33 Men (7 page)

Sepúlveda scouted the chimney and decided an ascent was risky but possible. A cascade of rocks was ricocheting down the tube—but he had a helmet. He adjusted the lamp on his helmet skyward and began slowly advancing. The ladder was designed for just such an escape effort but decades of constant humidity had eaten away the rungs. As he reached up, Sepúlveda could feel them giving way. Some metal rungs were missing. Like a desperate rock climber, Sepúlveda began to improvise. The tunnel was four feet wide, far too big for him to brace a leg on each side. So, grabbing a plastic tube that ran the length of the chimney, he tried to find a nub and a foothold on the slippery stones. Meanwhile, a constant hail of rubble continued to clang down on his head. The mountain was still crying, peeling apart. Determined to claw his way out, Sepúlveda summoned his muscles to obey. He reached his hand up and had begun to pull his body up when he slipped. A rock crashed into his face, slicing his lip and knocking out a tooth. Another rock, this one the size of a tennis ball, whooshed by. Sepúlveda had cheated death by a few inches. When yet another rock bounced harmlessly by, Sepúlveda took this as both an omen and a cue to retreat.

“I felt like a twelve-year-old, so strong, so much energy. I never got tired. The only thing I wanted was to get out,” said Sepúlveda, who described his experience in mystical terms. “In the middle of this chimney, I felt this was divine . . . my hairs stood on end. Something told me ‘I am with you.
'
”

Sepúlveda felt an overwhelming joy and confidence as he descended the chimney. “I came back and told them no one will die here, those who want to believe, it is up to you, but if you believe, hold God's hand and mine and we will get out of here.”

The reaction to life-altering trauma evolved in idiosyncratic ways for each individual—depending on each miner's personality. In drastic experiences like the San José mine collapse—which psychologists define as “situations of extreme confinement”—some victims wilt. Others bloom. For Mario Sepúlveda, his entire life seemed to be geared toward just such a challenge.

He relished his new emerging role: leader of the pack.

DAY 2: SATURDAY, AUGUST 7

With no communication from any rescue team, the miners spent another restless and fearful night. In the morning, the men agreed to pray again with Henríquez. A semblance of routine had begun to form by at least gathering to pray together, but desperation was beginning to take hold. Food was running short. The 10 liters (10
½
quarts) of bottled water were not nearly enough, and the men began to drink from the huge 5,000-liter (1,300-gallon) tanks usually reserved for industrial drilling machines. The water in the tanks was months old, filled with dirt and grime. “We drank it but it tasted like oil,” said Richard Villarroel.

Claudio Yañez drank and drank the dirty water—up to 7 liters (almost 2 gallons) a day. The taste reminded him of diesel fuel and dust. He knew the water was filled with mineral residue and had been stagnant for nearly half a year, but the thirst was brutal. And so Yañez continued to drink.

“The hierarchy was lost almost immediately,” said Alex Vega, who worked as a mechanic and knew the mine intimately after nearly a decade inside. “The thirty-three of us were one and we began a democratic system; the best idea that made the most sense was the idea that ruled.”

The men began to vote on nearly every important decision. At noon they held a group meeting that combined the democratic debate of a New England town meeting with the humor of the British parliament. Ideas were put forward and either immediately ridiculed to death or debated openly. All the men had an equal voice. Ideas were measured by their intrinsic value, regardless of whether it was sponsored by the shift foreman or the lowliest assistant.

The miners had now spent nearly two full days underground. The batteries on the men's lanterns were fading. Cell phones were now dead. Though there had never been cell phone coverage in the shelter, the men used them as lights, clocks and speakers, listening to music to soothe the pain of the deep silence.

Some of the younger, less experienced miners began to panic. Nineteen-year-old Jimmy Sánchez, the youngest of all the miners, began to hallucinate. He imagined his mother coming to visit him deep in the mine, and in his dreams she brought fresh
empanadas
—a Chilean meat pie flavored with onion and adorned with a single black olive. As a quick lunch snack, the
empanada
is like most of the food in Chile—forgettable. But for Jimmy and his mates, at this underground altitude, even the fresh memory of an
empanada
was food for the gods.

