33 Men

by Jonathan Franklin

  The youngest of Los 33—the appellation the men gave themselves—was nineteen-year-old Jimmy Sánchez, who began to hallucinate and suffer from nightmares. He imagined the ghosts of dead miners haunting the caverns. Hallucinations are so frequent among solo sailors, lost explorers and lone fishermen that they become enshrined as legends or myths. The luscious vision of a mermaid at sea is a fantastic solution to a deep desire. The ghosts of dead miners may well have been part of that same fragile mind-set. As the heat drained the water and energy from their bodies, many of the men began looking for God.

  Mario Sepúlveda had a conversation with the Devil. “I would go to pray in a place that was very isolated, the same place where Gino Cortés lost his leg. In one of those prayers, I was praying very loudly and a huge rock fell next to me. I knew it was not God, but that it was the Devil. He was coming for me. All the hair on my body stood up.” Sepúlveda began to scream at the rock, “How much longer will it take you to understand? You too are a son of God, be humble.” After that confrontation, the Devil left Sepúlveda in peace.

  Throughout the mine, the men saw shadows, figures and beings that would later melt away. They called these apparitions mineros chicos, or “little miners.” “There are a lot of paranormal things in that mine,” said Sepúlveda with the conviction of a true believer. Instead of calling themselves the thirty-three men, they started referring to thirty-four: God was with them; he was the thirty-fourth miner. Even the nonbelievers began to pray.

  Victor Zamora began describing luscious meals he could only dream of eating—steaks with tomato and a beer. Only Alex Vega sat back somewhat comfortably, one of few with a bed, as he had dismantled the seats from a truck and converted them into one of the cave’s finest sleeping devices. Another man made a set of dominoes by cutting up the safety triangle he found in one of the vehicles. The miners gathered in small groups as they confessed fears and shared dreams and took long walks, like couples, into the dark.

  Ariel Ticona suffered in private agony. He was about to become a father. His first daughter, Carolina, was nearly due, or was she already born? Had it been a healthy delivery, and how was her mother? While most of the men lived for the day the rescue would finally haul them out of the hole, Ariel Ticona lived on a different calendar. Ticona’s life was reduced to a single date: September 20, his daughter Carolina’s due date. “I was fine going fifteen days without food; with enough water you can fill your stomach,” he said. “I was prepared for another month, to keep going.”

  “I gave myself up to die,” said Richard Villarroel, who was less than a month away from becoming a father for the first time as well. “I lost twenty-eight pounds and was afraid of not meeting my baby. We were so skinny. . . . I looked around and saw my compañeros, who looked so bad; that made me very scared.”

  Still, Villarroel battled to save his buddies. “I don’t know where I got the strength. My head was fine. But I stood up from my bed and was spinning. Very dizzy. I was rocking back and forth . . . But I would go down to level 90, find some scraps of tubing, then hike up to the other levels and put oil on the scraps and burn them trying to send smoke signals.”

  In the higher reaches of the mine, Villarroel could see crude messages on the walls that read “Los 33” and had an orange arrow with the word “Refuge.” In the first desperate days, when the men imagined teams of rescue workers arriving, they had used spray paint to indicate the position of the refuge. Now the messages looked like a hieroglyph from an earlier era.

  As they lay on the floor, talking incessantly, dying slowly, Sepúlveda began to notice that the men were living a collective dream, a utopian vision of how they would live if God and the drillers collaborated to provide a second chance at life. The sound of the drill was ever closer, but their delirium making the dream difficult to sustain.

  “We had lots of good times, jokes, lots of happiness,” said Sepúlveda. “At one moment we said, ‘When we get out of here, they are going to invite us on an airplane trip. The plane will crash and we will all survive—the thirty-three miners surviving again.’ We always laughed about that.”

  United with his fellow miners as victims of a profound injustice, Franklin Lobos, the soccer player, began talking of forming a nonprofit foundation, a tangible expression of their collective vision, in which they could pool their earnings and promote the concepts of decent wages and livable working conditions for workers around the planet. They dreamed of a never-ending pact, the 33 Musketeers—one for all and all for one.

