Authors: Héctor Tobar
The men’s confused silence is soon filled by the sound of the shift foreman counting. Raúl Villegas, who was driving one of the ore trucks, is missing, but Franklin Lobos and Jorge Galleguillos saw him on his way to the surface, and it seems likely that he got out. “Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two…” Urzúa counts again, and again gets thirty-two, but all the men are shifting around, and he’s not quite clear that this is the right count, because in the San José Mine the lists of workers always shift from one day to the next. Nothing in the mine is ever certain, though the supervisor is pretty sure of one thing: There’s probably no way to escape, and no way for rescuers to reach them, in this haphazard collection of passageways cut into a mountain.
3
THE DINNER HOUR
There is nothing especially remarkable about the phone call the off-duty miner Pablo Ramirez gets at about 2:00 p.m. It’s from Carlos Pinilla’s secretary at the San Esteban Mining Company. “There’s a problem in the mine,” the secretary says. “A problem with the Ramp. Don Carlos says to get over here. And it looks like you’ll only need a few operators for your shift.” Ramirez is at home in Copiapó, enjoying his last few hours of rest before beginning work on the night shift at the San José Mine. When the shift currently inside the mine ends its workday, he will take the reins from Luis Urzúa as the supervisor of the night shift: but that’s not supposed to be for another five hours or so. Judging from the secretary’s matter-of-fact tone, there’s been another spillover of rock from the cavern of the Pit, and getting the guys out will be a routine but arduous task involving a few machine operators clearing out rock from the Ramp. A day of production will be lost.
This is what Ramirez thinks as he drives to the mine. He’s not worried for all the guys he knows inside. He knows about half of the men quite well: The shift foreman, Florencio Avalos, is one of his best friends, and Florencio’s two sons call Pablo “
tío
,” or uncle. Ramirez and Avalos are both about thirty, smart young guys with good careers ahead of them in mining, and at this moment Ramirez hasn’t heard anything to disabuse him of the belief that he’ll be able to sit down and have a beer with his friend fairly soon. At 4:30, Pablo arrives at the mine and sees something significantly more troubling than he expected. The mouth of the mine, its one and only entrance, is spewing dust. A bit of dust coming from the mine isn’t that unusual, but Ramirez has never seen quite the billowing cloud he sees now, rising up from the cavelike entrance, “like a volcano,” he later says. And then there are the noises: the explosions produced by rock falls, a moaning crash repeated again and again. But even this is not terribly unusual, because the mountain is constantly broadcasting noises from its innards to the outside world: Whenever a team of workers sets off a blast deep inside, for example, the sound usually follows the mine’s passageways and rises to the surface. But neither the sound nor the spewing dirt stop. Past five, six o’clock, the dust is still making it impossible to enter the mine and go for the men inside. As the hours pass, mine workers and managers gather outside, looking a bit lost, with Carlos Pinilla standing there in his white helmet among them. Pinilla has tried twice before to go inside, reaching only as far as Level 440 before the cloud of dust became too thick to continue.
At about five o’clock, with the dusk of Southern Hemisphere winter fast approaching, Pinilla leads a team of men back inside: Pablo Ramirez and two other mine supervisors enter with him.
They descend in a pickup truck, making several switchback turns without incident, until, at Level 450, they see a two-inch-wide crack all across the floor of the Ramp. The “good” diorite of the only passageway into and out of the mine has fractured wider than Ramirez has ever seen before, and he will remember this as the moment he first grasped the seriousness of the accident. As they advance a bit farther, Ramirez follows the light of the pickup truck and expects to see, at any moment, the loose rock produced by a cave-in from the excavated cavern of the Pit. Instead, at Level 320, after driving 4.5 kilometers from the mine entrance (2.8 miles), the pickup comes to an unexpected obstacle, its headlights shining upon a flat, gray mass. The Ramp is blocked, top to bottom, by a single piece of rock. Ramirez thinks he’s seen or prepared for every mining disaster possible, but never in his musing or his planning has he imagined anything like this. It feels as if someone had gone through with a knife and cut the mine in half. The men get out of the pickup and stand before it, a solid wall of rock that couldn’t possibly be there.
