Authors: Héctor Tobar
“It was surreal,” Luis Urzúa says. “But after a while, surreal things like that started to seem normal.”
Urzúa decides that the men are spending too much time watching
Buenos Días a Todos
. They sit there for hours and neglect important work. For example, now that the men are eating regular meals, there’s a lot of shit, literally, to clean down in the toilet area. And not the isolated little llama pellets of before, but rather man-size, miner-size, smelly turds, in large quantities. To get the men to clean their excrement, Urzúa calls to the surface and asks the rescuers to turn off the television in the morning. With no more
Buenos Días
from Santiago, the men finally get around to latrine duty. From then forward, the television is on only during the afternoon, for soccer games involving Chile’s most popular teams, La Universidad de Chile and Colo-Colo, and for movies “to keep us calm and to keep us from complaining,” one of the miners says.
* * *
Not everyone trapped below is taking it easy while waiting to be rescued. In this first week of September, Víctor Segovia notes in his diary an odd sight: Edison Peña is running through the mine. He’s taken a pair of boots and cut them down to ankle height, and uses those to run up and down the dark passageways, alone with the beam of light on his helmet and the sound of his breathing through the thick air. Edison has long been the eccentric of the A shift: He used to walk alone in the mine, and sang Elvis songs in the Refuge, and when they were starving he performed those morbid death skits with Mario Sepúlveda. But running for exercise down here in hell is lunacy of a higher order. Why is Edison running? After the contact, Edison says, he was overcome with joy and gratitude. He’s seen a “blue light” in the mine, the light of faith. He’s promised God that he’ll do something to show his devotion, and what could be more devoted than to run uphill, against a 10 percent grade, in those passageways carved from the Earth? But he’s also running because he senses his body needs exercise to become well. Once he started eating real food he became painfully constipated, as did many other men. Going to the bathroom is an ordeal. “I’d go and push and push. What was coming out was really thick. Then it got stuck, somehow, and no, no, no, no. It was like trying to deliver a baby. It hurt a lot.” He needs to do something with his ailing body, and he has no bike to ride, so he starts to run. Many of the guys see him and start laughing. “They’d make fun of me. No one said anything supportive. Except maybe Yonni Barrios: He was worried something would happen to me.” To Florencio Avalos, it looks like Edison is running “to forget things, to make himself tired so that he can sleep.” Florencio also knows how dangerous it is to wander around a mine alone, and concludes that Edison, as a Chilean expression puts it, “is one plank short of a bridge” (
le falta un palo para el puente
). For Edison, running through those corridors where a falling slab might kill you is his way of saying he’s going to stand up in the face of adversity. Later, he will have some running shoes sent down, from a certain globally popular brand, and then a pair of neoprene slippers. Running liberates his mind, but it also reminds him where he is and what he’s been through. “I felt completely alone,” he says.
* * *
While Edison Peña runs, other men drill above him. The Plan B drill has advanced 200 meters by September 9. The hardness of the diorite, the profound depth, and the angle and curve in the original, smaller borehole it’s following cause the drill bits to wear out more quickly than they would otherwise. They have to change bits every twelve hours. The drilling slows from 20 meters an hour to as slow as 4. In the drilling team there are Americans from Center Rock Inc. and Driller Supply, and Chileans from the local mining company Geotec, and others. All of them, working together, are pushing their bodies and the drill past their limits. They’re so eager to reach those living souls that they succumb to a phenomenon that Laurence Golborne and André Sougarret have seen before: Like the man who kept drilling long past the lowest level of the mine when the rescuers were first searching for the miners, they can’t “let go” of the hole. In their anxiety to reach the men at the bottom of the shaft, they drill when they shouldn’t. Unfortunately, while the men on the crews can summon the will to work past the point of exhaustion, the metal in the drill bit must still obey the laws of physics, and it finally and inevitably shatters, at a depth of 262 meters (860 feet), as revealed by a sudden drop in pressure in the T130 drill, and some schizophrenic behavior from the torque gauges. The crews raise the massive hammer to the top, and lower a camera to discover a basketball-size chunk of the drill bit is stuck in the hole, rendering the shaft useless.
Not long afterward, the Plan A drill suffers a hydraulic problem and also shuts down. The reassuring sound of drilling traveling through stone to the trapped miners below stops, and in the silence that follows, the miners begin to feel more alone, abandoned, and desperate than they have since the first drill bit broke through above the Refuge. They write letters and make telephone calls to the surface demanding to know what’s going on, and they soon discover they might be stuck until December after all.