  The phenomenon of extreme situations provoking positive, life-changing attitudes is long recognized by religious masters who deliberately fast. For the trapped miners, collective dreams of peace and unity came easily, but the reality was much more fragile. Family ties united various miner cliques, as uncles, cousins and brothers were bound by blood and a family tradition of mining. Twenty-five of the men lived within two hours of the mine, so they shared a common language of the desert—a tough, survivor’s coda that in its vocabulary, accent and values created a cultural moat to outsiders.

  While the thirty-three met collectively for decision making, prayer and food, a subgroup of five miners—all subcontractors not officially employed by the mine owners—were shunted to the sidelines. “Treated like second-class citizens,” said one government official. The veteran miners had little in common, either culturally or colloquially, with the recent arrivals.

  Although the refuge was a secure spot for sleeping, it was also blistering hot and smelled like a locker room overrun with weeks-old dirty towels. The smell was so unbearable that Omar Reygadas started up a heavy earth mover and began to demolish the main door. What once protected the men from the dust and the dirt was no longer needed. Reygadas knocked down the entire front wall and dumped the debris farther down the tunnel. The refuge still overflowed with the smells of ten dirty, sweating men, but now an occasional current of air made it habitable. For Franklin Lobos, the air became a sweet perfume.

  DAY 14: THURSDAY, AUGUST 19

  Each sleeping area began to devise autonomous rules and rules for communal living. However, in moments of crisis, those differences were surmounted by the even stronger survival instinct. By Day 14, the miners were sure that the drilling was going to reach them—but soon enough? The men devised an intricate reaction plan: when the drill was about to break through the roof, they would disperse to all corners of the tunnel, each man with a handwritten note and clear instructions to attach the letter to the drill bit. The miners were armed with cans of orange spray paint—usually employed by topographers—to paint the drill shaft to alert the rescue team that somewhere deep below, trapped like animals, at least one man was alive. Heavy equipment was readied. The miners were prepared to use the perforating machine, known as a jumbo, to widen the tunnel to reach the drill shaft, if necessary. A bulldozer-like vehicle known as a “scoop” was ready to clear debris.

  As the drill bit inched closer, the enthusiasm surged inside the mine.

  The men loved hearing the sound of the drill. For twenty-four hours now they had spoken excitedly about their notes and plans to alert the rescuers to their survival. The men could feel the percussion hammering, just above them. Salvation had arrived. Then a nervous realization rippled through the group.

  The drilling continued, but now it was below them. The drill had burrowed 2,300 feet directly to the men, and missed them. Rushing to a lower level, the men relived the anticipation and the desperation. At 80 feet below the men, the drilling stopped. Above ground and below, the silence was deafening. The men panicked when the loudest of several drills suddenly stopped. Silence was terrifying. Edison Peña began screaming that they were all going to die. José Henríquez told the men to trust in God.

  “The guys began to lose the notion of time; desperation set in. They did nothing but sleep, guys like Claudio Yañez. I started to feel that seventy percent of the men were infected with that feeling, I cried and cried, but never let them see me. The circle was about to close. The circl
e of death,” said Samuel Ávalos. “It broke me to see Richard Villarroel—his wife was pregnant. Osmán Araya had young kids. I thought that while I had one young child, at least the others were older. I was imagining that I would never see the topside again. I was more worried about my companions. They had little babies, pregnant wives. That broke me. . . . To see my compañeros cry and cry. That was fucking tough. Anybody would crack watching that, anyone.”

  “That was the darkest moment, when we went to the lowest level of the mine and could feel that the drill had gone by,” said Alex Vega. “Many men decided to die. They began to write goodbye letters. Victor Zamora was first, then Victor Segovia and Mario Sepúlveda.”

  “We were in death’s waiting room; I waited for death and was tranquil. I knew that any moment the lights would go out and it would be a dignified death,” said Mario Sepúlveda. “I prepared my helmet, my things, rolled up my belt and arranged my boots. I wanted to die a miner. If they found me, they would find me with dignity, my head held high.”