“
Cagamos
,” someone says, unknowingly repeating the same word uttered by the men trapped by this same rock 425 feet below. We’re
fucked. Ramirez, a man who takes pride in being able to tackle any problem a mine can give him, suddenly feels a sense of powerlessness, that there is nothing he or his boss can do to rescue the thirty-three men on the other side of this rock. The best remaining hope is the chimneys, but only a special police unit, a team with mountain climbing gear, will be able to enter them.
Standing before that solid stone in his white helmet, Pinilla looks stunned. He is the most powerful man in the daily working lives of the men of the San José Mine, the high-strung boss who hurriedly left behind his underlings just before this rock fell in his wake. But now he begins to weep. “He’s usually a jerk, real macho when it comes to those things,” Ramirez will say later. “But he started crying, right away.”
“I thought, no, I knew for certain that someone had to be dead,” Pinilla says later. At 1:45, the moment of the collapse, the personnel truck was supposed to be headed uphill, taking the men out for lunch; the contractor mechanics weren’t even supposed to be in the mine at that hour, and more than likely they, too, were headed out of the mine for lunch. Pinilla imagines those men crushed in the massive failure of the Ramp and can’t help but think:
I’m the bastard who sent them all down there
.
They drive back up to the surface, and find the owners, Marcelo Kemeny and Alejandro Bohn, waiting in white helmets. They have to call for help, there’s no other way. This requires Bohn and Kemeny to get in their truck and drive down the hill away from the mine and toward the highway in search of a cell-phone signal—there’s a phone line at the mine but for some reason they choose not to use it. At 7:22, more than five hours after the collapse, the owners of the San José Mine call the authorities for the first time.
The call reaches the local fire department, then the offices of the National Geology and Mining Service, and eventually the disaster office of Chile’s Ministry of the Interior, which supervises all of Chile’s police and security forces. An hour later, six men from the Chilean police’s Special Operations Group (GOPE, in Spanish) arrive at the San José Mine with climbing gear. They enter the mine in a pickup truck and are on the Ramp, passing Level 450, when they get a flat tire while driving over the new crack in the roadway. Following behind them in another pickup, Carlos Pinilla and Pablo Ramirez see the crack has doubled in size.
If the police unit were to know that the crack is new, and how much it’s grown in the past two hours, they might realize how unstable the mountain is and halt their rescue effort. So in Ramirez’s account of the moment, as the police rescuers get out to quickly change the tire, Pinilla looks over to Ramirez and places a finger against his lips. Ramirez understands and doesn’t say a word about this frightening, growing fissure in the mountain, a warning sign of another collapse that will surely follow.
* * *
As the hours pass with thirty-three men trapped behind a cloud of dust and a curtain of stone, the administrators of the San Esteban Mining Company put off calling the families of the men. “In certain mines, the first instinct is to just try and hide these things as much as possible,” one Chilean official later says. At 3:00 p.m., they might have called and said: There’s been a collapse, it’s going to take a while to get them out, don’t expect them for dinner. At 7:00 p.m., they might have said: It’s looking more serious than we expected, and we don’t know when exactly we’ll get them out, but as far as we know they’re safe. Instead, for more than eight hours after the accident and deep into a Thursday night rumbling toward a Friday morning, the company’s representatives say nothing, and word of the accident first reaches wives, mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons in Copiapó and other cities and towns across the narrow spine of Chile via the vague, alarming, and often inaccurate bulletins of various radio and television stations.
One of the few loved ones to hear quickly from someone with more or less direct knowledge of what’s going at the mine is a woman not listed on any mining company document, and with no legal claim to any private information: Yonni Barrios’s big, rosy-cheeked, and incessantly happy mistress, Susana Valenzuela.
Susana’s brother-in-law works in a mine in Punta del Cobre, just outside of Copiapó, and learns of the accident as word goes out to the mining community that men might be needed for a rescue. That brother-in-law calls his wife, Susana’s sister, who at 7:00 p.m. shows up at the door to Yonni and Susana’s home in Copiapó and asks, “Is Yonni here?”
“No, he’s not,” Susana says.
