Letters had already proven to be a huge psychological boost to both the families and the miners. Among the first requests from the trapped men were pens and paper. The Chileans had also phased in a phone system with the miners; this was to be followed by a video conference system. But open communications also meant a loss of control. What if a wife decided to ask her miner husband for divorce? Was this really the time to fight over household bills and finances?
DAY 27: WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1
From a distance the rescue site at the San José copper mine looked like a construction site gone mad. Huge cranes rattled twenty-four hours a day, transporting metal tubes the length of a ship’s mast with ease. Cement trucks, bulldozers, backhoes and robotic mine machines that looked like insects prowled the mountainside. Parking lots were filled with supplies ranging from a field of drill bits to twenty-eight pallets packed with charcoal. Placed in an oil drum and lit, the burning charcoal served as a night-light and heater for the estimated twenty policemen stationed as sentries along the hillside.
Shifts of helmeted men, their huge hands grubby and their faces slow to smile, were evidence of the arduous task that had gathered hundreds of rescue workers for the past four weeks. Inside the mess tent were men from Brazil, South Africa, the United States and Canada who joined hundreds of highly trained Chileans. These rescue workers had missed their children’s birthdays and abandoned their families to fly to the Atacama Desert to help. They volunteered for twelve-hour shifts to try to save men they didn’t know, men they might never meet.
Caravans of 4x4 pickups arrived with food, machinery and donations. “We are here to provide support to the families and the kids. Every four or five days we bring milk and yogurt to these one hundred and eighty people,” said Adolfo Duran, distribution supervisor for Soprole foods, pointing to stacks of yogurt cartons and crates of milk. “The feeling of fraternity has been augmented heavily this year; first we had the earthquake and now this. Personally, I feel like our nation has become much stronger this year.”
Down the mountain, below the police checkpoints, family feuds erupted and became part of the media circus. Hundreds of reporters trapped behind security lines had little to do but interview one another or speculate. How many of the married miners had lovers? Were the trapped men having sex? Was the operation really going as smoothly as the Piñera government was portraying it?
Despite the outpouring of support and help, Camp Hope was no superficial love fest. Family feuds erupted and tears flowed in disputes. “Yonni doesn’t want to come out of the mine,” joked a doctor working at Camp Hope as he described sorting out the ongoing love triangle that continued to ensnare miner Yonni Barrios in a secondary net of entrapment. His longtime wife and his longtime lover continued to battle—even destroying the photos placed at his official shrine. In family after family, the story was the same: long-lost daughters and sons flocked to see the father who had never been a father, a painful and touching demonstration that the heart tugs at even long-frayed blood ties.
Local government officials realized that Camp Hope would continue to grow. The population was now five hundred and new “neighborhoods” sprouted weekly as journalism teams arrived to stake a claim to a piece of turf and a chance to find nuggets in a story the entire world was now watching. In 2000, when the Kursk, a Russian submarine with a crew of 118, sank to the bottom of the ocean, the world’s media was fixated on the plight of the trapped sailors, who slowly died, their story measured by the ever fainter “tap—tap tap,” a Morse code message played out on the submarine’s shell. A decade later, almost to the day, the Chilean mining drama became arguably the world’s biggest ever multimedia tragedy. With the completion of a fiber-optic connection to the men, digital video cameras that were sent down la paloma as well as entertainment systems, including a video projector and MP3 players, allowed the thirty-three miners to quickly become among the most wired and media-savvy disaster victims in human history. Two months after the collapse, the number of hits on Google for “Chilean” and “miners” hit 21 million.
The drama of the Chilean miners was fast becoming a daily staple in the world’s entertainment diet.
Camp Hope now had zones for children, community bulletin boards, and scheduled bus shuttle services to nearby cities as well as an evangelical preacher’s stage with amplified prayer and scratchy speakers set up just 10 feet from the international press tent. While reporters and producers filed news reports, they were often serenaded by cries of faith, promises of salvation, and reminders not to forget the “thirty-fourth miner,” Jesus Christ.
