Authors: Héctor Tobar
The men make a show of looking for the precious bag of saline solution, including Samuel himself, who declares suddenly, and not without irony, “Oh, look, here it is. I found it!”
After that, Mario Sepúlveda pours a few salty drops from the bag into the glasses of water along with the spoonful of tuna the men get each day. And sometimes he inadvertently adds another salty ingredient to the water. Several of the miners notice that as Mario pours the water and puts a few peas or a few drops of milk in each cup, the sweat from his forehead drips into some of the glasses: He’s telling the men how good everything is going to taste, and is simply too excited and too wrapped up in what he’s doing to notice. Not only are the men eating meals made from Mario Sepúlveda’s bathwater, they’re drinking some of his sweat, too.
7
BLESSED AMONG WOMEN
The driller Eduardo Hurtado reaches the San José Mine on Sunday at 9:00 a.m., after an all-night drive of 430 miles, having been summoned by his boss at the Terraservice drilling company the night before, a few hours after Minister Golborne’s tearful announcement that a “traditional rescue” was no longer possible. The machine Hurtado will use arrives two hours later: a Schramm T685WS rotary drill, manufactured in West Chester, Pennsylvania. It’s a portable drilling rig on wheels, a vehicle about as long as a gasoline tanker, and it carries a mast that rises up to direct a hydraulic-driven drill into the ground. On an average day Hurtado and his crew will take this kind of drill and, with the guidance of a geologist or topographer, sink a hole that searches for ore. “Yeah, I’d done a lot of deep holes, but always looking for minerals,” Hurtado says to me. “I’d never drilled for
viejos
before.” Other drillers have already started searching for the men, the first beginning on Saturday night. Hurtado steps into the small company office at the mine and finds Alejandro Bohn, one of the owners, looking exhausted and dispirited, though his manager, Pedro Simunovic, is much more alert and helpful. Hurtado needs a topographer to tell him where to drill, but for the moment there isn’t one to be found. “The situation felt chaotic and anarchic,” Hurtado says. “No one was in charge.”
Finally, Hurtado finds a topographer and some blueprints of the mine. It’s obviously much faster and more accurate to drill a hole straight down, from a spot on the surface directly above the location they’re trying to reach, in this case, one of the passageways near the Refuge. The hunt for this ideal drilling spot leads them to climb the bare, rocky surface of the mountain and mark out a patch of ground, which a work crew then begins to flatten with a bulldozer, to create the “platform” upon which they’ll place the drill rig. They’re not quite finished when a geologist inspecting the area tells them to stop: He’s found several telltale cracks in the mountain. They are standing above the vacuum in the mountain left by the collapse of the mine. “This could all give way at any moment,” the geologist says.
They hunt for another spot, where they’ll have to drill diagonally into the mountain, and by late Monday morning they’re ready to go. Hurtado feels the need to give a little speech, reminding his crew of eight men how important this job is, and says that maybe each guy should say a prayer for the hole they’re about to drill: “Let’s all put our trust in the skinny guy,” Hurtado says, meaning, of course, the skinny guy on the cross. As they bow their heads one member of the drilling team says: “Hey, boss, let’s hold hands as we pray.” The eight drillers stand in a circle of helmets, and then the operator, Nelson Flores, places a rosary on the drill. Soon the rig’s compressor and rotary drill hum and grind into action, the truck’s mast tipped at a 78-degree angle and aimed at a target below 2,000 feet of diorite. “It was going to be hard because of the angle,” Hurtado says. “I could end up anywhere. It’s impossible to control exactly what the deviation will be.” As they drill the shaft, the Terraservice crew will place a series of interlinking steel tubes in the hole they’re carving into the mountain. Gravity will cause this steel shaft to bend in the same way a series of linked plastic straws bends. If they hit the Refuge, it will be with what soccer-loving Spanish-speakers call a
chanfle
, a bend-it-like-Beckham curve shot. The deviation can be as much as 5 percent, meaning that by the time it reaches the level of the trapped men the drill bit could be 100 feet off its target—and the corridor they’re trying to reach is no more than 32 feet wide.
The grinding and pounding Terraservice drill spits a constant cloud of dust skyward from a chimney pipe, and sends a flow of wastewater over the ground. The sound and the dust fill the cold night as a fog begins to descend over the mountain. On other patches of mountain around him, more teams begin to drill, too; Sunday is drifting toward Monday, and for the moment, no one is in charge of coordinating the rescue effort.