Edison Peña returns to one of the passageways alone, and allows himself to slip deeper into loneliness than any of his colleagues, listening to the suddenly louder and clearer sound of his chopped-up “running boots” striking the mine floor one stride after another. Florencio Avalos, Luis Urzúa’s youthful second-in-command, decides he’s tired of sitting around waiting to be rescued. He gathers rope and other tools that can be used for climbing, and with three other men heads up toward the gray curtain of stone that’s blocking their way out.
15
SAINTS, STATUES, SATAN
Before leaving on his escape expedition, Florencio Avalos calls to the surface and talks to his old friend and compadre Pablo Ramirez. I’m going to try to find a way out through the chimneys, Florencio says. Ramirez tries to talk him out of it, of course, but Florencio won’t be dissuaded. With his brother Renán, and with Carlos Barrios and Richard Villarroel, Florencio drives the kilometer up to Level 190 and the chimney closest to the site of the collapse. Their plan is to retrace the path Mario Sepúlveda and Raúl Bustos followed on that first night underground, up the chimney to the next level, and perhaps to another chimney after that. They start up the jumbo and its attached cherry-picker basket, and they begin to climb.
* * *
On the surface, the rescue team isn’t ready to give up the Plan B hole. If they can get that chunk of metal out, they can resume drilling. They lower a magnet into the hole, but they fail to lift the shattered drill bit. On that same day, the American driller Jeff Hart arrives at the mine site following his long journey from Afghanistan. He’s there for the next, final phase of the Plan B drilling, a mission that’s on hold until the currently blocked hole can be unblocked, or a new Plan B drill can be started.
In the midst of the silence and the waiting, Carmen Berríos receives a letter from her husband, Luis Urzúa. He says the men are desperate because they can’t hear any drills. “The rescuers have worked hard for you,” she writes back. “Because God is with them. But if you all down there stop believing and stop praying it will all be for naught. Don’t you think?… Now, if you don’t hear the machines drilling, it’s not because they’ve left. Just have faith and don’t surrender to desperation. I write this because I want you to understand that a single objective motivates all the people involved in the rescue: getting you out of there.”
Before nine on the foggy morning of September 10, the trucks carrying the parts for the Plan C drill arrive after their long drive across the Atacama. They drive slowly up the narrow road leading to the San José property. It’s cold and the mood among the family members gathered outside the mine is subdued, though several wave Chilean flags and a few manage another chant of “Chi-chi-chi, le-le-le.” While the trucks ahead of him park, one driver stops his vehicle, and as he waits near the gate, a television news crew stops to talk to him: “We’ve arrived, with many sacrifices, after crossing the desert,” the driver says, and he’s visibly moved to be at the mine, where his countrymen and so many people around the world have focused their hopes. “But here we are, with our hearts big, like all Chileans.”
* * *
Above Level 190, Florencio Avalos and his three companions are summoning the courage to crawl up the chimney. They reach the opening to the next level of the Ramp, and walk toward the second, higher curtain of gray stone blocking the road to the surface. Florencio and the other miners begin to clear out small boulders at the site of this collapse, rocks that are on top of a huge reclining stone. Very soon, he’s cleared a space big enough to squeeze through, crawling like a cat. “I’m going in there,” he says, and Carlos and Renán and Richard all tell him it’s too dangerous. But Florencio squeezes through, and as he does so he sees a vast, open black space that swallows up the beam from his lamp. He crawls toward this precipice and loosens a rock, which falls into the blackness and lands with a crackling clap about two or three seconds later; his experience as a miner tells him the rock has fallen some 30 or 40 meters, roughly the height of a building that’s ten or twelve stories tall. He realizes he’s near some sort of new, interior
rajo
, or cavern. To advance farther, he ties a rope around his waist and passes it back to his colleagues, “because I knew that any wrong move and I might fall.” He’s able to crawl out of the crack and stand on a rock overlooking this cavern. “I shone my lamp and saw nothing but rocks, in this enormous space, and I thought,
We can get out through here
. I knew that from that point it was just another thirty meters up to a place where it was clear, and what I could see upward was thirty meters.” But Florencio also can see that the crack he’s just squeezed through is too narrow, and the remaining climb is too strenuous, for all of the men to make it. The bigger and older men would still be stranded. “At most, fifteen or twenty of us were going to be able to make it out this way. Luis Urzúa wouldn’t be able to make it. Franklin Lobos wouldn’t either, or José Henríquez or Jorge Galleguillos.”
