While the police commandos searched and explored the mine looking for the trapped men, word of the accident spread—a cave-in at San José, thirty-three men inside. Rumors flourished, including the version that twenty-two miners were crushed and dead. “I heard they found my father’s truck, with blood inside it, and he was dead. I cried and cried all that day,” said Carolina Lobos, twenty-five, daughter of Franklin Lobos, the former soccer star trapped in the mine. “I had no more tears left, yet still I cried.”
Dr. Jorge Diaz, medical director for the Asociación Chilena de Seguridad (ACHS), was on call at a Copiapó medical clinic. Upon hearing of the San José mine collapse, he immediately cleared out the hospital beds, summoned his staff and prepared to treat the injured. No one ever arrived.
After her unsuccessful attempt to convince her husband, Mario Gómez, to stay in bed and not go to work that fateful morning, Lillian Ramírez waited nervously at home. At 8 pm, when she heard the sound of the truck that delivered her husband home, she put the dinner in the microwave. “It was very odd that my husband was taking so long to come in. So I opened the curtains and saw my husband’s boss. . . . It was very strange. I put my hands to my face and said, ‘My God, something has happened.’ ” The mining executive asked Ramírez to come with him and said there had been a small accident that would be resolved the following day. He refused to provide details, provoking further panic for Lillian Ramírez, who immediately sought out her nephew and drove up to the mine. It would be months before she returned home.
Surrounding the entrance to the San José mine, the golden brown desert was buried by acres of gray debris, sharp piles of rocks known to miners as “sterile material.” As they held no signs of the rich veins of gold or copper, these rocks were dumped in the desert, decades of detritus tossed in uneven waves across the landscape.
These “sterile” rocks were now windbreaks and refuge for the growing clan of families streaming up the hill. Tiny altars with a single photo and candles were now accompanied by signs such as “Fuerza Mineros—Los Estaban Esperando” (“Be Strong, Miners—We Are Waiting for You”). The individual face of Jimmy Sánchez, a grim photo taken from his job application, stared out mutely, a silent scream. On an adjacent rock an orange miner’s helmet was propped up, sheltering two lit candles beneath it.
Dozens, then hundreds, of family members and friends of the trapped miners flocked to the San José mine on the evening of August 5 and the dawn of Friday, August 6. They brought sleeping bags, food and cigarettes, which they consumed incessantly as they gathered nervously near the mouth of the mine. “I know he can survive this, he once lived as a stowaway on a cargo ship and went twelve days without eating,” said Rossana Gómez, twenty-eight, as she proudly described her father, Mario Gómez, the oldest of the trapped men. “He survived el accidente,” she said in a coded reference to a dynamite mistake that shredded her father’s left hand years ago, splaying it throughout a mining camp. “I am sending him tranquility and comfort,” she added, confident that her father would be saved and comforted by her conviction that Dad’s long-time desire to mentor a young son would be fulfilled.
Gómez—his lungs failing, his seven fingers proof that he was a veteran—was a survivor who could adapt to this dark dungeon of a life and might adopt the younger, weaker miners. Gómez could teach the young pups the art of survival on the job. Rossana proudly promoted her father, saying, “He provides strength to his mates.”
If anyone needed reinforcement, it was the Bolivian-born Carlos Mamani—the only non-Chilean in the group. August 5 was Mamani’s first day of work, a single shift he had picked up as a moonlighter, an extra job to help defray the cost of caring for eleven-month-old Emili, his new baby. Now Mamani was trapped. Given the century-long animosity between Chile and Bolivia, living in a hole some 2,300 feet deep, surrounded by thirty-two Chileans was, for a Bolivian like Mamani, akin to being a Serb stuck in a Croat foxhole.
Of the thirty-three men, twenty-four lived in the nearest city, Copiapó, a mining town with a population of one hundred and twenty-five thousand, where an estimated 70 percent of the local economy relied on the mines. News of a mining accident surprised few of the locals, many of whom were third-generation miners. The local Copiapó newspaper, El Atacameño, regularly ran headlines about crushed and dismembered miners. Yet instantly this felt different. The depth at which the collapse had happened and the number of victims were noteworthy, even in a community fluent in the language of mining tragedies.
The desert mountains and salt flats of northern Chile are loaded with such riches that slightly over half of the Chilean export revenue comes from mining. In a good month, the nation exports nearly $4 billion in copper. Fully one-third of the world’s copper comes from Chile, and the tale of the “green gold” has figured in the nation’s economic success for the past two decades, a boom that has not included many of the communities in the mining area. With copper prices tripling from roughly $1.20 a pound to well over $3.00 over the past five years, old tailings and second-rate mines were reevaluated. What was junk at $1.20 a pound might well be profitable if copper prices remained above the $2.50 price level. Abandoned mines and older, more dangerous operations were suddenly valuable and viable.
The Atacama region is home to major mining operations but it also has the second highest unemployment rate in Chile. While copper companies in Chile earned an estimated $20 billion in profits in 2009, government statistics showed the area to have among the fastest rise in poverty in all of Chile. “In other words, one of the richest regions in the country is, at the same time, one of the poorest,” concluded an article in The Clinic, an alternative newsweekly based in Santiago.
