33 Men (6 page)

“They were very upset,” said Commander Villegas. “We were frustrated, but that changed when we had contact with the families. The hope and faith they had encouraged us.”

Chilean mining minister Laurence Golborne arrived at the mine on Saturday. He had struggled to find commercial flights back to Chile, and so was picked up in Lima, Peru, by the Chilean Air Force and flown to the mine. Upon arrival, Golborne was stunned by the disarray he found. Clearly, the mining executives running the San José operation were overwhelmed and undercapitalized for a major rescue effort. After taking the lay of the land, Golborne was proud to inform Piñera that he had organized the arrival of the first drilling rig. The president was unimpressed. “Okay, well done. Now I want you to get not just one but ten drilling rigs,” he told Golborne. The president's obsession with maintaining multiple rescue options would become a hallmark of Operation San Lorenzo.

The rescuers told Golborne they had hope the men might be alive. Despite the rumors, no evidence of crushed vehicles or broken bodies could support the fear that the men had been wiped out in a single crushing blow. Daily routine inside the mine was predictable enough to deduce that when the collapse hit, the men were in the lower reaches of the mine and at least some of the group could still be alive in the blocked tunnels.

“We knew the miners had enough water because during drilling they need to have big tanks of water. The problem was the oxygen,” said Golborne. “When the shaft collapsed, we really felt angry and powerless. We informed the relatives about this collapse and that we couldn't carry out a traditional rescue [via the mouth of the mine]. . . . I didn't try to give them false hopes. I committed myself to tell them only the truth. I didn't want to cause any gossiping. In this type of situation people talk a lot. You could expect people to say they were all dead.”

Golborne's announcement to the families was brutally honest. He told them the rescue effort was suspended. He broke down and cried in front of the families as he announced, “The news is not good.” Then rescue workers packed up and began leaving. Firefighters, rock climbers and the GOPE police began to exit the mountaintop. Segura and Ñancucheo were discouraged and humbled. They had been certain they could rescue the men.

“When I saw the GOPE guys go, the rescuers go, I thought if they are going, it is because the miners are all dead,” said Carolina Lobos. “I cried. We all cried.”

“I felt helpless and desperate,” said Lillian Ram
í
rez. “All the relatives went on strike and wanted to get the mine bosses with wooden sticks—like vandals. We made a human chain and told them that we were not going to let anyone leave the mine. The anger and desperation made me push a policeman. . . . Then I realized it was a mistake, what we did, but desperation makes you do many things. And to recognize that is human. We really did not know what was happening.”

Pablo Ram
í
rez protested. A shift supervisor at the San José mine who had been among the first to volunteer for the dangerous rescue operations, he insisted they needed to push forward, to continue looking for the men. Ram
í
rez was sure that on one of his missions deep inside the mine he had heard the bleat of truck horns. His rescue colleagues ridiculed him. “No one believed me,” he said. “They said it was the souls of the dead miners haunting me.”

THURSDAY, AUGUST 5—AFTERNOON

Pablo Rojas had arrived at the San José mine that morning with such a hangover that as soon as his group had finished reinforcing walls and propping up the ceiling, he went to lie down in the peace and quiet of the safety shelter, 2,250 feet deep, near the bottom of the mine. Rojas's father had died days earlier and even before the big night out, his head had ached with pain. The massive cave-in roused the bedraggled Rojas, but he was slow to appreciate the magnitude of the disaster.

Claudio Yañez had been preparing to set dynamite charges when the blasts of air from the collapse nearly knocked him over. Yañez was among the first group to arrive at the shelter, and he watched the other miners struggling to do the same, as the mine continued to heave and shift. “They arrived little by little,” he said. “The guys came down to try and use the telephone, but it didn't work. We looked at each other for the first time and in desperation. We couldn't believe what was happening.”