Other miners, unable to deal with the emotional impact of their ordeal, simply froze. “They stayed on their bed all day; they never got up,” said Villarroel. Time passed excruciatingly slowly for the men, a massive silence filling the gap. No drilling. No sounds of dynamite. Not a single sound from above. Just the torturous drumbeat of water and falling rocks.

The men repeatedly walked hundreds of yards up the sloping, curved tunnel to stare in depressed shock at the massive boulders. Though they were sure that rescuers must be searching above, the sound of silence was terrifying, and a faint thought began to grow. Will we ever get out of here?

They would curse the rock, “
Piedra maldita, concha de su madre!
” (“Damn rock, your mama's pussy!”) The other miners would rally their enthusiasm for a brief cheer of “
Viva Chile
” (“Long live Chile”) but then trudge back to the refuge with the same message—no news.

The men needed a miracle—and food. After just two days, their bodies were beginning to shrivel, and their faces became gaunt as their energy began to ebb. Shadows of whiskers began to shroud their faces and dirty hair poked out in stiff clumps. As they spoke face to face, the disintegration of civility was evident. Smells of sweat and humid humanity became so intense, the men began to abandon the shelter and sleep on the rocky tunnel floor.

The men began to break up into groups. Fighting broke out over cardboard. Subclans formed as relatives and old acquaintances bonded in a sense of survival. The leaders, including Sepúlveda and Urzúa, settled at a bend in the tunnel 105 meters above sea level [350 feet]. It was instantly baptized “The 105 Group” or simply “105.” These men had the best air, a floor that was less wet, and breathing room from the other two groups. Farther below, another group moved into the Safety Refuge and called themselves
Refugio
. Its hard ceramic floor made sleeping difficult inside, but the roof was reinforced with bolts and a metal mesh to catch falling rocks.

A third group was essentially left to fend for themselves. Cousins Esteban Rojas and Pablo Rojas, plus Ariel Ticona, who had married into the family, formed a clique here at the most dangerous sleeping spot. Just outside the refuge on the mine's main road a second site became known as “the ramp” or
Rampa
. This sleeping area was less claustrophobic, as air blew lightly through the tunnel. But the drawbacks were notable—the area was wet, meaning the men barely slept and at times had to build canoe-like shelters to keep the flowing water at bay.

The cardboard did little to stave off the dampness, the moisture was incessant and they could neither sleep nor stay dry. Some of the men began to sleep in the beds of the trucks. “We did not have much hope for a speedy rescue,” said Alex Vega, “and the hardest wait began, in silence and with no certainty of what would happen to us.”

DAY 3: SUNDAY, AUGUST 8

By 6:30
am
on Day 3 the men were awake and ready for prayer. Henríquez was cheerful and promised that God would respond to their prayers. Every day that passed, his sermons and prayers felt like a lifeline, a single feature to grab on to and hold tight. The rescue might or might not be coming close, but the miner's faith was helping sustain them. They began to refer to Jesus as “the thirty-fourth miner.”

After prayers, Mario Sepúlveda roused them for a group meeting. Sepúlveda's demeanor injected the men with his trademark enthusiasm without betraying the miner hierarchy. He lectured the group to respect Urzúa. If the leader did not want to lead, then Sepúlveda would gladly take the lead as a man capable of cajoling, threatening and motivating the men as a positive force.

Despite flagging energy, individual skills began to shine. Raúl Bustos, the survivor of the huge earthquake, drafted Carlos Mamani, the young Bolivian, to help him build a series of canals to help drain off the water running through their camp. Edison Peña rigged up a system of lighting—using the batteries from the vehicles, in particular the bulldozer-like truck known as the “scoop,” which had a 220-volt outlet built into the chassis. Instead of relying on intermittent and dim lanterns, Peña's work brought the men a constant beam of light. Illanes also designed a system to charge the head lamps by connecting them to the vehicle batteries. For hot tea, the men boiled water by running one of the trucks and sticking half-liter bottles of water around the exhaust pipe. Though the plastic was too hot to touch, it never melted and the warm water mixed with a few bags of tea the men found provided a small moment of comfort. The men also placed wet boots and wet clothes over the motor and used the heat from the engine as a clothes dryer.

