33 Men

by Jonathan Franklin

  All thirty-three men had somehow survived the massive collapse. Several were bruised and a few bloodied but not one had a broken bone. No one was missing.

  Inside the shelter, Luis Urzúa, the highest-ranking man in the mine, sought to control the men. As shift foreman, Urzúa was not required to participate in the physical work but instead guided, prodded and motivated the men under his command. In the hierarchical world of Chilean mining, the foreman is absolute leader, his word followed with military discipline. Questioning an order from the shift foreman was sufficient reason to be disciplined or dismissed. “The world of natural selection functions quite strongly in this environment,” explained Dr. Jaime Mañalich, the Chilean minister of health. “To arrive at the position of shift foreman, you have to pass through many a test.”

  Urzúa was a solidly built man with soft eyes and a leadership style built not on being a brute but on most often being right. With more than two decades’ experience inside mines, Lucho Urzúa had the experience to command his troops, but he was a recent arrival to San José. That he had worked there for less than three months now hung heavily in the tense and dirty air inside the safety refuge. The men questioned his ability to coordinate the disaster response. Why should he be the leader? Did he even know the mine? Urzúa did little to garner support when he suggested the men stay in the refuge, confident that a rescue operation would save them. In the first few hours after the collapse, raging arguments erupted. Tempers flared. Urzúa was losing control.

  Imprisoned in the shelter, Sepúlveda was calm as he paced about. He had practically predicted this very collapse. How many times had he argued with labor and safety inspectors back in Copiapó? He had spent days encouraging, haranguing and berating them to investigate the San José mine for safety violations. Sepúlveda had attempted to form his buddies into a workers’ union, but gave up in frustration when he came to believe that the representatives of the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), the national workers’ union, were as self-serving as the mine owners. According to Sepúlveda and other miners, the union was in the pocket of the mine owners, spending more time breaking the union than fortifying it.

  Sepúlveda, a short, balding man with a wide crooked-tooth grin, was a workaholic who combined a love of physical labor and an unbreakable spirit. To his colleagues he was either El Perry (Chilean slang for “the Good Dude”) or El Loco (“The Crazy One”), the unofficial mine shaft jester. He would regularly launch sharp jibes at the mine management, but always with such spontaneous humor that even the targets of his barbs would find themselves laughing along. At the end of a typical day’s shift, as the miners took the twenty-five-minute journey in a truck that spiraled up 10 miles per hour from the bottom of the mine, Sepúlveda always had a captive audience: his exhausted colleagues. They marveled and cheered as he improvised monologues and skits. Who else but El Perry would pole dance on the bus as the miners left work? A natural mimic and charismatic character, Sepúlveda was in a situation his hyperactive nature found oppressive—enclosure. He was desperate to find a way out.

  Sepúlveda and Mario Gómez organized the miners into three separate missions. Even as the mountain roared and the dust billowed around them, the men began to scour the mine for escape routes. Food, air and clean water were all limited, and the mine continued to rumble and send signals of another monstrous collapse. It was clear they would all die without swift action.

  The main shaft of the mine was a ragged tunnel with uneven walls that, when lit by vehicle headlights, sent shadows bouncing about. It looked like the bowels of a haunted world. Side tunnels, caverns and storage rooms had been carved at seemingly random spots. Huge tanks of water were stashed throughout the mountain. Containing as much as 4,000 gallons each, the water was used to operate drilling machinery inside the mine. Had the men been able to see the mine from a cutaway side view, it would have resembled an anthill riddled with shafts.

  The levels of the mine were measured in meters above sea level. Given that the entrance to the mine was roughly 800 meters (2,600 feet) above the ocean, the very bottom of the mine was called level 45. The refuge shelter where the men were gathered was level 90. The thirty-three men were trapped near the very bottom of a vast mine.

  Secure in their faith that rescue teams were already mobilized, the men were desperate to send a message that they were still alive. Some of the miners began gathering truck tires and dirty oil filters. Richard Villarroel, a twenty-seven-year-old mechanic working as a subcontractor in the mine, was sent in a pickup truck to drive up the tunnel. He arrived at level 350 where the tunnel was sealed shut by the block of rock. Villarroel looked for cracks in the rock, then stuffed the holes with rubber tires and oil filters, which he ignited. Thick black clouds of smoke filled the tunnel, enough of it seeping upward, he hoped, to alert the rescue teams to their location.