Raúl Bustos had been working inside a mechanic's workshop just up the tunnel from the shelter when the collapse hit. In a letter he later wrote to his wife, he described the scene: “The suction and the air knocked us all over.”

Inside the shelter, best friends and relatives sought to find out who had survived. Florencio Ávalos, thirty-one years old, found his twenty-seven-year-old brother, Renán. Florencio felt paternally responsible; he had encouraged his younger brother to work at San José. Neither of them saw it as a career, but compared with the alternative of seasonal work picking grapes in their tiny pueblo in the mountains near the Argentine border, the job here was quite literally a gold mine.

Esteban Rojas hugged his three cousins—a gracious thanks that they were all alive. Best friends Pedro Cortés and Carlos Bugueño also celebrated their survival; neighbors since childhood, they were inseparable and had started work at the mine on the same day.

Franklin Lobos, however, was distraught. As the driver of the last vehicle into the mine, Lobos had passed Ra
ú
l Villegas's truck rumbling up the ramp. Calculating the time of the collapse and the estimated position of the truck, Lobos feared the worst and could practically see the crushed vehicle in his mind's eye. Given the massive collapse of rock, the men had little doubt that
la mina maldita
(the cursed mine) had stolen the life of another colleague.

Lobos knew the shelter well; one of his many tasks was restocking the safety shelter. He had never liked working in the mine. At his previous mining job he had been trapped by a cloud of smoke and forced to retreat to the bottom of the mine to avoid suffocating. For eight hours, as his family gathered outside, Lobos and his colleagues had wondered if they would be given a second chance to live. Now Lobos was looking for a third chance.

All thirty-three men had somehow survived the massive collapse. Several were bruised and a few bloodied but not one had a broken bone. No one was missing.

Inside the shelter, Luis Urzúa, the highest-ranking man in the mine, sought to control the men. As shift foreman, Urzúa was not required to participate in the physical work but instead guided, prodded and motivated the men under his command. In the hierarchical world of Chilean mining, the foreman is absolute leader, his word followed with military discipline. Questioning an order from the shift foreman was sufficient reason to be disciplined or dismissed. “The world of natural selection functions quite strongly in this environment,” explained Dr. Jaime Mañalich, the Chilean minister of health. “To arrive at the position of shift foreman, you have to pass through many a test.”

Urzúa was a solidly built man with soft eyes and a leadership style built not on being a brute but on most often being right. With more than two decades' experience inside mines, Lucho Urzúa had the experience to command his troops, but he was a recent arrival to San José. That he had worked there for less than three months now hung heavily in the tense and dirty air inside the safety refuge. The men questioned his ability to coordinate the disaster response. Why should he be the leader? Did he even know the mine? Urzúa did little to garner support when he suggested the men stay in the refuge, confident that a rescue operation would save them. In the first few hours after the collapse, raging arguments erupted. Tempers flared. Urzúa was losing control.

Imprisoned in the shelter, Sepúlveda was calm as he paced about. He had practically predicted this very collapse. How many times had he argued with labor and safety inspectors back in Copiapó? He had spent days encouraging, haranguing and berating them to investigate the San José mine for safety violations. Sepúlveda had attempted to form his buddies into a workers' union, but gave up in frustration when he came to believe that the representatives of the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), the national workers' union, were as self-serving as the mine owners. According to Sepúlveda and other miners, the union was in the pocket of the mine owners, spending more time breaking the union than fortifying it.

Sepúlveda, a short, balding man with a wide crooked-tooth grin, was a workaholic who combined a love of physical labor and an unbreakable spirit. To his colleagues he was either El Perry (Chilean slang for “the Good Dude”) or El Loco (“The Crazy One”), the unofficial mine shaft jester. He would regularly launch sharp jibes at the mine management, but always with such spontaneous humor that even the targets of his barbs would find themselves laughing along. At the end of a typical day's shift, as the miners took the twenty-five-minute journey in a truck that spiraled up 10 miles per hour from the bottom of the mine, Sepúlveda always had a captive audience: his exhausted colleagues. They marveled and cheered as he improvised monologues and skits. Who else but El Perry would pole dance on the bus as the miners left work? A natural mimic and charismatic character, Sepúlveda was in a situation his hyperactive nature found oppressive—enclosure. He was desperate to find a way out.