Improvised baths were taken in a nearby mud pit. Soap was nonexistent, as were the basics of hygiene, including shampoo and toothpaste. For toilets, the men used an empty oil drum. When it was near full, they shoveled dirt and gravel atop the stinking mess and dumped it in an area downstream from their camp—covering the waste with more gravel. Still the smells began to rise up in nauseating waves. Victor Zamora could not stomach the stench. He moved out of the shelter to sleep on
la rampa
. For Zamora the entrapment was “a nightmare . . . we did not know if we would ever make it out.” To escape the daily horror, Zamora began to keep a diary, a written record of his experience. His literary interests surged as he started writing poetry, short stanzas of optimism and survival cut short only when he ran out of ink.

Food from the shelter was now under strict guard. Only Luis Urzúa and Mario Sepúlveda had access. They proposed a strict rationing program, a plan that was quickly agreed upon after a simple democratic exercise: the men voted. “Sixteen plus one was majority,” explained Urzúa. “We voted on everything.” The men agreed to eat once a day, little more than a sliver of food. “We would take a spoonful of tuna fish, maybe half the size of a bottle cap, and that was our food,” said Richard Villarroel. “Our bodies were starting to be consumed.”

What little food had been left in the shelter was fast disappearing. Half the cartons of milk were long expired. The heat had curdled the contents into banana-flavored clots. It was rancid.

Claudio Acuña sniffed the carton. “Smells okay,” he thought, then without hesitation he chewed and swallowed a full liter of the chunky milk.

Samuel Ávalos scoured the mountain for scraps of food. “I turned over the garbage bins, searched through it all but it was filled with papers, reports from the mine.” In the bottom of each of six bottles of Coca-Cola, he found there was a flavorful drop of drink. He found orange peels and ate them gladly.

Mario Gómez, the veteran miner and former merchant marine, encouraged the men to hold out. He described a journey he had made as a young man when he had hidden aboard a Brazilian cargo ship. For eleven days, young Gómez had lived inside a life raft, a stowaway who survived on rainwater and little else. “We will survive,” Gómez would remind the men. Gómez carried undisputed seniority status. He first worked in the San José mine in 1964, before some of these colleagues were born. He had seen the mine grow from a small pickax-and-wheelbarrow operation to its current size. His lost fingers were part of his legend and he was not embarrassed. To him they were like scars from years of combat with the devilish mine. He considered the stubby remnants proof of his commitment. “Like medals,” he would say.

“Our morale was down, and now and then the guys would cuss each other out. We just wanted to leave,” said miner Pablo Rojas, a third-generation miner known as a hard worker with few words. “Each man had his own personality.” And many of the men had their own addictions. In addition to tobacco, many had a prodigious addiction to alcohol. For these men, entrapment also meant enforced cold turkey, the accompanying mood swings and desperation making their ordeal all the worse.

Three days had now passed. The men had been trapped for seventy-two hours. This was far longer than any of them had ever spent underground. Despite their efforts to attract attention, there had still been no contact with any rescue team. Food was scarce, the water terrible. The eerie echo of cracking, shifting rock was followed by silence—a reminder that they were deep inside the belly of a beast, swallowed and trapped far below civilization.

The miners grew desperate. While they tried to avoid the question, a singular reality began to haunt them all: Will we get out of here alive?

