33 Men (3 page)

Mario Sepúlveda missed the bus from Copiapó that morning. At 9
am
he began to hitchhike to the mine. Traffic was sparse and rides impossible along the long road. Sepúlveda was tempted to head back to his cheap boardinghouse. Then a lonely truck arrived on the horizon. When it stopped and picked him up, Sepúlveda felt lucky. He would make it to work after all. At 10
am
he arrived at the mine, checked in, joked with the security guards. By 10:30
am
he was driving into the belly of the mountain.

At 11:30
am
, the mountain cracked. Workers asked the head of mining operations, Carlos Pinilla, what was happening. According to congressional testimony by the miners, Pinilla was heading down into the shaft at the time. He told the miners the sound was a normal “settling of the mine,” and kept them deep inside the shaft. Pinilla himself, according to the miners, commandeered the first available vehicle, turned around, and immediately headed for the surface. “He left early that day and he never did that. He would usually leave at one or one-thirty and that day he left around eleven,” Jorge Galleguillos testified. “He was scared.”

Raúl Bustos knew next to nothing about mining when he entered the San José copper mine on the fateful morning of August 5. Bustos was a man at home on the water, working on boats, repairing, welding and fixing water systems at the Chilean Navy shipyards. He worked there for years until a Sunday morning in February 2010, when he lost not only his job but his entire workplace, which was dragged out to sea by a thirty-foot-high wall of water, a deadly tsunami. The 8.8 earthquake that spawned the tsunami left few factories standing in the coastal city of Talcahuano, so Bustos migrated 800 miles north to the San José mine.

Bustos, forty years old, knew the mine's dangerous reputation but was not worried. His job often kept him in a garage with a zinc-roofed shed, on a treeless hillside repairing vehicles. Sunstroke and homesickness seemed to be his biggest dangers. Every other week, he rode the bus half the length of the nation to see his wife, Carolina. Bustos never complained about the twenty-hour ride or let his wife know his new workplace was so precarious. When a vehicle was reported to have a flat tire and mechanical problems deep inside the mine on the morning of August 5, Bustos stepped inside a pickup and was driven four miles down into the mine, deep into the earth.

The mine was a maze of more than four miles of tunnels. As more than a century of miners had chased the rich veins of gold and copper, the tunnel was not excavated in an orderly fashion, but was a chaotic scene. Loose cables hung from the ceiling. Thick wire mesh was hung from the roof to catch falling rock. Small altars along the narrow main tunnel marked the spots where workers had been killed. In general, the men worked in groups of three or four. Some worked alone. Nearly all of them had ear protection, making it difficult to speak or hear anything but the loud noises of the working mine.

At 1:30
pm
on August 5 the miners stopped for lunch, some of them heading down to the refuge where there were benches and they could grab a boost of oxygen. Five minutes sucking oxygen was usually enough to get the men back to work or at least back to the lunch table where they shared a rare communal moment in their solitary world. While they ate, the men fired up “
la talla
”—a distinctly Chilean practice of spontaneous humor that feels like a brilliant combination of stand-up comedy and impromptu rapping. Meanwhile, an entire mountain was sagging above them.

Franklin Lobos was the last man to enter the mine that day—probably the last one ever. As official chauffeur for the mine, Lobos ran an efficient and hilarious shuttle service—entertaining his passengers with wild stories of women and fame as he drove them into the depths of a world that looked like a set from
Lord of the Rings
with its sagging roof, piles of debris, and walls that looked as if they had been carved out by hand a century earlier.

As a former soccer star in Chile, Lobos was a legend. It was like having David Byrne drive you to Heathrow or Mike Tyson as your cabdriver to JFK. Lobos, fifty-three, was now bald, round-faced and low-key. His youthful adventures made him a magical storyteller and he regaled his passengers with the glory days of his career for the soccer club Cobresal. Many of the miners were devout fans, men who grew up watching Lobos score goal after goal as he cemented his reputation on the soccer
field.