* * *
When Cristián Barra arrives at the mine on Monday, the sense of disorder is palpable, and troubling, because it’s his job to prevent chaos. Barra is there at the behest of President Sebastián Piñera—Barra is one of those strict and severe men who work behind the scenes to keep the best Latin American democracies running with a no-nonsense, kick-’em-in-the-balls-and-get-it-done efficiency. He works at the Ministry of the Interior, traditionally the most powerful agency in any Latin American country, and the one in charge of Chile’s police forces and security apparatus. Barra seeks out the mine owners, Alejandro Bohn and Marcelo Kemeny. He finds them in their small office with the tiny window facing the desolate stretch of desert mountain range they own, two middle-aged, sleep-deprived men in oxford shirts and white helmets. They tell anyone who will listen that they thought the mine was safe—Kemeny says a few months back he entered the mine with his own two sons, ages fifteen and nine.
The night before, Kemeny and his manager, Pedro Simunovic, had a brief, tense encounter with the families. The angry men and women staged a protest to force the owners to “show their faces.” Amid much pushing and shoving despite the police officers assigned to protect them, Kemeny and Simunovic entered a tented meeting area set up by the local government. Simunovic withstood a hail of insults and was able to utter only a few words, while Kemeny stood in the background saying nothing, and most of the family members didn’t even notice he was there.
The rescue efforts are moving forward without the owners’ input. “They weren’t psychologically or emotionally able to make any decisions, or to plan what to do next,” Barra later says. Anticipating this state of affairs, Barra has come armed with an official declaration of a State of Emergency, issued by the minister of the interior at the order of the president, at a meeting at La Moneda, the presidential palace, a few hours earlier. Barra is Piñera’s fixer; they’ve known each other for more than twenty years, since the early days of the National Renewal party. Barra has come to take charge of the mine, and one of his first acts will be to deploy police officers and erect barriers that will keep the miners’ fathers and brothers and sons from entering the mine on more quixotic rescue attempts.
Barra also establishes a series of protocols—who can enter the mine property and who can’t, the identification required to pass through. He is the vanguard of an army of federal officials on their way not just to rescue the thirty-three men trapped beneath their feet but also, in a sense, to rescue the minister of mining. Like everyone else in Chile the top members of the Piñera government saw the minister cry on television because he couldn’t tell the miners’ families exactly how he would get the men out alive. Now the Piñera administration has assumed the responsibility of giving him a plan, despite some grumbling from the president’s advisers that it’s not politically expedient: Why assume responsibility for the lives of thirty-three men who are probably doomed anyway, when tradition and the law dictate that you need not and should not get involved?
The president has made a quick stop in Copiapó on his return journey from Quito, Ecuador. He met briefly with a small group of family members, and with several local officials, including the provincial governor, Ximena Matas (she is one of his appointees), and a pair of conservative members of Congress, though not with the leftist legislators present, including the Socialist senator and novelist Isabel Allende. Later, in Santiago, he convened that first meeting at La Moneda at which he agreed the government should take over the rescue. The next obvious question is: Who knows more about mining rescues than anyone in Chile? It has to be someone at Codelco, the state-run National Copper Corporation, the world’s largest producer of copper. Soon a call is out to the man who runs the largest of the Codelco family of mines, André Sougarret, at El Teniente mine in Rancagua, south of Santiago. Sougarret is an engineer and administrator at a mine that’s so big—it has seven thousand employees—that rescues are a routine part of the worklife there. As he begins to assemble a team of about twenty-five men he gets a second call with an urgent question: How quickly can you make it to the presidential palace?
Ninety minutes later, Sougarret is entering La Moneda, Chile’s equivalent of the White House, for the first time in his life, dressed in jeans and carrying a mining helmet under his arm. He’s directed to an office where he waits for a meeting that never takes place. Two hours later, an official tells him to go down to the basement. “I had no idea what was happening,” he later says. Finally, he’s told: “You’re going to Copiapó.” He becomes a passenger in a caravan of cars headed to the air force base adjacent to Santiago’s international airport. When he arrives at the base, Sougarret sees, to his surprise, that he’s getting on a plane with President Piñera. A bit after takeoff, a crew member serves Sougarret lunch, and when he’s finished eating the president and the first lady emerge from their private cabin and sit next to him. The president pulls out a notepad and sketches a drawing that shows what he, the president, knows about the San José Mine and where the men are trapped. The president says something to the effect of “Well, that’s the situation. If I give you absolutely any resource you need to rescue them, what’s the probability of getting them out alive?”