While Chilean officials continued to caution that huge technical and logistical challenges lay ahead in removing the men from the mine, families laughed and prepared barbecues, at peace with the knowledge that the miners were alive. With bonfires and an abundance of positive energy, the camp felt less like a refugee camp and more like a scaled-down Chilean music festival. Live performances abounded. At the keyboards the famed Chilean pianist Roberto Bravo, surrounded by a ring of family, uncorked what he described as the performance of his lifetime.
“I can breathe easy now. There’s no more doubt,” said Pedro Segovia, thirty-eight, brother of the miner Darío Segovia. “Before, we didn’t know if the machinery could really find them at seven hundred meters [2,300 feet].” As he sucked on a lemon, dousing it regularly with salt, Segovia described the San José mine as a death trap. “I worked there for a year. It was always a dangerous place to work. All of us who went in there would wonder, Will we make it out? Once a piece of the roof, a one-hundred-kilo [220-pound] rock, fell on me. Luckily it shattered on a protective screen and only bruised my back.”
Pedro Segovia took shifts with family members and friends to stand watch in their family tent, where a solitary candle burned amid images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. The family’s vigilance was not for fear of robbery. Camp Hope was the kind of place where lost cell phones were cordially returned to grateful owners. The Segovia family kept one member awake out of respect for Darío. He was directly below them, trapped. How could they all be asleep?
Adjacent to the Segovia tent, a group of children played with the candles in the shrine to their grandfather, Mario Gómez. With pencils and crayons, they drew simple pictures of cars and solemnly stacked the drawings next to his photo before running to play in the rock piles that dot the otherwise barren hillside.
Camp Hope was now becoming a community. Although each family set up its individual home and daily routines, a common cause and purpose had given the crowded living conditions an air of civility. Among the family members there were few secrets. The combination of abundant free time and a common passion meant that news traveled briskly in the small camp.
Carolina Narváez, wife of Raúl Bustos, was becoming familiar with tragedy. Six months earlier, trapped at the epicenter of the 8.8 magnitude earthquake, Narváez and Bustos watched a tsunami destroy the shipyard where he worked. Working at the San José mine was always intended to be a temporary stint until Talcahuano, Bustos’s hometown, 745 miles south, was rebuilt. “Nobody has ever lived this long underground. I can’t be weaker than him,” said Narváez, sitting on a rock and smoking a cigarette. Behind her a poster showed Raúl, staring out, his face grim. Narváez held no illusions that they would survive the ordeal unscathed. “I know the Raúl who went in there is not the Raúl who will come out.”
In a nearby campsite, just 65 feet away, Nelly Bugueño was practically celebrating that her son Victor Zamora had been trapped. Always critical of her son for rushing and suffering day-to-day stress, Bugueño said the entrapment had forced Victor to look inward. She read and reread his letters with wonder. As a lifelong miner, Victor had never shown such a talent for bold, emotional writing. This was definitely not the same Victor she had first raised and then watched develop into a lifelong miner.
“He found his second self down there. He has discovered that he is a poet. Where did all these beautiful sentiments come from? Did they sprout?”
Bugueño smiled, her petite stature overshadowed by her immense pride. “I don’t want him working in mountains anymore. He should write songs, write poems.”
In a nation that produced the Nobel Prize–winning poets Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, it is not surprising that the men named Zamora the miners’ official poet. Zamora’s rhyming compositions were often one-page homilies to the rescue workers. His combination of hope, gratitude and humor quickly made them among the most-read messages from below. Even after multiple readings, Zamora’s poems brought tears to the eyes of Pedro Campusano, a paramedic working at the paloma station. “When the first one came up, I read it and got halfway through; I couldn’t—” Campusano’s eyes filled with tears. “When I read it . . . it fills me with emotions.”