  A second group of miners gathered sticks of dynamite to detonate the charges in a brief yet distinctive explosion that would, it was hoped, be heard by rescue workers. Other men began to scour the new configuration of the mine to find pockets of air.

  Urzúa, a trained topographer, began to sketch a map, a crude attempt to take the dimensions of his new reality. Commandeering a white pickup as his office, Urzúa began his mapmaking in earnest.

  While some men still respected his leadership, there were notable exceptions. Juan Illanes, a fifty-two-year-old subcontractor, emboldened by his experience as a soldier in Patagonia, where he had spent nearly two years in a foxhole, considered himself exempt from Urzúa’s chain of command. Illanes and four other workers hired to maintain and operate vehicles inside the mine were not mine employees. This meant that in the norms of a Chilean mine, Illanes and his group were second-class citizens. A tribe apart.

  Without light, there was no day. Or night. Every routine was destroyed, eliminated or radically altered. As their head lamps began to run out of battery power, the men used them sparingly. They entered the fragile world of sensory deprivation. Add in the emotional overload from a near-death experience and it makes sense that the miners lost all notion of time. The veteran miners understood immediately the technical challenges of drilling and hacking through hundreds of feet of solid rock. For them, the rescue—if it ever came—was a complicated and uncertain operation.

  Psychologists understand that in such circumstances, the individual survival instinct trumps the common good. Adrenaline pumps into the brain and survival chemicals flood the body, enabling remarkable feats of physical strength but also a single-mindedness that blinds the miners to the value of stopping for a moment and making a plan. As those first hours passed, the thirty-three miners began to act like a roaming band of hungry animals, haphazardly shitting and urinating throughout their reduced world. Ignoring calls for group unity, they set up disparate caves in random corners of the tunnel. Few of the men slept that first night.

  DAY 1: FRIDAY, AUGUST 6

  Having huddled through the night on cardboard strips, in an attempt to stay dry and to blunt the sharp rocks, the miners arose wet and anxious. José Henríquez sought to begin the new day with a dose of hope: a collective prayer. The round-faced, cheery fifty-four-year-old worked in the mine as a jumbero, an operator of heavy machinery, which was among the highest-paid jobs in the mine. But that was his day job. Henríquez’s passion was preaching the miraculous powers of Jesus Christ to his congregation in the southern Chilean city of Talca. Gathering the men in the refuge, Henríquez gave a brief prayer—enough, it seemed, to relax the men and allow Lucho Urzúa and Mario Sepúlveda to organize a mission. Claudio Yañez had a Casio wristwatch, allowing the men to reorient their schedule and day. “I didn’t need a watch down there,” said Sepúlveda. “You know what works as a clock? My stomach. I could tell what time it was by what I wanted to eat. Your body does not react the same to the idea of a steak at seven in the morning as it does at seven at night.”

  Many of the miners were convinced that they should remain in the shelter and await a rescue. Sepúlved
a summed up his thoughts on that strategy in a very public, very loud and succinct opinion: that’s suicide. Sepúlveda wanted, needed and demanded action. His entire character was a whirl of energy and proactive survival. From childhood on, his life had been a fight to survive. His mother had died giving birth to him and he had been abandoned by his father. Young Mario grew up sharing a bed with six other siblings. At times he slept in the barn alongside the livestock, even eating the animals’ food to survive. “I was very, very poor and they treated me worse than the animals,” said Sepúlveda. For the now-middle-class thirty-nine-year-old with a wife and two teenage children, escape from the mine was the very mission for which he felt his life had been preparing him.

  The miners divided up into separate groups. One team used heavy machinery to create noise. Despite the massive collapse, the men had at their disposal a flotilla of vehicles ranging from pickups to the Jumbo, a 30-foot-long truck with a drilling platform on the front end used to perforate the roof and make holes for dynamite. The men moved all the vehicles to the highest point of the tunnel. Once astride the blockage, they began to create a cacophony of sounds. Honking horns. Exploding dynamite. Bashing huge metal plates against the bulldozer. The short crack of dynamite and the echoing metallic clang reverberated through the tunnel, but was it enough to be heard? Would at least one member of the rescue team be alerted? The men continued to attack the roof of the mine with the Jumbo—like a mad woodpecker, the machine pecked wildly, making an infernal racket.