Sougarret can’t answer, and neither can another engineer sitting next to him. “Then he asked us if we knew of any other kinds of rescue, something that might work in this situation,” Sougarret says. “We told him that, in general, you can’t really predict if a rescue will work—and that, generally speaking, there are more negative outcomes than positive ones.”
When the presidential plane arrives in Copiapó a little after 4:00 p.m., it’s very cold. Sougarret gets into the backseat of a van that takes the president to the mine, and there they join Golborne for a brief press conference in which the president announces the government has brought in the country’s top mining-rescue expert to lead the effort to find the trapped thirty-three men—he then names Sougarret, though he mispronounces his name. To his great relief, Sougarret manages to escape the press before they can ask him what, exactly, he plans to do.
One of the first men Sougarret meets at the San José Mine is the general manager, Carlos Pinilla. “Hey, remember me?” Pinilla says. “I met you at La Serena.” Decades earlier, Sougarret was an intern at that mine when Pinilla was the boss there. Pinilla and the other managers provide Sougarret with information that gives him some hope. He learns that there are likely several thousand gallons of water stored in tanks inside the mine, which means the trapped men, if they’re alive, won’t immediately die of dehydration. The San José is more than a century old and thus has many forgotten passageways that allow air to seep in and out. In fact, as he stands on the Ramp near the entrance, Sougarret can feel air flowing into the mountain: Any men trapped inside will likely not die from suffocation. Going deeper, Sougarret also verifies that “it was a very good mine, in terms of the rock that was holding it together.” This is at once reassuring and disturbing: The hard diorite shouldn’t have caved in, but it did, which means that the essential structure of the mountain must have failed. Whatever is blocking the many passageways leading to the men must be a very large obstacle indeed, as is soon verified by a group of geologists who estimate the skyscraper-size “mega-block.” It would take a year to excavate a new tunnel around that obstacle to reach the men.
From the medical personnel who have arrived at the mine, Sougarret learns that a healthy man can last thirty to forty days without food. However, if there’s a man debilitated with a lung disease such as silicosis (and they’ll soon find out there is, as Chilean health officials round up the medical records of the men), he’ll survive perhaps half as long; and a man with a broken limb or some other serious injury might survive as little as a week or two. Four days have already passed. They have to try every possible rescue strategy, and Sougarret decides to send one team to fortify the passageways below so that a second team can try to reach the men by clearing the chimneys. Many among the dozen or so mining professionals who have come to the site to offer guidance and expertise believe that this sort of “traditional” rescue through the chimneys and other passageways is the best hope.
The “nontraditional” effort consists of nine drills working independently—in effect, the rescuers are firing nine bullets at the same target and hoping one will hit. Hurtado, like the other drillers, knows all of Chile is watching. After three days of drilling, the Terraservice borehole reaches a depth of 370 meters: Hurtado’s team stops and pulls out the drill so that a topographer can use instruments to check on its progress. The report back is not good: The hole has bent in the wrong direction. Can he make it bend back the right way, someone asks? “Impossible,” he answers. “It was as if we had set off for Caldera, but ended up on the road to Vallenar instead,” Hurtado later says, naming two towns that are on opposite ends of the Pan-American Highway as it runs through Copiapó. Among his drill team, one man looks especially beaten down by this setback: the man who called them all together to hold hands at the start. “Our feelings were heavy,” Hurtado says. “This wasn’t an ordinary hole anymore.” They begin to drill again, the geologist Sandra Jara checking their progress every 200 meters with a device that Hurtado’s team lowers into the 4.5-inch-diameter borehole. It contains a gyroscope that uses the Earth’s rotation and some basic principles of physics to establish true north. This hole, unlike the first one, seems to be bending in the right direction, and teams working in six more twelve-hour shifts push it down to 400 meters, then to 500, working with a combination of urgency, altruism, and pessimism, because beyond the likelihood that they will miss their target, there is also the distinct possibility that if they do find anyone that person will be dead. The possibility of finding corpses is real enough that Barra and the Ministry of the Interior have put a special protocol in place in case the drill breaks through: Sougarret will supervise a team that will lower a camera down the hole, but only he, the minister of mining, and the camera operator will be allowed to see the monitor, because it might reveal the macabre image of a dead man, or several dead men, or even thirty-three dead men. If the men are dead it will fall to the minister, and only the minister, to tell the families.