DAY 3: SUNDAY, AUGUST 8

Copiapó, Chile, is a city surrounded by undeveloped beaches, vast desert and barren mountains packed with rich deposits of gold, silver and copper—worth millions, in some cases billions, of dollars. These hidden treasures were first mined in 1707, when the population of Copiapó was 990 residents. Today the city is still modest-sized—125,000 residents including the surrounding areas—yet the local airport is literally buzzing. There are fourteen daily flights to and from Santiago, flights often fully booked as a flood of mining engineers, geologists and surveyors arrive in Copiapó. They disembark the airplane, stepping down a steep metal staircase, then wander unescorted across the tarmac—sometimes mistakenly heading to the baggage area—to a miniature terminal where vendors sell oysters, crab claws and
locos
(abalone), a delicious local shellfish with firm white meat and a delicate taste like lobster.

These executives are forward scouts for an army of entrepreneurs seeking to harvest the profits from the most recent worldwide copper boom, which began in 2002 and by August 2010 showed no signs of collapsing. With Chinese industry maintaining an apparently insatiable appetite for copper and minerals, mining operations in Chile continue to boom. Every day Chile exports approximately $70 million worth of copper, and every few months a new multimillion-dollar mining project is announced. This region of northern Chile is also home to one of the world's great concentrations of high-tech mining equipment—machines capable of pounding, drilling and grinding through thousands of feet of solid rock.

Four days after the collapse of the San José mine, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera mobilized the vast fleet of mining machinery like a rogue army general. Rejecting advice from aides to be cautious, Piñera bet everything that he could save the miners, putting his face forward as a guarantee for a successful mission, thus provoking panic throughout his inner circle of advisers, who thought the president had just volunteered for a kamikaze mission at a workplace where even the miners who dared work there gave themselves the same brave moniker.

Among Piñera's first assignments: find a general manager for the rescue operation. Long a fan of hiring multilingual MBA whiz kids as his personal inner circle, Piñera was out of his element in the world of mining. The mining minister, Laurence Golborne, whom Piñera appointed in March 2010 at the start of his presidential term, was also an outsider to the mining world. Golborne had been appointed to Chile's top mining post in recognition of his management skills as a chief executive with Cencosud, an $11-billion-a-year chain of retail stores and upscale South American supermarkets. The leaders of the Chilean mining industry were unimpressed by the dashing executive with a penchant for blasting youthful rock music on his iPhone. His blithe answer to their concerns did little to encourage them; in response to the question of how he would overcome his inexperience, Golborne had quipped, “I'm a fast learner.”

Piñera and Golborne collectively had only a superficial understanding of the mechanics of subterranean mining; their knowledge of how to organize a rescue of men trapped underground was even more minimal. The men turned to Codelco, the state-run mining conglomerate that produces 11 percent of the world's copper supply. On August 9, after a barrage of phone calls and hastily arranged conference calls at the highest levels of Codelco and the government, Piñera found his general manager for the rescue. But no one bothered to tell the unwitting candidate.

When the call finally arrived late at night on August 9, André Sougarret was in bed, ready to sleep. “The board of directors has decided, get yourself and a team . . . to help the people who are in charge of the rescue,” said his boss at Codelco. Sougarret, a calm, forty-six-year-old engineer with the hint of a smile never far away, listened attentively, but was not particularly moved by the message. He mentioned the call to his wife, then went to sleep at his home in Rancagua, Chile.

Sougarret had been in mining since he was in his mid-twenties and never failed to make friends as he worked his way up the Chilean mining industry's chain of command. With a specialty in underground mines, he was currently manager of mines at El Teniente, the world's largest underground mine with 1,500 miles of tunnels and a workforce of 15,000. In 2009, this mine produced 400,000 tons of copper. If El Teniente
were an independent country, it would rank twelfth in the world for copper output.

Sougarret was aware of the collapse at the San José mine but never considered it an affair of the state-run copper giant. The accident had occurred at a privately owned mine about 600 miles north—a disaster, yes, but someone else's disaster.