  For Claudio Yañez, the thought of imminent death held no such peace. For days his companions had been hinting that it was time to take drastic measures, time to eat the skinny newcomer, Yañez, who had been in the mine for just three days at the time of the collapse. At times, Yañez felt they were joking, but never enough to scrape away the meaty slab of truth: the first man to die was likely to be slowly cooked and converted into food for the rest.

  Daniel Sanderson, a young miner who worked inside the San José mine but was not on the fateful shift, was later a confidant of several of the miners, who wrote him letters describing the possibility of starvation. “They thought they were going to eat each other,” he said.

  On Day 15, the men were down to the last of their food. The preacher José Henríquez urged everyone to hold hands and pray for the two cans of tuna to duplicate. The men obliged and put their hands together on the food box. They had little to lose, and everyone agreed Henríquez had been a savior and a unifying force. Some of the men smiled and joked as they prayed for God to produce tuna fish.

  On August 21, Day 16, Mario Sepúlveda was sure he would die.

  Not having eaten for two days, Sepúlveda was now vomiting the contaminated water. He wrote a final letter, offering advice to his thirteen-year-old son, Francisco: “Remember Braveheart, the warrior who protects his people. That is what you must do, take care and protect your mother, your sister . . . you are now the man of the house.”

  SIX

  A BONANZA AT THE BOTTOM OF THE MINE

  DAY 16: SATURDAY, AUGUST 21

  On a desolate, rock-strewn slope approximately half a mile above the mouth of the San José mine, Eduardo Hurtado and his six-man team drilled nonstop. From the drill site they could see the abandoned offices of the mine, a pair of simple wooden shacks that like a ghost town captured a moment of instant abandonment—drawers open, files on the desk. In the days since the accident, the floor filled with the desert dust and the open wooden window shutters flapped lazily when the wind kicked up—which wasn’t often enough for Hurtado and his crew, who toiled in a broiling desert sun. The brisk wind came at night, when the sky was aglow with stars and the temperature dropped below freezing. At dawn, a tongue of thick fog lapped up the valley, drawn from the Pacific Ocean; it added another penetrating layer of cold. No one complained. Weather was the least of their worries as they angled a drill bit toward their target, 2,300 feet below.

  The drilling team ran a twenty-four-hour operation that stopped only for maintenance at 8 am and 8 pm, to add oil and check hydraulic fluid. Theirs was one of nine operations to drill nine separate boreholes toward the trapped miners, all coordinated by André Sougarret. Each site had a seven-person team, but the approach and drills being used varied. Sougarret had gambled on different drilling technologies. Borehole 10B was powered by a technology known as “reverse air,” which could drill up to 800 feet in a single day but was difficult to reorient if it went off course. The slower but more precise technology known as diamond drilling allowed for corrections en route.

  Like rays of light, the nine boreholes were angled from above, shooting in long, diagonal shafts in an attempt to enter a tunnel, the workshop or even the refuge itself. Maps of the mine had repeatedly deceived engineers, showing structures that did not exist or failing to highlight metal reinforcing rods that in a split second could decapitate a drill and erase a week’s work. In a normal drilling operation to 2,300 feet, when speed was of no matter, drills routinely veered off course by 7 percent and arrived within 260 feet of the target. On this job, the entire target was a safety shelter no more than 33 feet long and just 540 square feet in total.

  Time for meals was scarce, and the mess hall down below an unnecessary interruption. Every few days a box filled with one hundred sandwiches and bottled water was dropped off, donated by the owners of Santa Fe, a nearby iron mine. The rescue workers fed the scraps to a blue-and-green lizard that lived in the rocks. “Normally we would have a grill and cook meat or chicken,” said Hurtado. “This was not the time for a barbecue; we had too much anguish.”

  Hurtado, a fifty-three-year-old with nearly two decades of drilling experience, was obsessed with time. As he fought to keep the drill functioning, the days ran together. Had it been five days since they started this latest hole? Seven days? Like the countdown clock on a bomb, every second brought the miners—if any were still alive—closer to death. For many rescue workers lower on the hill, the mechanics of drilling a 2,300-foot tube was a daunting and incomprehensible notion. Hurtado’s crew had a precise understanding of the challenge; they had arrived within forty-eight hours of the mine collapse and barely slept in the ensuing weeks. “We all had an obsessive, almost violent relationship with time,” said Hurtado. “I thought that if we did not arrive in the next day or two, we would find them dead.”

