33 Men

by Jonathan Franklin

  If they are not ironed flat, pirquineros slowly die from lung problems. Just two months before, miner Alex Vega had been walking in the mine when his legs gave way and he collapsed. Toxic gases from the exhaust of the machinery had stripped his body of oxygen. An ambulance rushed Vega to the local Copiapó hospital, where he was kept for the better part of a week.

  Long-term exposure to the gases and grit led to silicosis—caused by breathing toxic silica particles, which clog the lungs. Year after year, these miners inhale clouds of tiny rock fragments, making the lungs ever less efficient. In advanced cases, known as Potter’s Rot (in reference to the use of silica in pottery making), the victim lacks oxygen and his skin takes on a blue tint. Mario Gómez, the oldest man on the shift, had collected so much dust and debris in his lungs that after fifty-one years as a miner, he was often short of breath and used a bronchial dilator to maximize the portions of his lungs that still functioned. With silicosis, miners like Gómez are slowly starved of oxygen—essentially the same process that would happen to a pickup truck if it were driven through this desert for twenty years with never a change of air filter.

  A pirquinero devotes his life to mining for a week, sometimes a solid month, as he breaks his back in solitary battle with the mountain and, for some, then soothes his loneliness with impromptu sexual escapes that a local doctor described as a “Brokeback Mountain situation.” A Chilean psychiatrist working with these miners described the phenomenon as “transitory homosexuality,” which, he noted, is a centuries-old practice among sailors, what he called “a practical solution to the ever more desperate lack of female companionship.” When the miners returned to town, they indulged heavily in alcohol, women and a blast of instant pleasures that guaranteed they would soon need another paycheck. Local cocaine—at $15 a gram—was also for many on the list of temptations.

  Samuel Ávalos had spent the past twenty-four hours scrambling to earn 16,000 Chilean pesos ($32) to take the bus to Copiapó. Ávalos, a round-faced, hardened man, lived in Rancagua, a mining town just south of Santiago, home to “El Teniente,” the world’s largest underground mine. Despite the plethora of mining jobs in the area, Ávalos had little experience underground. His job was as a street vendor—his specialty, pirated music CDs. The police harassed him often, sometimes confiscating his stash. But the last day had been lucky—he’d made just enough money to board the last bus with an empty seat to Copiapó. Only later would he realize that José Henríquez, a fellow miner, was on the same bus.

  During the bus ride, Ávalos drank. He transferred to the shuttle bus to the mine still in a daze. “The drinks had their effect. Getting down, stepping off the bus, I practically fell,” said Ávalos. “Then it was very strange. I don’t know what you would call it, but a spirit passed by. My mother. She’s deceased. I asked her, ‘Mom, what are you saying? What do you want?’ I didn’t figure it out. Later I had lots of time to think about that last warning.”

  Ávalos typically stuffed his jacket with chocolates, cakes, cookies, milk, and juice. With his jacket bulging, he constantly battled to hide the contraband from Luis Urzúa, the foreman who was never happy to see his workers with food. He considered it a distraction.

  “That day I left my food above. I didn’t bring even a single chocolate,” said Ávalos. It was another moment he would relive again and again in the coming weeks.

  As the incoming shift changed clothes and prepared for work, forty-two-year-old paramedic Hugo Araya exited the mine, his shift complete. Even after six years in San José, Araya never felt comfortable inside the mine. The sagging entrance with that rusted sign about safety always seemed a bit of a joke, considering the constant flow of accidents, cave-ins and fainting miners. But then Araya, who worked as lead emergency medical technician in the mine, was the kind of guy you called in when problems arose. Most of all, he hated the mine’s smell. “Like something decomposing. Like rotten meat,” he’d say.

  With carbon monoxide from the vehicles, gases emanating from the dynamite charges and the men smoking cigarettes nonstop, Araya received the emergency call so often it rarely felt like an emergency anymore. He would then drive the twenty-five-minute, four-mile journey down switchbacks and tunnels, deep to the bottom of the cavern where he’d find a pair of miners sucking on oxygen masks, ready for evacuation. Usually the men could go home that night. At worst, after a day or two in the local clinic they’d be back at the job, hacking, dynamiting, sucking up dust and rarely complaining.