  “We used the trucks to smash against the walls,” said Samuel Ávalos. “We connected the horns on the truck to tubes that ran up to the surface so we would be heard above. We took turns screaming into those tubes. . . . We were desperate.”

  Alex Vega wanted to climb out of the mountain by following a series of cracks that led, he guessed, all the way to the surface. He was convinced that an escape path was possible but the men had limited battery power on their lamps and no way to carry enough water for what might be a daylong expedition. “We were afraid of getting crushed by falling rock,” he said. “There was a chance of being trapped.”

  A second team of miners, led by Sepúlveda and Raúl Bustos, scouted an escape route via a ventilation duct. This chimney—one of an estimated dozen air ducts that made the air in the mine nearly breathable—rose vertically for 80 feet. “We started to look for alternatives; we climbed up 30 meters [100 feet] on a hanging ladder. We reached the level 210 and saw that it was also blocked,” Bustos wrote his wife in a letter later. “There was another chimney but it did not have a ladder.”

  In many Chilean mines, every chimney would have been a clean circle, shooting up like a skylight to the next level of the mine and lined with safety equipment ranging from a ladder to escape lights. Apart from providing a vent for air to circulate inside the mine, the chimneys are designed to provide an adequate secondary escape route if a tunnel collapses. In the San José mine, the second chimney shaft was unlit and the ladder decrepit. Furthermore, the chimney was astride the main tunnel, meaning that a single accident could simultaneously wipe out both escape routes. It was a basic failure that the miner’s union, led by Javier Castillo, had denounced for years. The trapped miners now understood his logic.

  Sepúlveda scouted the chimney and decided an ascent was risky but possible. A cascade of rocks was ricocheting down the tube—but he had a helmet. He adjusted the lamp on his helmet skyward and began slowly advancing. The ladder was designed for just such an escape effort but decades of constant humidity had eaten away the rungs. As he reached up, Sepúlveda could feel them giving way. Some metal rungs were missing. Like a desperate rock climber, Sepúlveda began to improvise. The tunnel was four feet wide, far too big for him to brace a leg on each side. So, grabbing a plastic tube that ran the length of the chimney, he tried to find a nub and a foothold on the slippery stones. Meanwhile, a constant hail of rubble continued to clang down on his head. The mountain was still crying, peeling apart. Determined to claw his way out, Sepúlveda summoned his muscles to obey. He reached his hand up and had begun to pull his body up when he slipped. A rock crashed into his face, slicing his lip and knocking out a tooth. Another rock, this one the size of a tennis ball, whooshed by. Sepúlveda had cheated death by a few inches. When yet another rock bounced harmlessly by, Sepúlveda took this as both an omen and a cue to retreat.

  “I felt like a twelve-year-old, so strong, so much energy. I never got tired. The only thing I wanted was to get out,” said Sepúlveda, who described his experience in mystical terms. “In the middle of this chimney, I felt this was divine . . . my hairs stood on end. Something told me ‘I am with you.’”

  Sepúlveda felt an overwhelming joy and confidence as he descended the chimney. “I came back and told them no one will die here, those who want to believe, it is up to you, but if you believe, hold God’s hand and mine and we will get out of here.”

  The reaction to life-altering trauma evolved in idiosyncratic ways for each individual—depending on each miner’s personality. In drastic experiences like the San José mine collapse—which psychologists define as “situations of extreme confinement”—some victims wilt. Others bloom. For Mario Sepúlveda, his entire life seemed to be geared toward just such a challenge.

  He relished his new emerging role: leader of the pack.

  DAY 2: SATURDAY, AUGUST 7

  With no communication from any rescue team, the miners spent another restless and fearful night. In the morning, the men agreed to pray again with Henríquez. A semblance of routine had begun to form by at least gathering to pray together, but desperation was beginning to take hold. Food was running short. The 10 liters (10½ quarts) of bottled water were not nearly enough, and the men began to drink from the huge 5,000-liter (1,300-gallon) tanks usually reserved for industrial drilling machines. The water in the tanks was months old, filled with dirt and grime. “We drank it but it tasted like oil,” said Richard Villarroel.