Sepúlveda and Mario Gómez organized the miners into three separate missions. Even as the mountain roared and the dust billowed around them, the men began to scour the mine for escape routes. Food, air and clean water were all limited, and the mine continued to rumble and send signals of another monstrous collapse. It was clear they would all die without swift action.

The main shaft of the mine was a ragged tunnel with uneven walls that, when lit by vehicle headlights, sent shadows bouncing about. It looked like the bowels of a haunted world. Side tunnels, caverns and storage rooms had been carved at seemingly random spots. Huge tanks of water were stashed throughout the mountain. Containing as much as 4,000 gallons each, the water was used to operate drilling machinery inside the mine. Had the men been able to see the mine from a cutaway side view, it would have resembled an anthill riddled with shafts.

The levels of the mine were measured in meters above sea level. Given that the entrance to the mine was roughly 800 meters (2,600 feet) above the ocean, the very bottom of the mine was called level 45. The refuge shelter where the men were gathered was level 90. The thirty-three men were trapped near the very bottom of a vast mine.

Secure in their faith that rescue teams were already mobilized, the men were desperate to send a message that they were still alive. Some of the miners began gathering truck tires and dirty oil filters. Richard Villarroel, a twenty-seven-year-old mechanic working as a subcontractor in the mine, was sent in a pickup truck to drive up the tunnel. He arrived at level 350 where the tunnel was sealed shut by the block of rock. Villarroel looked for cracks in the rock, then stuffed the holes with rubber tires and oil filters, which he ignited. Thick black clouds of smoke filled the tunnel, enough of it seeping upward, he hoped, to alert the rescue teams to their location.

A second group of miners gathered sticks of dynamite to detonate the charges in a brief yet distinctive explosion that would, it was hoped, be heard by rescue workers. Other men began to scour the new configuration of the mine to find pockets of air.

Urzúa, a trained topographer, began to sketch a map, a crude attempt to take the dimensions of his new reality. Commandeering a white pickup as his office, Urzúa began his mapmaking in earnest.

While some men still respected his leadership, there were notable exceptions. Juan Illanes, a fifty-two-year-old subcontractor, emboldened by his experience as a soldier in Patagonia, where he had spent nearly two years in a foxhole, considered himself exempt from Urzúa's chain of command. Illanes and four other workers hired to maintain and operate vehicles inside the mine were not mine employees. This meant that in the norms of a Chilean mine, Illanes and his group were second-class citizens. A tribe apart.

Without light, there was no day. Or night. Every routine was destroyed, eliminated or radically altered. As their head lamps began to run out of battery power, the men used them sparingly. They entered the fragile world of sensory deprivation. Add in the emotional overload from a near-death experience and it makes sense that the miners lost all notion of time. The veteran miners understood immediately the technical challenges of drilling and hacking through hundreds of feet of solid rock. For them, the rescue—if it ever came—was a complicated and uncertain operation.

Psychologists understand that in such circumstances, the individual survival instinct trumps the common good. Adrenaline pumps into the brain and survival chemicals flood the body, enabling remarkable feats of physical strength but also a single-mindedness that blinds the miners to the value of stopping for a moment and making a plan. As those first hours passed, the thirty-three miners began to act like a roaming band of hungry animals, haphazardly shitting and urinating throughout their reduced world. Ignoring calls for group unity, they set up disparate caves in random corners of the tunnel. Few of the men slept that first night.