  After his full night’s shift, Araya was coated with a fine layer of coffee-gray dust, an oily mixture that did not easily wash away. That morning as he showered and scrubbed at his home an hour away in Copiapó, Araya felt a deep unease. The mountain had “cried” all night. Eerie creaking groans and sharp reports had left all the men on edge. When a mine like San José cries, the tears tend to be the size of boulders.

  More than a century of picks, dynamite and drills had riddled the mountain with so many holes and tunnels that new workers would wonder aloud how the roof did not fall down on the many passageways. Araya had no way of recognizing that after 111 years of operation, after millions in gold and copper ore had been wrenched from every corner of the now labyrinthine tunnels, the mine had also been stripped of its support structure. Like a house of cards, the mine was now delicately balanced.

  Deep inside the San José mine, the miners stripped to the basic necessities—helmet with lamp, water bottle, shorts and MP3 player with a customized dose of Mexican rancheras, emotional ballads that chronicle the loves, sacrifice and nobility of the working class. “A lot of times you would see the men working in their boots and their underwear,” said Luis Rojas, who worked in the San José mine. “It was just too hot to wear many clothes.”

  Darío Segovia spent the morning of August 5 attaching metal nets to the roof of the mine—a rustic system to catch falling rocks and prevent men and machines from being crushed. Known as “fortification,” Segovia’s job was extremely dangerous. He was like a firefighter inside an inferno, attacking small blazes while he was aware the battle was lost. “Before eleven am, I knew the mine would fall, but they sent us to place the reinforcement nets. We knew the roof was all bad and it would fall. To pass the time we drove the pickup to gather some water at the tanks. It was dangerous; the roof was so fragile.”

  Mario Sepúlveda missed the bus from Copiapó that morning. At 9 am he began to hitchhike to the mine. Traffic was sparse and rides impossible along the long road. Sepúlveda was tempted to head back to his cheap boardinghouse. Then a lonely truck arrived on the horizon. When it stopped and picked him up, Sepúlveda felt lucky. He would make it to work after all. At 10 am he arrived at the mine, checked in, joked with the security guards. By 10:30 am he was driving into the belly of the mountain.

  At 11:30 am, the mountain cracked. Workers asked the head of mining operations, Carlos Pinilla, what was happening. According to congressional testimony by the miners, Pinilla was heading down into the shaft at the time. He told the miners the sound was a normal “settling of the mine,” and kept them deep inside the shaft. Pinilla himself, according to the miners, commandeered the first available vehicle, turned around, and immediately headed for the surface. “He left early that day and he never did that. He would usually leave at one or one-thirty and that day he left around eleven,” Jorge Galleguillos testified. “He was scared.”

  Raúl Bustos knew next to nothing about mining when he entered the San José copper mine on the fateful morning of August 5. Bustos was a man at home on the water, working on boats, repairing, welding and fixing water systems at the Chilean Navy shipyards. He worked there for years until a Sunday morning in February 2010, when he lost not only his job but his entire workplace, which was dragged out to sea by a thirty-foot-high wall of water, a deadly tsunami. The 8.8 earthquake that spawned the tsunami left few factories standing in the coastal city of Talcahuano, so Bustos migrated 800 miles north to the San José mine.

  Bustos, forty years old, knew the mine
’s dangerous reputation but was not worried. His job often kept him in a garage with a zinc-roofed shed, on a treeless hillside repairing vehicles. Sunstroke and homesickness seemed to be his biggest dangers. Every other week, he rode the bus half the length of the nation to see his wife, Carolina. Bustos never complained about the twenty-hour ride or let his wife know his new workplace was so precarious. When a vehicle was reported to have a flat tire and mechanical problems deep inside the mine on the morning of August 5, Bustos stepped inside a pickup and was driven four miles down into the mine, deep into the earth.

  The mine was a maze of more than four miles of tunnels. As more than a century of miners had chased the rich veins of gold and copper, the tunnel was not excavated in an orderly fashion, but was a chaotic scene. Loose cables hung from the ceiling. Thick wire mesh was hung from the roof to catch falling rock. Small altars along the narrow main tunnel marked the spots where workers had been killed. In general, the men worked in groups of three or four. Some worked alone. Nearly all of them had ear protection, making it difficult to speak or hear anything but the loud noises of the working mine.