DAY 4: MONDAY, AUGUST 9

At 10
am
, Sougarret received another call, an urgent order: come to the presidential palace immediately. “I thought, this must be a mistake,” said Sougarret. “Why would they call
me
to La Moneda—the presidential palace?” Sougarret packed a tiny knapsack, grabbed his miner's helmet and drove ninety minutes to La Moneda. He had passed by the building hundreds of times but never entered it. Ushered to the second floor—home to the office of the president and his top strategists—
Sougarret was told nothing, just asked to
wait.

La Moneda is pockmarked with history and had he looked, Sougarret would have noticed the walls speckled with hundreds of now-patched bullet holes, a lingering testament to the September 11, 1973, military coup d'état, which blasted then-president Salvador Allende from this seat of power. Allende, an aristocratic physician with a deep allegiance to his socialist revolution, resisted the army attack, firing back from a second-story window with a machine gun, allegedly a gift from Fidel Castro. Allende's body was found after the siege, with a single bullet hole in his head. Most historians agree it was suicide. For the next seventeen years General Augusto Pinochet ran Chile with a combination of Spanish Inquisition torture techniques and highly modern economic reform. Three thousand Chileans died at the hands of the military, but the steady economic growth established Chile as Latin America's most stable economy—a juxtaposition that for the subsequent decades spawned zealous foes and fanatical fans of the now-deceased general.

Following Pinochet's rule, bloody memories of torture and execution convinced a generation of Chileans to boycott right-wing politicians. From 1990 to 2009, the country was run by a series of progressive presidents who attacked poverty, invested in infrastructure, promoted personal freedoms and signed free trade agreements with dozens of nations. The 2010 election of Piñera—a centrist politician from Renovación Nacional, a right-wing party—buried the ghost of Pinochet and ushered in a new kind of government: technocrats with something to prove. The Piñera inner circle knew that being seen as right wing in Chile meant being permanently on probation—that if they failed to lead Chile, it might well be another generation before any of them received a second chance.

Inside La Moneda, Sougarret felt uncomfortable. He had dressed informally, in blue jeans. His miner's helmet and knapsack were in contrast to the whirl of smartly dressed suit-
and-tie-clad men. A phalanx of journalists hovered in the halls, confirmation that something urgent was happening. Yet Sougarret was ever more confused; in two hours hardly a word had been spoken to him.

Finally the message came—“Let's go!”—and Sougarret was whisked to the basement garage where he boarded the presidential motorcade. Flanked by cars, each with Uzi-toting bodyguards, Sougarret crossed Santiago in a rush of protocol. Entering the airport, the convoy ignored the commercial gates and headed to Air Force Group 10, home base for the presidential jet. Sougarret still had had no briefing, no word on his mission or destination. Aboard the plane, President Piñera summoned Sougarret to his private cabin, pulled out a sketch pad and made a crude drawing of the mine and the safety shelter and issued a directive: get them out. Piñera told the still-baffled engineer to design the best possible rescue plan. Piñera emphasized that the operation was assured the full backing and resources of the government.

Only then did Sougarret realize he had been drafted to lead the mission. Thirty-three lives were in his hands and no one had asked if he was available, willing or felt capable. Sougarret would later compare the experience to being kidnapped.

Arriving at the darkened camp, Sougarret was further disoriented. He had never visited the San José mine, and again, without warning, his responsibilities grew. President Piñera announced to the gathered media that he had brought an “expert” who would take responsibility for the rescue.

“Okay, I thought, this is getting complicated,” said Sougarret. “We then walked some steps toward the campsite where the family members were. I was struck by those anguished faces. . . . There were fifty people. I noticed many worried faces and, in some cases, desperation. And unease. I remember they said some nasty things to the president, because he had first gone to the press and then to them. That was a pledge we always fulfilled—to speak first with the families and then with the journalists. That stuck in my mind. Then the president explained that he came with these experts who would try and solve the problem, and would utilize all the possible resources. That was a key moment for me, the beginning of it all,” said Sougarret in an interview with the Chilean newspaper
El Mercurio
. “I realized that I was in charge of the operation. The president left and I was there, alone.”