DAY 1: FRIDAY, AUGUST 6

Having huddled through the night on cardboard strips, in an attempt to stay dry and to blunt the sharp rocks, the miners arose wet and anxious. José Henríquez sought to begin the new day with a dose of hope: a collective prayer. The round-faced, cheery fifty-four-year-old worked in the mine as a
jumbero
, an operator of heavy machinery, which was among the highest-paid jobs in the mine. But that was his day job. Henríquez's passion was preaching the miraculous powers of Jesus Christ to his congregation in the southern Chilean city of Talca. Gathering the men in the refuge, Henríquez gave a brief prayer—enough, it seemed, to relax the men and allow Lucho Urzúa and Mario Sepúlveda to organize a mission. Claudio Yañez had a Casio wristwatch, allowing the men to reorient their schedule and day. “I didn't need a watch down there,” said Sepúlveda. “You know what works as a clock? My stomach. I could tell what time it was by what I wanted to eat. Your body does not react the same to the idea of a steak at seven in the morning as it does at seven at night.”

Many of the miners were convinced that they should remain in the shelter and await a rescue. Sep
ú
lveda summed up his thoughts on that strategy in a very public, very loud and succinct opinion: that's suicide. Sep
ú
lveda wanted, needed and demanded action. His entire character was a whirl of energy and proactive survival. From childhood on, his life had been a fight to survive. His mother had died giving birth to him and he had been abandoned by his father. Young Mario grew up sharing a bed with six other siblings. At times he slept in the barn alongside the livestock, even eating the animals' food to survive. “I was very, very poor and they treated me worse than the animals,” said Sepúlveda. For the now-middle-class thirty-nine-year-old with a wife and two teenage children, escape from the mine was the very mission for which he felt his life had been preparing him.

The miners divided up into separate groups. One team used heavy machinery to create noise. Despite the massive collapse, the men had at their disposal a flotilla of vehicles ranging from pickups to the Jumbo, a 30-foot-long truck with a drilling platform on the front end used to perforate the roof and make holes for dynamite. The men moved all the vehicles to the highest point of the tunnel. Once astride the blockage, they began to create a cacophony of sounds. Honking horns. Exploding dynamite. Bashing huge metal plates against the bulldozer. The short crack of dynamite and the echoing metallic clang reverberated through the tunnel, but was it enough to be heard? Would at least one member of the rescue team be alerted? The men continued to attack the roof of the mine with the Jumbo—like a mad woodpecker, the machine pecked wildly, making an infernal racket.

“We used the trucks to smash against the walls,” said Samuel Ávalos. “We connected the horns on the truck to tubes that ran up to the surface so we would be heard above. We took turns screaming into those tubes. . . . We were desperate.”

Alex Vega wanted to climb out of the mountain by following a series of cracks that led, he guessed, all the way to the surface. He was convinced that an escape path was possible but the men had limited battery power on their lamps and no way to carry enough water for what might be a daylong expedition. “We were afraid of getting crushed by falling rock,” he said. “There was a chance of being trapped.”

A second team of miners, led by Sepúlveda and Raúl Bustos, scouted an escape route via a ventilation duct. This chimney—one of an estimated dozen air ducts that made the air in the mine nearly breathable—rose vertically for 80 feet. “We started to look for alternatives; we climbed up 30 meters [100 feet] on a hanging ladder. We reached the level 210 and saw that it was also blocked,” Bustos wrote his wife in a letter later. “There was another chimney but it did not have a ladder.”

In many Chilean mines, every chimney would have been a clean circle, shooting up like a skylight to the next level of the mine and lined with safety equipment ranging from a ladder to escape lights. Apart from providing a vent for air to circulate inside the mine, the chimneys are designed to provide an adequate secondary escape route if a tunnel collapses. In the San José mine, the second chimney shaft was unlit and the ladder decrepit. Furthermore, the chimney was astride the main tunnel, meaning that a single accident could simultaneously wipe out both escape routes. It was a basic failure that the miner's union, led by Javier Castillo, had denounced for years. The trapped miners now understood his logic.