, it’s easy to forget that all of these tasks are happening in an opening in the ground that descends nearly 5,000 feet (1,500 meters).
“We did a survey years ago and this shaft is pretty straight all the way to the bottom,” said Bauer. His crew members, Infrastructure Technician Will Hover, and Loup, also recognized the impressive nature of the Yates Shaft in a word: incredible.
“Some of the timbers we’re getting into now are original timbers from back in the day because they’re one solid timber 27-feet long,” explained Loup.
Hoover agreed, “Incredible. We’ve talked about that quite a bit. With the technology back then and how crazy they had to be. That’s really a testament to those guys, you know, of how it’s held up. It was really only supposed to last 50 years and it’s going on 90.”
In addition to its age, the Yates Shaft represents multiple considerations for the crews who are working on the shaft's TDM. Its depth and its width also impact the daily work of these crews.
Matt Kelly, the fourth and newest member of Bauer’s crew, described his first impressions.
“It’s hard to explain because if you’ve never seen it, it’s kind of mind boggling. Some people get weirded out when you tell them you’re in a mile-deep shaft. They’re thinking of this small area, 15-foot by 27-foot and not like it’s a big opening.”
Oddly, Kelly continued in describing the small work area, it’s the claustrophobia, not the acrophobia, that people find unnerving. “You can’t see the bottom.”
Even with all the training they receive, crew members are always surprised when they start work in the shaft. “I remember when I first started reading through all the SOPs,” recalled Hover, “I still had no clue what was going on until we actually went down and did the work.”
The first week working in the shaft, Loup equated going underground to, "gaining your sea legs. It’s kind of a weird feeling knowing that there’s nothing below that cage. Going out there and knowing there’s a 5,000-foot hole, it was kind of eerie at first, but then, to me, a day or two and I was good.”
Day and night, day in day out
While maintenance work in the Yates Shaft has always been part of the job description for its infrastructure technicians, most routine maintenance would happen during the overnight shift while the day shift was spent transporting people and supplies to the Davis Campus on the 4850 Level (4,850 feet below the surface). The TDM prioritized the work of the crews to 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week maintenance.
Transitioning to all-day and all-night TDM also changed the nature of the work the infrastructure technicians do on their shifts. The biggest change required the Yates Shaft crews to master woodworking skills needed to shape the Douglas fir used in the majority of the shaft.
Infrastructure Technician Jake Mack gave credit to the voices of experience who got the crews started on improving their skills.
“We were really lucky that some of the old timers were still here. Charlie Roth did timber back in Homestake [Mining Company] and for RCS Construction when they started rebuilding.”
Baumberger added, “Charlie was an integral part of getting started on the timbers. I think he’d been here for 40 years when he retired. I worked with him for five years, and I learned a lot from Charlie, and then once he was just about to retire, we started doing timber. Going down and showing us how to do it – that was big.”
Brent Knottnerus, senior mechanical engineer assigned to the Yates Shaft TDM, praised Roth's attitude. “It was invaluable to teach the crews.”
Knottnerus recognized that the infrastructure technicians took their enhanced training and built upon it. “The crews learned and then they came up with their own way of doing stuff, too. They took it upon themselves to mill the timbers using the tools that were in the old sawmill. They figured it out in a way to do it safely, to do it efficiently. It’s not an easy job. They continue to do it day and night, day in day out.”
The ingenuity of the crews to adapt their skills to each timber, finding new ways to manage the needs at each level, and discussing the work at every step with their crew leaders helped get the project started. Adding to their organization and productivity, they incorporated efficiency in milling the timbers, while constantly maintaining the highest safety standards and procedures.
At first, Baumberger wasn't sure how to approach the task of changing a timber. "I don’t even know where to start. It was pretty daunting.”
“It’s a slow process. If you try to rush things, then things cannot go as well as they should,” Sigdestad explained. “It’s a matter of finding the best way. When we first started, we were thinking one timber in a day. Now we can sometimes do three or four timbers in a shift.”
One bucket, one generation at a time
The technicians recognize the impact they are making before and after work. As the project advances, it's dramatic to see how all their completed work compares to the old timbers they are removing as the crews work downward to the next level.
“If you thought it was bad, and then you get down eight months later and see a bad timber,” explains Kelly, “you’re like, ‘okay, that’s pretty bad.”
“It was held together by shaft glue,” acknowledges Sigdestad. The combination of rock, mud, and aged timbers often combines into an adhesive that over time fills in the smallest spaces between timbers.
Mergen described the tedious process of removing all that ‘shaft glue.’ “Everybody sees the muck pile out there [in the Yates yard] growing, and they don’t see the 10 million saw cuts that we do. Or hand walk all this stuff one five-gallon bucket at a time with claw hammers. We fill up two 11-ton skips every day.”
The methodical work of removing bucket after bucket of caked dirt and rock, much of which accumulated over decades of removing debris from the former mine, requires a massive amount of work on a small scale.
“You’ll run into a section where there’s a lot of muck from leftover skipping. You’ve got to cut all those boards out and it’s muddy. You take a five-gallon bucket with a claw hammer and you’re carrying those over to the skip and dumping them there,” said Mike Oates, underground operations logistical coordinator. “It’s hard work for those guys.”
Even just emptying the bucket takes a team. “You’ve got one bucket, and you have to pass it from the south cage,” explained Novotny, “and then you pass it over to a person standing on the north cage and then pass it to a third person on the South skip and then they'll dump it. It's just a bucket and you hand them back. I've tried to count buckets and lost track around five, but there's hundreds of buckets per panel that you've taken out.”
Mergen compared the process to a popular game. “It’s a puzzle. It’s kind of like Jenga. You’ve just got to think your way through it every day, pulling the right piece of wood at the right time. It’s not just as easy as going down, putting a screw in and a little bolt. There’s a lot more.”
Cooper Reutter knows that the big picture makes the process of removing the timbers piece by piece memorable. “The wood’s cool because it’s more historic than metal. Some timbers in there are quite a bit older than everybody in this room.”
The history of the wood isn’t the only element of the project that binds many of the crew members to the current TDM project. “My grandpa, my Dad’s dad, mined from the 41[00] to the 48[50]. This hole. It’s kind of cool when I’m down in that area working. I’m reworking what my Grandpa probably did,” shared Mergen. “A lot of generations of people in my bloodline have been in this hole.”
The work the technicians complete over the course of the TDM prepares and solidifies the historic Yates Shaft for what’s coming in its not-too-distant future: a complete conversion to steel, similar to the Ross Shaft.
The overall process of TDM varies from the original construction, too. “It’s different the way we’re doing it than the way they did,” explained Bauer. “They stacked all their timber instead of hanging. That’s how they can get full [27-foot] timbers. They’d stack them on top of the posts.”
That method won't work anymore, though.
“Since it’s in place already, we don’t really have that option,” Hover said. “We kind of had to figure out different tricks and ways to do it now. A bit of trial and error.”
Sam Gonsioroski, one of the last infrastructure technicians brought in after the TDM started, also considered how to share his everyday work on a once-in-a-lifetime project with his family.
“I like all my work underground. I’ve got two young boys at home that think it’s kind of cool. They don’t have any idea what’s going on. I think it’s cool.”
The more seasoned crew members also have their own perspective on the experience of working in a 90-year-old wood shaft.
In conversations with his family, Baumberger keeps it simple. “I just tell them I love them every day.”