During his 1981 to 1995 career, Lobos rose to the elite in northern Chile—a demigod who turned free kicks into a one-man show. Even before Lobos touched the ball, the entire stadium was rapt, imagining the impossible trajectory that Lobos would unleash, celebrating his abuse of physics. Lobos's goals were so precise and unbelievable that the Chilean press dubbed him “The Magic Mortar Man,” a player capable of half-field bombs that arched exactly to their target. Even Beckham would have applauded. But soccer stars in Chile have an average career of ten years. By his mid-thirties, Lobos was gainfully unemployed and devoid of either the star power or the cash to live up to the legendary status. Lobos tried his luck as a taxi driver, but with two daughters headed to college, he needed cash, and in Copiapó that meant one thing: a job at the San José copper mine.

It was just past 1
pm
when Lobos drove Jorge Galleguillos down into the mine inside a cargo truck. Halfway down they stopped to chat with Raúl “Guat
ó
n” (“Fatman”) Villegas, who was driving a dump truck filled with rocks and boulders carrying trace amounts of copper and gold. It was then that the mine cracked.

“As we were driving back down, a slab of rock caved in just behind us,” Galleguillos later wrote. “It crashed down only a few seconds after we drove past. After that, we were caught in an avalanche of dirt and dust. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. The tunnel was collapsing.” Galleguillos would later compare the scene to the collapse of the World Trade Center. Layer after layer of the tunnel fell in stacks, like pancakes.

As the mine cracked, it unleashed a series of avalanches. Lobos did not dare speed up. Instead he focused on avoiding debris that partially blocked the tunnel. The collapse was now in front and behind him. He crashed into the wall. Unable to see, Galleguillos exited the truck in an effort to guide Lobos down. As the roof continued to rain down, Galleguillos sought refuge in the lee of a water tank. The men finally negotiated a sharp curve and, despite the clouds of dust, slowly began to descend toward the safety refuge.

When Lobos reached his colleagues, they stared at one another in shock. No one could say what had happened. Everyone knew it was unlike any of the mini-avalanches that were habitual inside the San José mine.

One thing they did know: for even the most novice miner, the message was clear—“
El Piston
” was coming. Slumped in the corner of the rescue shelter, huddled behind bumps little bigger than a mattress, all the men braced themselves.

When a mine caves in, the air inside the mine explodes—like a piston—through the tunnels, generating winds so strong that they plaster a working man to the far wall, shatter his bones, crush the breath out of already muddled lungs. “It was like getting boxed in the ears,” said Segovia. “It felt like it went through your head.”

Small avalanches inside San José were a monthly event, a terrifying but brief rupture that invaded the miners' daily solitude. Even with headphones and the deep bass of reggaeton and Colombian cumbia blasting into their ears, the men never missed the distinctive
craaaaack!
Rock versus rock. Every time it was the same; within seconds each miner sought refuge. The following minutes were guaranteed to bring any one of a possible series of consequences—at best a storm of suffocating dust; at worst, news that a colleague had been crushed. Usually the entire episode lasted a few hours. This was different.

“A true piston effect is like an explosion. It is a deep sound, like a herd of galloping buffalo. You have very little time to react,” explained Miguel Fortt, one of Chile's most experienced mine rescue experts. “You can't do much.”

“I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my head,” said Omar Reygadas, a fifty-six-year-old miner with decades of experience. “My ears exploded.” Despite his helmet and ear protection, Reygadas was nearly doubled over in pain. Could he even hear? He worried he'd been deafened.

The blast sent Victor Zamora flying. His false teeth, jarred loose, were lost in the rubble. His face was bruised and scratched as waves of compressed air, like miniature sonic booms, battered the men. The air was a tornado-like storm, with rocks and dust firing down the tunnels.

The thick cloud of dust and debris blinded and choked and deafened the group of men, coating them in a layer of dust almost an inch thick, as they struggled to escape the mine, falling, crawling and pushing their way up the mine shaft. Like sailors in a hurricane, they interpreted the energetic blast from Mother Nature as a sign of vengeance from an invisible female goddess—that capricious and omniscient overlord who had last say in their precarious world. Some of the men began to pray.

The force of air shot through the top of the mountain, producing what Araya and others outside the mine described as “a volcano.”