Sougarret didn't need distressed family members to hammer home the consequences of a mining disaster. El Teniente, where Sougarret was a top manager, was the site of Chile's deadliest mining accident, known as the “Tragedia del Humo.” The 1945 “Smoke Tragedy” at El Teniente was sparked by a fire inside a storage bunker. Barrels of burning oil quickly trapped more than a thousand miners behind a cloud of impenetrable, thick smoke. The smoke filled the cracks and corners of Tunnel C. For hours the miners held wet cloths to their faces, a crude measure that soon proved ineffective as the men collapsed. The mine's safety systems were substandard; emergency exits were not clearly marked.

As clouds of billowing black smoke poured from the mine, a courageous rescue effort was unleashed. Miners rushed into the flames, trudged into the inferno, and carried semiconscous colleagues to the surface. Six hundred men were saved, but 355 perished.

The Smoke Tragedy provoked a national debate over mine safety and led to the creation of the Department of Mining Security. The concept of risk prevention was introduced in management decision making and the plans were so successfully implemented that El Teniente would win international safety awards for fourteen consecutive years. It was no coincidence that aides to President Piñera, realizing that the owners of San José were unprepared for a sophisticated rescue operation, mobilized the most professional, safety-conscious team in Chile—the crew from El Teniente, with Sougarret in command.

Sougarret's first challenge was to coordinate the drilling. Throughout the four days since the collapse, the Chilean mining community had mobilized and sent convoys of equipment to the scene—heavy-duty bulldozers, water trucks, cranes and drilling machines, which could bore through hundreds of feet of rock, creating shafts known as “boreholes.” The engineers at the site had quickly decided that a rescue via the mouth of the mine was extremely dangerous and that the boreholes offered the most reliable option for making contact with the trapped men.

The machines used to drill the boreholes were bunched together, a cluster of steaming, hissing towers that looked like an oil field operation interspersed with flopping Chilean flags. These portable drilling contraptions were not modern: since the 1950s, they have been hauled, shipped and portaged to random corners of the planet to perforate the outermost levels of the Earth's crust.

These machines helped locate the raw materials used to fuel a half century of industrial frenzy—everything from aquifers to zinc deposits. The drills were now joined in a communal prospecting mission, a daring search-and-rescue operation. A 3½-inch-wide drill bit was aimed toward one of the spiraling tunnels nearly half a mile below: a needle with a 2,300-foot journey, in search of a mine shaft.

By the time Sougarret arrived, six different drills had been tried in haste—and chaos. “They were making various holes but there was no strategy,” said Sougarret of the drilling scenario he inherited. “We decided that there would be three drilling techniques . . . three parallel plans with different concepts: some would be fast and others precise. We were fighting time. If we wanted to be precise, we would be much slower. If we wanted to advance quickly, things could deviate.” Sougarret calculated that the boreholes could advance 325 feet per day; to achieve the precision necessary for the drills to be even close to the trapped men would take—at a minimum—a full
week.

With sketchy maps of the mine, the drillers were forced to estimate the exact location of the underground safety shelter—the presumed spot where any surviving miners might be holed up. Could the men have made it to the shelter? The vehicle workshop? Or were they buried in the rubble? Like the rescuers who searched the shafts manually, the amount of guesswork was a frightening variable for engineers accustomed to precise instructions.

Typically a drilling operation is aimed at a massive pool of oil or an underground aquifer. Here the target was minuscule: the safety shelter was the size of a backyard swimming pool. If engineers misdirected the borehole heading by just two inches, by the time it had tunneled the 2,300 feet down to the level of the safety shelter, it would miss by hundreds of feet. “When we arrived at the mine, we were told to place our drill right above the refuge,” said Eduardo Hurtado, a drilling supervisor with Terraservice, a Chilean company that specializes in perforations. “The bulldozer began to flatten the area to make the platform for the drilling rig and the topographer was making measurements. Then José Toro, a geologist from the El Salvador mine, came. He knew the area well and told us to move the machine; they were worried that the entire mountain might still come down.”