As they gathered at the mine, the disparate families shared a common anger—the accident had been so widely predicted, it was overdue. Yessica Chilla, partner to Darío Segovia, forty-eight, one of the trapped men, remembered, “The day before the accident, he told me the mine was about to settle and that he didn’t want to be on the shift when the collapse arrived. But we needed the money. His shift had ended, but then they offered him extra hours. No one refuses because they pay you double. That day he was going to earn ninety thousand pesos [$175]. But he wanted to leave this job to run a trucking business.”
Elvira Katty Valdivia didn’t hear about the accident until many hours after the collapse: “A friend from college called me. ‘Katty, do you know about what happened? It seems Mario is on the list of those trapped inside the mine.’ She told me to turn on the TV and I started watching and I saw the list. There was Mario Sepúlveda.” Valdivia’s dark skin, straight black hair and penetrating gaze highlighted a beauty that had been sorely tested in recent weeks. With her laptop propped up inside a nearby tent, she attempted to maintain the clients for her accounting business. While she balanced the books, her life could not have been more off-kilter. A hole drilled from her feet, with precise luck, would have pierced the tunnel where her husband, Mario, fought, battled and prayed in his struggle to survive. “I feel very sorry for him. Me here, and him down there, seven hundred meters [2,300 feet] deep,” she said, indicating the ground. “I would like to be with him, be able to touch him, tell him that I love him very much.” Valdivia expressed bitterness toward the mine owners. “They never told me anything. They didn’t tell anyone. They didn’t tell us a member of our family was down there trapped in the mine.”
Valdivia’s employer—U.S. accounting firm Price Waterhouse—assured her her salary would be paid in full while she maintained a vigil on this remote outpost as she awaited news on the fate of her husband. With two teenage children, Scarlette, eighteen, and Francisco, thirteen, in tow, Valdivia began to organize her life from inside her temporary home at the mine site. With rumors of death and entrapment swirling in her head, Valdivia watched as her world disintegrated. “People were running everywhere and screaming,” she said. “My son was crying and I was trying to console him. It was a very difficult moment. . . . I couldn’t sleep. I asked myself, Why me? Why
me? Why is this happening to us?”
Chilean President Sebastian Piñera was in Quito, Ecuador, when he first heard of the mining tragedy. He could be excused for thinking the same as Katty Valdivia: “Why me? Why is this happening to us?” It was Piñera’s second successive tragedy in his short tenure as president. When he took office just four months earlier, Piñera inherited a nation shattered by the February 27, 2010, earthquake. That quake left hundreds of thousands homeless and hundreds more dead when a tsunami crushed the coastline. Piñera’s ambitious political agenda was also leveled by the 8.8 Richter scale quake, the fifth largest ever recorded. Instead of a fresh slate to highlight new ideas, Piñera’s team was dealing with thousands of collapsed adobe structures, destroyed hospitals and the wreckage along an estimated 1,200 miles of Chile’s modern highways.
“I was with President Correa in Ecuador,” said Piñera. “Our diagnosis that first evening was clear. We knew there were thirty-three men. They were trapped at seven hundred meters [almost half a mile] and after a diagnosis of the company, it was seen as a precarious situation. There was no possibility for them to respond. The option was thus very simple. The government would assume responsibility for the rescue or nobody would. It was much more simple than people think.”
Piñera ditched protocol, canceled a strategically important reunion with Juan Manuel Santos, the newly elected Colombian president, and rushed back to Chile. He ordered top aides to the scene that very night.
In an effort both caring and self-serving, the Piñera administration saw the crisis as a perfect stage to highlight the can-do attitude of the nation’s first elected right-wing government in half a century. Piñera bet his dwindling political capital on the fate of thirty-three unknown miners. It was a gamble that would later reinforce the billionaire businessman’s reputation as a brilliant short-term stock trader.
DAY 2: SATURDAY, AUGUST 7
The men had now been trapped for two full days, yet no sign of life had been found. Basic, primal fears began to haunt the rescuers. Did the men have air? Were they injured and dying slowly? How would they eat?
Below ground the rescue effort hit another setback. The rescue workers had been trying to find a route around the blocked ventilation shafts, but with the mine still shifting, the shafts began to collapse. The massive battleship-sized rock slipped a fraction, sending more small avalanches through the mine. Now the GOPE mission changed from rescuing trapped miners to evacuating the rescuers and avoiding a second entrapment. Without the tripod to guide the rope, the police rushed to extricate their colleagues who were being bombarded by rocks. If they pulled too fast or to one side, they risked slicing the rope and delivering a rescuer to his death. If they went too slow, the chance of a large rock knocking him unconscious grew by the second.
“We train for this. We have to study geology, and part of our curriculum is mine rescues,” said Hernan Puga, a GOPE member who mentioned that the local mountains housed an estimated two thousand small-scale mines. He compared the vertical descent and ascent to the type of training the police regularly carried out for special operations inside prisons.
When all the rescue workers had been pulled free, instead of celebrating their near escape from death, the police commandos were filled with frustration.
“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 Ramírez. “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 Ramírez 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. Ramírez 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.”
THREE
STUCK IN HELL
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 encourage
d 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 Raúl 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.
33 Men Page 4