When the escape party returns back down to the Refuge, Florencio learns that André Sougarret has been trying to reach him. Don’t try that again, he says. It’s simply too unstable and too dangerous. Florencio has set eyes upon the new chasm created by the collapse and explosion of the skyscraper-size chunk of diorite that destroyed the mine on August 5. The crumbling mountain is still spitting rockfalls every few days or hours, and Florencio is fortunate to have seen this chasm, and to have stood inside it, without being seriously injured.
* * *
At 10:00 p.m. on September 13, with a group of engineers, mechanics, and drillers still trying to rescue the Plan B hole, the Virgin Mary arrives at the San José Mine. She’s made of wood, a newly sculpted representation of the Virgen del Carmen, the patron of Chile and spiritual guide to the soldiers who fought in the War of Independence against Spain. The Ecuadorian artist Ricardo Villalba carved her, under commission from Pope Benedict XVI, who’s blessed her and given her to Chile to mark the country’s bicentennial. She’s been touring the mining cities and towns of northern Chile, and since August 5 thousands have asked her to intercede on behalf of the thirty-three trapped men. As the Virgin is carried onto the mine property inside a glass case, several women gather below her with candles whose yellow flames are protected from the Atacama wind inside holders fashioned from discarded cups and bottles. A flickering yellow light glows through the plastic skins of these humble receptacles, painting the faces of the faithful with a glow that’s warmer and kinder than the stark gray of the flood lamps that hover over the camp. Following the liturgy led by the bishop of Copiapó, Monsignor Gaspar Quintana, the women whisper prayers, and as they do, some allow the hot wax of white candles to drip over their fingers, until their wind-chapped hands themselves begin to resemble weeping wax sculptures. They pray for the Virgin to remove the obstacles that are keeping those thirty-three workingmen in darkness, under the ground upon which they are standing. From behind the glass, the Virgin sees their devotion and looks down upon them with the faint, fixed beatific smile that the sculptor Villalba has given her.
* * *
News of the presence of the Virgin Mary on the surface soon arrives below. For the Catholics, the power of the mother of God can be summoned to Earth, and sometimes it takes concrete form in an object said to have been created by the hand of God: for example, as in the Virgin of Candelaria in Copiapó, a tiny stone sculpture said to have appeared, miraculously, to an eighteenth-century mule driver seeking shelter from a storm in the nearby mountains. People venerate these objects because they feel closer to God in their presence. Now several of the Catholics trapped in the San José Mine will credit the Virgen del Carmen for the fortuitous event that follows mere hours after she’s left the mine: the rescue of the Plan B hole. The drillers and engineers at the Plan B site have lowered a metal “spider” into the hole and managed to retrieve a 26-pound chunk of metal stuck inside, 862 feet below. The Virgin, it seems, has interceded on their behalf, and the men who are especially devout Catholics hold pictures of the mother of God, the patron of Chile, and give thanks. After five days and nights of crisis, and of prayer, the best hope for a timely rescue of the thirty-three men is back on.
After listening to all the Catholics around him boast of the powers of this or that statue or image of the Virgin, José Henríquez begins to make some casual remarks during the daily prayer about the danger of venerating images instead of venerating God. One of the miners has even done a dance to the Virgin. Henríquez finds the cult of statues at once quaint and offensive. It’s one of the Ten Commandments, after all: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images. On Mount Sinai, God came to Moses and said not to bow before such objects. Eventually, Henríquez will expound on his beliefs in a way several miners find insulting. “To a certain point, Don José wanted to impose his religion on us,” Omar Reygadas says. “He started to renounce the saints. I don’t believe in the saints either, but I respect all religions. The people going to the prayers were from different religions, some were even nonbelievers who just wanted to pray. And there were a lot of people devoted to the Virgin of Candelaria, who is the one they say takes care of the miners. So when Don José started to speak out against the saints and the adoration of images, those people were offended.” Henríquez says, “I didn’t attack anyone. Did I make a commentary? Yes. Because it’s there in the Word: Don’t worship images.”