Deep in the mine, the men faced a dust storm that flooded their world and was to last for the next six hours. After the roof collapsed, the men were blinded by a cloud of rocks, dirt and traces of the highly precious copper and silver ore that, since the opening of the San José mine in 1889, has lured six generations of miners into this precarious world. “I thought my ears would explode, and we were inside a truck with the windows up,” said Franklin Lobos, describing the pressure that damaged the inner ear of his colleague José Ojeda.

Ten minutes after the first collapse, the mountain ruptured again. A short, succinct signal that millions of tons of earth and rock had slipped again. Outside the mine, panic struck.

Mine operators and supervisors who heard the first crack assumed the miners “had burned”—slang for igniting dynamite. Nothing unusual there. But two “burns” in ten minutes? Impossible. The third
craaaaaaaaaaack!
was terrifying and unmistakable. Above and below the mine, hundreds of workers were paralyzed in fear. What was going on down there? Miners never detonated their charges so close together. Curiosity mixed with trepidation pervaded this deserted corner of the Atacama Desert.

Inside the mine, a group of some fifteen miners had battled the dust and struggled to walk up the tunnel in search of safety. They were stopped by a massive rock face blocking the tunnel. The men panicked. “We were huddled like sheep,” said José Ojeda. “We heard that sound, I don't know how to describe it . . . It is terrifying, like the rocks are screaming in pain. . . . We tried to advance, but we couldn't; a wall of rock blocked
us.”

When Florencio Ávalos arrived in a pickup, all the men climbed aboard, stacked like refugees. On the way down they crashed twice, ramming the walls, lost in the dark chaos. As the pickup bounced down the road, one of the miners fell off. Alex Vega reached out and yanked back the flying body, pulling the man to safety. In the chaos he was never sure who he had saved. As he strained to pull the man back to the bed of the truck, something snapped in his lower back. It would be hours before the adrenaline wore off enough for the stabbing pain to begin.

Driving blindly through thick clouds of dirt and debris, it took the men nearly an hour to reach the safety refuge, a shelter carved from the rock. Once they reached the refuge, the men shut the metal doors to block out the dust storm. Then the thirty-three men took turns breathing from oxygen tanks.

The 540-square-foot refuge was little more than a hole in the wall with a ceramic floor, reinforced ceiling, two oxygen tanks, a cabinet filled with long-expired medicine and a tiny stash of food. “The guys would constantly raid the safety shelter so we never knew exactly what was left. They always stole the chocolates and the cookies,” said Araya, the paramedic who was also in charge of stocking—and restocking—the safety refuge. “These guys were lucky, though; usually we had only one tank of oxygen in there, but when they got trapped, there were two tanks.”

Inside the mine, Luis “Lucho” Urzúa tried to pull the reins tight on his group. Two decades as a miner and a stretch as an amateur soccer coach were enough experience to make leadership a reflex. As shift foreman, Urzúa was the official leader—but the soft-spoken mapmaker had worked less than three months in the mine. He barely knew his troops. Scouring his makeshift refuge, Urzúa took stock of his provisions: ten liters of water, one can of peaches, two cans of peas, one can of salmon, sixteen liters of milk—eight banana-flavored, eight strawberry-flavored—eighteen liters of juice, twenty cans of tuna fish, ninety-six packets of crackers and four cans of beans. Under normal circumstances, the food was meant to satisfy the appetite of ten miners for forty-eight hours. Now there were thirty-three hungry men. “That day many of the guys had left their lunch up at the top of the mine,” said miner Mario Sepúlveda. “There was less food than normal.”

By four in the afternoon, approximately two and a half hours after the first deep sounds of cracking, the mine was fully collapsed. “It was like a volcano; the hillside spit out debris and from the mouth of the mine there was a cloud of dust,” said Araya. He described the sound outside the San José mine when an 800-foot-long section of the mine collapsed: “It wasn't a long sound—more like a final collapse. One deep thump.”

The final “thump” that Araya described was a rock estimated at 700,000 tons that sealed the only entrance to the mine. The trapped miners knew the final “thump” was anything but routine, even in a mine as dangerous as San José. The dust alone had nearly killed them, leaving the men coughing, crying and half blinded. Their eyes filled with so much grit that the majority soon developed a crackling hard yellow coating that glued their eyes shut. Even when they opened their eyes, the darkness was impossible to penetrate, and water poured down through the walls.