Word: shaft
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Shaft. Around that narrow hole, a community rallied to the first radio call for help, and a nation anxiously waited for word of the lost child. Drills, derricks, bulldozers and trucks were rushed to the lot from a dozen towns. Three giant cranes lumbered through Los Angeles behind police escort. Firemen ran an air hose down the well, began pumping air down by a rotary pump. A little more than an hour after Kathy's fall, a power-drill crew began to sink a shaft alongside the abandoned well. On the other side, big clamshell shovels clawed an open...
...midnight, the shaft was down 41 feet; by 4 a.m., down 65 feet. Then the drilling stopped; the shaking of the drill might cave in the sandy California soil in the bigger pit. As dawn broke hot and clear over the San Gabriel Mountains, the snorting, clangorous power shovels had dug a pit 57 feet deep. "Whitey" Blickensderfer, 43, an unemployed ex-sandhog, was lowered into the crater with a partner-little, gnomelike O. A. Kelly, an out-of-work carpenter and ex-miner. By midmorning, they had tunneled to the well pipe, cut a small exploratory window...
They decided not to dig any further in the open excavation, and concentrated instead on the narrow shaft. All that hot, still afternoon, the big drill ground away. The shaft had to be lined by 24-in. casing, to prevent a cave-in. It was Saturday, and all afternoon the crowds thickened. By midnight, 12,000 were standing in the chilly spring night-grave, subdued neighbors, sightseers and dating teenagers, men & women in evening dress. In a car a little back from the scene, David Fiscus and his wife sat out their vigil. To sympathetic queries, he said wearily...
Again & again, the word would come from somewhere: "Only a couple of hours more now." Again & again, there were fresh delays: Tempers were short; arguments flared over what might have been done. At last diggers, deep in the shaft, began to tunnel laterally toward Kathy's iron prison. Whitey was only a few shovelfuls away from the well pipe, when he was hauled to the surface, his face angry and set. There was water in his boots. Slowly at first, then faster, water poured into the tunnel. Digging stopped...
...three hours before the shaft could be pumped dry. Whitey went back down. "He deserves a knighthood," said a worker, "but he doesn't even have a job." Others relieved him. The lateral tunnel began to cave in. The low talk of the workmen was carried over the loudspeaker. "It's caving to beat the band," said the voice below. Timbers went down for shoring. The men worked on, regardless of danger, or bone-deep fatigue. Little O. A. Kelly leaned back wearily when he was pulled to the surface, and swore: "I'm going in there...