  At 1:30 pm on August 5 the miners stopped for lunch, some of them heading down to the refuge where there were benches and they could grab a boost of oxygen. Five minutes sucking oxygen was usually enough to get the men back to work or at least back to the lunch table where they shared a rare communal moment in their solitary world. While they ate, the men fired up “la talla”—a distinctly Chilean practice of spontaneous humor that feels like a brilliant combination of stand-up comedy and impromptu rapping. Meanwhile, an entire mountain was sagging above them.

  Franklin Lobos was the last man to enter the mine that day—probably the last one ever. As official chauffeur for the mine, Lobos ran an efficient and hilarious shuttle service—entertaining his passengers with wild stories of women and fame as he drove them into the depths of a world that looked like a set from Lord of the Rings with its sagging roof, piles of debris, and walls that looked as if they had been carved out by hand a century earlier.

  As a former soccer star in Chile, Lobos was a legend. It was like having David Byrne drive you to Heathrow or Mike Tyson as your cabdriver to JFK. Lobos, fifty-three, was now bald, round-faced and low-key. His youthful adventures made him a magical storyteller and he regaled his passengers with the glory days of his career for the soccer club Cobresal. Many of the miners were devout fans, men who grew up watching Lobos score goal after goal as he cemented his reputation on the soccer field.

  During his 1981 to 1995 career, Lobos rose to the elite in northern Chile—a demigod who turned free kicks into a one-man show. Even before Lobos touched the ball, the entire stadium was rapt, imagining the impossible trajectory that Lobos would unleash, celebrating his abuse of physics. Lobos’s goals were so precise and unbelievable that the Chilean press dubbed him “The Magic Mortar Man,” a player capable of half-field bombs that arched exactly to their target. Even Beckham would have applauded. But soccer stars in Chile have an average career of ten years. By his mid-thirties, Lobos was gainfully unemployed and devoid of either the star power or the cash to live up to the legendary status. Lobos tried his luck as a taxi driver, but with two daughters headed to college, he needed cash, and in Copiapó that meant one thing: a job at the San José copper mine.

  It was just past 1 pm when Lobos drove Jorge Galleguillos down into the mine inside a cargo truck. Halfway down they stopped to chat with Raúl “Guatón” (“Fatman”) Villegas, who was driving a dump truck filled with rocks and boulders carrying trace amounts of copper and gold. It was then that the mine cracked.

  “As we were driving back down, a slab of rock caved in just behind us,” Galleguillos later wrote. “It crashed down only a few seconds after we drove past. After that, we were caught in an avalanche of dirt and dust. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. The tunnel was collapsing.” Galleguillos would later compare the scene to the collapse of the World Trade Center. Layer after layer of the tunnel fell in stacks, like pancakes.

  As the mine cracked, it unleashed a series of avalanches. Lobos did not dare speed up. Instead he focused on avoiding debris that partially blocked the tunnel. The collapse was now in front and behind him. He crashed into the wall. Unable to see, Galleguillos exited the truck in an effort to guide Lobos down. As the roof continued to rain down, Galleguillos sought refuge in the lee of a water tank. The men finally negotiated a sharp curve and, despite the clouds of dust, slowly began to descend toward the safety refuge.

  When Lobos reached his colleagues, they stared at one another in shock. No one could say what had happened. Everyone knew it was unlike any of the mini-avalanches that were habitual inside the San José mine.

  One thing they did know: for even the most novice miner, the message was clear—“El Piston” was coming. Slumped in the corner of the rescue shelter, huddled behind bumps little bigger than a mattress, all the men braced themselves.

  When a mine caves in, the air inside the mine explodes—like a piston—through the tunnels, generating winds so strong that they plaster a working man to the far wall, shatter his bones, crush the breath out of already muddled lungs. “It was like getting boxed in the ears,” said Segovia. “It felt like it went through your head.”