  DAY 16: INSIDE THE MINE

  With only two cans of tuna fish remaining, the miners had made another painful decision. Instead of a single bite of food every two days, they stretched the rations to one bite every three days. The miners were so exhausted that even the walk to the bathroom, just 100 feet up the ramp, was now a chore. The hardy miners, men who regularly worked twelve-hour shifts, sweating, smoking and hacking away at the mountain, were now listless, the spirit of survival eaten away by the effects of starvation and a sense of abandonment. Conserving energy was an essential bodily function. Alex Vega lay on the wet, rocky slope and looked around; his compañeros were prone, talking but rarely standing. “We just lay down,” he said. “It was too much effort to walk.”

  The men’s health was deteriorating rapidly—on the verge of going into a free fall known as the death spiral, said Dr. Jean Romagnoli, a Chilean doctor tasked with monitoring the men’s physical conditioning and nutrition. “If their health was here,” he said, holding his hand high, “in another two days they would have been falling like this.” Romagnoli sliced his hand down, like a guillotine. Even a simple infection that caused diarrhea was now a potential death sentence. “I can’t last much longer,” Victor Zamora wrote in a goodbye letter on August 21. “The only thing that I can say to my wife and children is that I am sorry.”

  The sound of multiple drills grinding toward the men was constant. But echoes and acoustic tricks played by the mine concealed the exact locations of the incoming shafts. What sounded like a direct buzz toward the men could be dozens of feet off course. Given the recent failures of drills that had sounded on target, then missed, optimism was muted. Still, they were on high alert. If a drill broke through, the men knew what to do—they had practiced and strategized many times. Twice before they had mobilized. Now, they wondered, would they get a last chance?

  DAY 16: RESCUE OPERATION

  By the afternoon of Saturday, August 21, Borehole 10B had reached 2,100 feet, less than 160 feet from the target. That the drillers felt tantalizingly close is a tribute to the dimensions of the operation. In many rescues, drilling through 160 feet of solid rock would have b
een a challenge, here it was just the final stage. Hurtado and his crew knew that in another twelve hours of drilling, Borehole 10B would reach the target depth. They also knew that the drill was slightly off course.

  Nelson Flores, the lead operator, fought to guide the drill to a precise set of GPS coordinates derived from a software program called Vulcan, a world-class tool that uses precise digital maps and then overlays the drill’s trajectory. By projecting the curvature of the drill’s parabola, Vulcan allowed engineers to guide the boreholes toward the final target. Flores also asked for help from above. Every day when he arrived at the drill, he carefully opened his pocket and pulled out a rosary and hung it gently from the controls. That rosary had belonged to his sixteen-year-old daughter, who had died the year before. When he drilled, the rosary shook slightly.

  Now Sougarret needed a hybrid miracle. The team led by Hurtado had kept the drill advancing rapidly and almost on track. The deviation was slight, but projections for the remaining feet indicated that the borehole might miss the target coordinates. “We didn’t have much faith that it would hit. . . . We needed it to go more vertical and change direction. And that is what happened in the last stretch, when it was most difficult,” said Sougarret.

  DAY 17: ABOVE GROUND

  At 2,165 feet, Flores slowed the drill. Instead of the normal twenty revolutions per minute, he lowered it to five revolutions per minute. The goal was not to rip through the walls of a tunnel but to ever so gently puncture a clean hole. Operating at full speed, the drill bit might fire shards of rock in every direction, launching a barrage of missiles capable of wounding or killing a miner.

  By 4 am a small crowd had gathered around Borehole 10B. The night was calm, the usual wind and fog, pleasantly absent. Despite a spate of recent near misses with other drills, the anticipation was electric. Floodlights lit the scene like a movie set, casting long shadows across the adjacent rock piles. The rumble of the drill engine was interrupted by frequent pauses.