The sister puts Susana in touch with her husband. “There was a cave-in at the mine at two in the afternoon and
los niños
are buried alive,” he says over the phone. “There’s no escape.”
“That’s what he told me: ‘Buried alive.’ ‘No escape,’” Susana says later. “People who work in the mines know what it means to say those things. So I got desperate.”
With her sister, Susana heads to the local station of Chile’s national police force, the famously erect, incorruptible, and efficient Carabineros. But the police haven’t heard anything either. In the short time Susana and her sister are there, however, word reaches the station, and they watch as police vehicles start to head out to the San José. Go to the hospital, the Carabineros tell them, but first Susana and her sister race back to their neighborhood, to tell Marta, Yonni’s wife.
Marta is a much smaller, older, more severe and serious woman than Susana. The women have known each other for several years, as Yonni has bounced back and forth between their two homes. Susana first met Yonni in his wife’s house: She mentioned to Marta that she needed someone to build some furniture. “This ugly old man I live with, my husband, made that over there,” Marta said. “I’m bored of him.” Yonni then emerged from the room where his wife had him “prisoner,” or so Susana tells it. Marta explains that she’s endured his philandering for years. Susana thinks:
This guy isn’t ugly at all
. In his sad, lonely smile there is a hint of sly cunning, the come-hither look of a wounded man who wants to open his soul to you, right now, as soon as you can slip away and be alone with him. “I brought him over here, and I liked him,” Susana says, “and I made him a little lunch, and then we made a little love afterwards.” He never did make the furniture. Now this history is a light and comical prologue to the tragedy of that same philandering man buried and lost in the San José Mine. When she learns of the accident from her husband’s mistress, Marta responds in a rather bloodless tone: “This is as far as you go with him. Now I’m in charge. Go get me the marriage book.” The
libreta de matrimonio
is a kind of passbook, signed by the official who performs a civil marriage ceremony, and it’s used to apply for a variety of government services, and also to gain access to places where only a spouse will be admitted (for example, a hospital room or a coroner’s office). This document is in Yonni’s possession, at Susana’s home.
Susana obediently retrieves her boyfriend’s marriage book, and together, she and his wife head off to the hospital.
* * *
Carmen Berríos is in Copiapó, on the bus, and the driver is playing fast-tempoed Mexican music on the radio and forcing all his passengers to listen to it. She’s spent the day with her father and is headed back home, to make dinner for her husband, Luis Urzúa, and their two children at 9:30. Suddenly, the swirling accordions give way to an announcer’s voice. “Extra, extra, extra!” the announcer says, in a radio voice that can’t help but attach a note of cheerful anticipation to the dispensation of a news flash. “Tragedy in the San José Mine! A collapse in the mine!” The flash dispenses little more than the bare skeleton of a story before the Mexican music returns. For Carmen, learning that she might have lost her husband while that folksy music plays is a juxtaposition that’s odd, cruel, and unforgettable.
“Driver, what did he say?” she asks. Because, to be honest, Carmen’s not entirely sure exactly where Luis works. He switched jobs a few months back, and she’s never been to his new mine, and she can’t be sure the mine in the radio bulletin is the one where Luis works. For a moment her small doubt becomes a source of hope. “Can you change it to another station?” she asks the driver. “Maybe there’s more information…”
“That’s all there is,” the driver says. “It’s an extra. Maybe they’ll have more later.”
She gets home and hears more bulletins on the radio: There are wounded miners, and dead miners, the radio says, and it’s now undeniably clear it’s Luis’s mine. “The whole nightmare fell on top of us, because we didn’t know if it was true, or not.” The clock in the living room passes 9:30 and Luis doesn’t come home. Her two children, a son and a daughter both in college, are quietly studying and not especially aware that dinner is late. When the clock reaches 10:30 she calls them together and says: “We have to have a family meeting. The radio is saying there was an accident at the mine where your father works.” She turns on the radio for them to hear, and there are reports of injured men being taken to the San José del Carmen Hospital in Copiapó, but Carmen decides she has to go to the mine, to get confirmation that he was even there when the mine collapsed. Her daughter’s friend drives her there in a pickup truck, using a GPS, because she’s never been there before and doesn’t know the directions.