  Claudio Yañez drank and drank the dirty water—up to 7 liters (almost 2 gallons) a day. The taste reminded him of diesel fuel and dust. He knew the water was filled with mineral residue and had been stagnant for nearly half a year, but the thirst was brutal. And so Yañez continued to drink.

  “The hierarchy was lost almost immediately,” said Alex Vega, who worked as a mechanic and knew the mine intimately after nearly a decade inside. “The thirty-three of us were one and we began a democratic system; the best idea that made the most sense was the idea that ruled.”

  The men began to vote on nearly every important decision. At noon they held a group meeting that combined the democratic debate of a New England town meeting with the humor of the British parliament. Ideas were put forward and either immediately ridiculed to death or debated openly. All the men had an equal voice. Ideas were measured by their intrinsic value, regardless of whether it was sponsored by the shift foreman or the lowliest assistant.

  The miners had now spent nearly two full days underground. The batteries on the men’s lanterns were fading. Cell phones were now dead. Though there had never been cell phone coverage in the shelter, the men used them as lights, clocks and speakers, listening to music to soothe the pain of the deep silence.

  Some of the younger, less experienced miners began to panic. Nineteen-year-old Jimmy Sánchez, the youngest of all the miners, began to hallucinate. He imagined his mother coming to visit him deep in the mine, and in his dreams she brought fresh empanadas—a Chilean meat pie flavored with onion and adorned with a single black olive. As a quick lunch snack, the empanada is like most of the food in Chile—forgettable. But for Jimmy and his mates, at this underground altitude, even the fresh memory of an empanada was food for the gods.

  Other miners, unable to deal with the emotional impact of their ordeal, simply froze. “They stayed on their bed all day; they never got up,” said Villarroel. Time passed excruciatingly slowly for the men, a massive silence filling the gap. No drilling. No sounds of dynamite. Not a single sound from above. Just the torturou
s drumbeat of water and falling rocks.

  The men repeatedly walked hundreds of yards up the sloping, curved tunnel to stare in depressed shock at the massive boulders. Though they were sure that rescuers must be searching above, the sound of silence was terrifying, and a faint thought began to grow. Will we ever get out of here?

  They would curse the rock, “Piedra maldita, concha de su madre!” (“Damn rock, your mama’s pussy!”) The other miners would rally their enthusiasm for a brief cheer of “Viva Chile” (“Long live Chile”) but then trudge back to the refuge with the same message—no news.

  The men needed a miracle—and food. After just two days, their bodies were beginning to shrivel, and their faces became gaunt as their energy began to ebb. Shadows of whiskers began to shroud their faces and dirty hair poked out in stiff clumps. As they spoke face to face, the disintegration of civility was evident. Smells of sweat and humid humanity became so intense, the men began to abandon the shelter and sleep on the rocky tunnel floor.

  The men began to break up into groups. Fighting broke out over cardboard. Subclans formed as relatives and old acquaintances bonded in a sense of survival. The leaders, including Sepúlveda and Urzúa, settled at a bend in the tunnel 105 meters above sea level [350 feet]. It was instantly baptized “The 105 Group” or simply “105.” These men had the best air, a floor that was less wet, and breathing room from the other two groups. Farther below, another group moved into the Safety Refuge and called themselves Refugio. Its hard ceramic floor made sleeping difficult inside, but the roof was reinforced with bolts and a metal mesh to catch falling rocks.

  A third group was essentially left to fend for themselves. Cousins Esteban Rojas and Pablo Rojas, plus Ariel Ticona, who had married into the family, formed a clique here at the most dangerous sleeping spot. Just outside the refuge on the mine’s main road a second site became known as “the ramp” or Rampa. This sleeping area was less claustrophobic, as air blew lightly through the tunnel. But the drawbacks were notable—the area was wet, meaning the men barely slept and at times had to build canoe-like shelters to keep the flowing water at bay.