Despite the initial euphoria over finding the miners alive, extricating them from the mine—what Chilean engineers dubbed “the Final Assault”—was a daunting challenge. It would entail a three- or four-month effort to drill a hole 2,300 feet to the trapped men, and design a system to haul them one by one up from the refuge. In recognition of the unprecedented nature of the challenge, the Piñera government opted for multiple rescue strategies, with deliberately varied technologies. The two exhaustively complicated drilling plans had deceptively simple names: Plan A and Plan B.
Plan A was designed around one of the world’s largest drills, a sophisticated Australian rig known as the Strata 950 raise borer. The raise borer was capable of drilling a 26-inch-diameter hole as deep as 2 miles, at a cost of $3,000 to $5,000 for every meter (3.28 feet) drilled. Only six such machines existed; fortuitously, one had been located in Chile. To rescue the trapped miners, the engineering plan called for the raise borer to drill straight down to the men. First the machine would carve an 18-inch hole, and then a second, wider bit would enlarge the tube so that the men could be hauled out in a rescue capsule. The drilling was slow but sure; in four months—by Christmastime—the tunnel would be finished. Experts all agreed that the Strata 950 could finish the job. But after such a prolonged confinement, would the miners be sane or even alive?
Chilean authorities were now flooded with hundreds of proposals to save the miners. With barely a moment to pause, the authorities jumped aboard the strategy used to save the miners in the Quecreek mine in Pennsylvania. The plan called for using one of the original boreholes and widening it using a powerful American-made drill known as the Schramm T-130. Dubbed Plan B, this scheme offered the possibility of rescuing the men in less than two months. However, there was no guarantee that the techniques that worked at 230 feet could now be extended to save miners trapped at ten times that depth.
DAY 29: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3
Brandon Fisher arrived at Camp Hope with a singular mission: to help guide Plan B. The tireless engineer was now reunited with members of the same team that eight years earlier had saved the miners in rural Pennsylvania. Could he repeat the miracle?
James Stefanic, president of Chilean operations for the U.S.-Chilean company Geotec Boyles Brothers, located the same model drill as the one that had been used in Quecreek—the Schramm T-130—at the Doña Inés de Collahuasi mine in northern Chile. The 100,000-pound rig is highly portable and comes with five axles, meaning it was easy to transport and could be set up almost instantaneously. Arrangements were made to bring the rig to the San José mine.
Plan B might also have stood for “Blind.” There was no way to guide this drill. Fisher was the key. With his Center Rock factory on call in Berlin, Pennsylvania, Fisher and his eighty-person company would craft a solution. Fisher was sure his team could design and manufacture a drill with a small snout on the tip that would fit snugly into the borehole, essentially keeping the now bigger drill on course.
Still, on many fronts Plan B was experimental—for one, the drill had never been used for a rescue so deep. “One of the most important things when you drill is to know exactly what the drill is going to weigh,” said Mijail Proestakis, an engineer on Plan B. “It is easy to go down, but you have to remember to be able to pull up everything.” Engineers were cautiously optimistic that the machine could handle the weight of the entire drilling shaft—an estimated 48 tons.
The Chilean Embassy in Washington, D.C., convinced United Parcel Service, the giant shipping company based in Sandy Springs, Georgia, to coordinate a massive rush shipment. Twenty-seven thousand pounds of drilling equipment were flown from the Pennsylvania iron belt to the remote Atacama Desert. The UPS Foundation, a philanthropic division of the $50-billion-a-year shipping behemoth, picked up the tab.
A key part of Plan B was still missing: the driller. Despite technical advances in drilling systems and GPS technology, the Schramm T-130 still needed a captain to guide the mission. Stefanic knew exactly who he wanted at the helm.
Jeff Hart, a towering forty-year-old sun-blasted oil worker from Denver, Colorado, was an expert at finding buried treasures. Hart was regularly flown to ugly corners of the planet to guide drills.