  Small avalanches inside San José were a monthly event, a terrifying but brief rupture that invaded the miners’ daily solitude. Even with headphones and the deep bass of reggaeton and Colombian cumbia blasting into their ears, the men never missed the distinctive craaaaack! Rock versus rock. Every time it was the same; within seconds each miner sought refuge. The following minutes were guaranteed to bring any one of a possible series of consequences—at best a storm of suffocating dust; at worst, news that a colleague had been crushed. Usually the entire episode lasted a few hours. This was different.

  “A true piston effect is like an explosion. It is a deep sound, like a herd of galloping buffalo. You have very little time to react,” explained Miguel Fortt, one of Chile’s most experienced mine rescue experts. “You can’t do much.”

  “I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my head,” said Omar Reygadas, a fifty-six-year-old miner with decades of experience. “My ears exploded.” Despite his helmet and ear protection, Reygadas was nearly doubled over in pain. Could he even hear? He worried he’d been deafened.

  The blast sent Victor Zamora flying. His false teeth, jarred loose, were lost in the rubble. His face was bruised and scratched as waves of compressed air, like miniature sonic booms, battered the men. The air was a tornado-like storm, with rocks and dust firing down the tunnels.

  The thick cloud of dust and debris blinded and choked and deafened the group of men, coating them in a layer of dust almost an inch thick, as they struggled to escape the mine, falling, crawling and pushing their way up the mine shaft. Like sailors in a hurricane, they interpreted the energetic blast from Mother Nature as a sign of vengeance from an invisible female goddess—that capricious and omniscient overlord who had last say in their precarious world. Some of the men began to pray.

  The force of air shot through the top of the mountain, producing what Araya and others outside the mine described as “a volcano.”

  Deep in the mine, the men faced a dust storm that flooded their world and was to last for the next six hours. After the roof collapsed, the men were blinded by a cloud of rocks, dirt and traces of the highly precious copper and silver ore that, since the opening of the San José mine in 1889, has lured six generations of miners into this precarious world. “I thought my ears would explode, and we were inside a truck with the windows up,” said Franklin Lobos, describing the pressure that damaged the inner ear of his colleague José Ojeda.

  Ten minutes after the first collapse, the mountain ruptured again. A short, succinct signal that millions of tons of earth and rock had slipped again. Outside the mine, panic struck.

  Mine operators and supervisors who heard the first crack assumed the miners “had burned”—slang for igniting dynamit
e. Nothing unusual there. But two “burns” in ten minutes? Impossible. The third craaaaaaaaaaack! was terrifying and unmistakable. Above and below the mine, hundreds of workers were paralyzed in fear. What was going on down there? Miners never detonated their charges so close together. Curiosity mixed with trepidation pervaded this deserted corner of the Atacama Desert.

  Inside the mine, a group of some fifteen miners had battled the dust and struggled to walk up the tunnel in search of safety. They were stopped by a massive rock face blocking the tunnel. The men panicked. “We were huddled like sheep,” said José Ojeda. “We heard that sound, I don’t know how to describe it . . . It is terrifying, like the rocks are screaming in pain. . . . We tried to advance, but we couldn’t; a wall of rock blocked us.”

  When Florencio Ávalos arrived in a pickup, all the men climbed aboard, stacked like refugees. On the way down they crashed twice, ramming the walls, lost in the dark chaos. As the pickup bounced down the road, one of the miners fell off. Alex Vega reached out and yanked back the flying body, pulling the man to safety. In the chaos he was never sure who he had saved. As he strained to pull the man back to the bed of the truck, something snapped in his lower back. It would be hours before the adrenaline wore off enough for the stabbing pain to begin.

  Driving blindly through thick clouds of dirt and debris, it took the men nearly an hour to reach the safety refuge, a shelter carved from the rock. Once they reached the refuge, the men shut the metal doors to block out the dust storm. Then the thirty-three men took turns breathing from oxygen tanks.

  The 540-square-foot refuge was little more than a hole in the wall with a ceramic floor, reinforced ceiling, two oxygen tanks, a cabinet filled with long-expired medicine and a tiny stash of food. “The guys would constantly raid the safety shelter so we never knew exactly what was left. They always stole the chocolates and the cookies,” said Araya, the paramedic who was also in charge of stocking—and restocking—the safety refuge. “These guys were lucky, though; usually we had only one tank of oxygen in there, but when they got trapped, there were two tanks.”