At the time, Hart was drilling for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. In that land so studded with minerals, oil and gas, Hart had been hired to find the most valuable underground lode of all: fresh water, the new Afghani Gold.
The initial message to Hart was stark. A mine had collapsed in South America. Thirty-three miners were alive but buried 2,300 feet deep—at the bottom of a gold and copper mine. Was he willing to come and try to drill them to safety? Hart agreed and, like a character in a James Bond film, was “extracted” from deep inside rural Afghanistan and flown to Dubai, then Amsterdam and on to Chile. Asked why he chose Hart, Stefanic was clear: “He is simply the best.”
With Hart set to take the controls of Plan B, the competition between the two teams escalated. Engineers on-site began placing bets on which rescue operation would reach the miners first. Glen Fallon, a towering Canadian who was the lead operator on Plan A, said he welcomed the competition. “There was a global SOS that went out on this. Now I get emails every day from people who want to volunteer, fly to Chile to help out,” he said. “Even my competitors are offering to help. In this race, there is only one team.”
DAY 35: THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9
Jeff Hart felt at home with the controls of the T-130 Schramm drill, a machine he had operated for thousands of hours. Using levers and foot pedals, Hart worked standing up, rarely removing his dark sunglasses, his ears wrapped in bulbous yellow protective gear. A rag hung from the back of his helmet, shielding his neck from the Atacama sun. After traveling halfway around the world, Hart was now on track to find his most valued target ever: a group of treasured humans. For days he rarely moved from his workstation at the Plan B drill. He drilled for ten hours a day, the passage of time measured by the growing collection of oil and mud stains that covered his jumpsuit. Then, on September 9, just the fifth day of operation, Plan B stalled.
Meanwhile Plan A continued to grind slowly into the mountainside. The huge machine spun and smashed through 490 feet of rock. While Plan B drilled far faster, it had to first make a small hole, then drill again to widen it enough for a human to squeeze himself out of the hole. Plan A was the tortoise—slow but steady—as it continued drilling a shaft easily wide enough to rescue the men.
Hart watched in confusion as the air pressure collapsed and the drill spun but no longer cut into the rock.
At 879 feet, the operation was stalled. Hart tried to decipher the signals from below. The engineers had no choice but to stop the drilling and remove the drill shaft, segment by segment, until they could inspect the hammer. The evidence was obvious: the drill head was shredded. Football-sized chunks had been torn off the tungsten-steel shaft. A video camera that was lowered down the hole revealed the missing pieces had become entangled with iron. Faulty maps had led the engineers to design a drilling route that passed through a layer of rods used to reinforce the mine. Now those rods had sabotaged the rescue tunnel.
DAY 36: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10
The engineers lowered huge magnets down the drill hole to try to remove
the metal chunks, but that effort failed. An attempt to batter and loosen the trapped shards was also unsuccessful. The metal was stuck. The rock held the hammer fragments tight, like a fishing lure snared at the bottom of a lake.
Igor Proestakis, a twenty-four-year-old Chilean engineer, had been brought to the rescue site by his uncle Mijail, one of the lead engineers for the entire rescue. Among the youngest of the engineers on-site, Proestakis heard about the problem of the trapped chunks of the hammer and began to design and draw a solution. Proestakis remembered from his university classes the decades-old technique of recovering material lost in the depths of a mine: lowering an open metal jaw with sharp teeth to the bottom of the shaft and placing it around the target—in this case the tungsten pieces. Extreme pressure was then applied atop the metal jaw, like a giant’s foot crushing an aluminum can. The pressure from above forces the sharpened teeth to slowly bend shut, trapping the “prey.” Known as “la Araña” (“the Spider”), the technique was crude but time-tested. Still, Igor’s repeated suggestions to use the Spider were ignored.
With Plan B stalled, rescue leaders panicked further when Plan A was forced to stop drilling. A leaky hydraulic hose required urgent attention.
33 Men Page 13
