33 Men

by Jonathan Franklin

  Dreams of being united were further stoked on the afternoon of September 25 with the arrival of the Phoenix. The missile-shaped rescue capsule—custom-built for the San José rescue operation by the Chilean Navy using specifications from NASA and the successful Pennsylvania rescue operation at Quecreek—was painted the colors of the Chilean flag. Weighing in at 924 pounds, with an interior chamber 6.5 feet high, the rescue capsule became a character unto itself. Ministers and rescue workers posed inside the circular tube. Family members approached the contraption and touched the capsule lightly, as if it were a sacred totem.

  While the rescue plans advanced without a hitch, Dr. Romagnoli, who had gained the miners’ confidence through his handling of the Iturra and Ibañez situations, now began preparing the men for the escape mission. Romagnoli knew that if the capsule failed or became stuck, the rescuers might be forced to haul the men out by a far simpler and riskier method: strapped and tied to the end of a long cable. But no matter what, the men needed to be in the best shape possible—they might be forced to climb ladders, descend ropes or, if the capsule jammed, simply stand for an hour in the tightly confined space.

  Romagnoli, an adviser to both the Chilean armed forces and professional athletes, began teaching the men light exercises in preparation for more strenuous physical education classes. He recommended that the men jog as a group in a one-and-a-quarter-mile stretch of tunnel. Using the U.S. Army fitness training as a model, the men sang while they jogged. Romagnoli explained that singing was a safety precaution to keep their heart rates in check: “If their heart rate goes above one-forty, they can’t sing and jog at the same time.”

  Romagnoli said the men were enthusiastic about the new routines. “One of the advantages we have is that these guys are strong; they are accustomed to working their arms and upper body. This is not a sedentary population we are dealing with. They will respond quickly.”

  Using a sophisticated chest-mounted device known as the BioHarness, Romagnoli harvested a wealth of data on the trapped men. Now the miners provided real-life data on extreme situations to the experts at NASA. “The Chileans are basically writing the book on how to rescue this many people, this deep, after this long underground,” said Michael Duncan, one of the NASA experts who visited Chile.

  In addition to his deft handling of the psychologists, Romagnoli won over the miners early on when he supported their pleas for cigarettes. He was a smoker and had openly questioned whether the most stressful moment in the miners’ lives was an appropriate time to ask them to kick the nicotine habit. Romagnoli was unorthodox: he believed in commonsense solutions, even at the expense of textbook wisdom.

  Sitting behind his desk, high on the mountain at the paloma station, Romagnoli’s daily chores of shipping medicine, logging vital signs and chatting with the miners consumed just a fraction of his twelve-hour shift. Now that the men were relatively comfortable, instead of hearing about urgent health problems, Romagnoli was pestered about the most minimal life improvements. One letter from below was a complaint that the miners had run out of artificial sweetener. Another miner sent Romagnoli his MP3 player and complained that he had too much reggaeton and not enough cumbia music. Romagnoli began downloading music, erasing and then reformatting the MP3 player with a customized song list. “These guys aren’t sick anymore,” he said with a laugh. “Now they think this is room service and I am their fucking DJ.”

  DAY 52: SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26

  As the miners continued to send up videos from below, the front-row characters, including Sepúlveda and Urzúa, were becoming known worldwide as the charismatic cheerleader and the rock-solid shift foreman, respectively. Many of the other miners remained anonymous. Not only were they not visible in the videos, but they were invisible when it came time to work. A division had begun to form between those who were willing to volunteer and advance the rescue effort and those who lazed around waiting to be saved. Despite massive efforts to keep the men busy, their life was now reduced to killing time. It was exactly the situation that NASA had warned against—free time in a stressful and barely habitable environment was an incubator for problems.

  Arguments broke out between the men who worked and performed duties and those who did not. A half dozen men lay in bed, staring at the rock ceiling, listening to music on personal stereos, or lounging uncomfortably in the TV room. “They were lazy, they did nothing,” said Franklin Lobos, describing the attitude of several of the miners.

  First it was the arrival of television that had been a distraction for the men; now boredom and a relative sense of security were threatening the harmony of the group. Samuel Ávalos—whose official duty was to measure the daily temperature, humidity and levels of potential fatal gases inside the mine—said his job was a daily exercise in monotony. “The temperature never changed; it was always around thirty-two degrees [90 degrees Fahrenheit] and the humidity at ninety-five percent,” he said while recounting how the heat was driving the men mad. Victor Segovia, the tireless scribe, began to have nightmares that he was trapped in an oven.

  DAY 54: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

  After weeks of technical setbacks, all three drilling operations were now grinding slowly toward the men. Plan C was finally up and running. One hundred sixty-four feet high, the massive platform towered above its “competition.” Using huge drilling bits that looked like dinosaur claws with gear, Plan C was the talk of the engineers. They estimated that within twenty days, the petroleum rig would reach the men. Bets were placed on what day the rig would break through to the miners down below. It would be another week before they all realized that the rock at the San José mine was so dense—more than twice as hard as granite—that the rugged petroleum rig would advance far slower than the engineers had hoped and the miners imagined.

  Sougarret was now facing a delicate decision. Would each tunnel need to be reinforced with steel casing? The advantage of the casing was the ability to provide a uniform surface for the retractable, adjustable wheels of the Phoenix capsule. No one dared imagine the logistics of the Phoenix getting jammed in the tube and having to organize a rescue of the rescue workers or, worse, of a nearly freed miner. All efforts to make the last ride up uneventful were being thoroughly explored. Sougarret, though, knew that installing the tubing would add another three to seven days to the entire rescue operation. The weight of the tubes was estimated at 400 tons, meaning a special crane would have to be driven in from Santiago to install them. Repeated inspections of the carved tunnels showed a near-perfect surface—glassy and like marble in many sections. However, the first 328 feet were far less uniform and prone to crumbling or disintegration. Sougarret refused to make the final evaluation; for now his eyes were focused on reaching the men. The pressure of maintaining the men’s physical and mental health remained.

  DAY 55: WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29

  At Camp Hope, the level of action was also agonizingly slow; thousands of journalists were going stir-crazy. Access to the actual rescue operation was limited to government cameras and a few fortunate journalists who had been given insider access—including those from the Discovery Channel, a Chilean documentary crew, and the author of this book.

  In response to the media’s hunger for images and footage, the Piñera press team set up a command post at the mouth of the San José mine. Piñera’s aides working in a unit known as the “Secretariat of Communications” reviewed tapes to determine if they were suitable for public release. Brief snippets were released to the press, but hundreds of hours were never shown, as government lawyers began to debate the legality of airing more footage. If the mine was effectively their home, what were the rights of the miners with regard to the videos being filmed by government cameras? Was this rescue public or was life in the tunnels a private scene? Could broadcasting the videos lead to lawsuits against the government for invasion of privacy?

  As the Piñera presidency battled with privacy rights, the world’s media continued to swarm into Camp Hope on a scale never before seen in Chile a
nd rarely seen anywhere in the world. The number of registered journalists surpassed two thousand. For several acres, the rocky hillside near the mine was blanketed in motor homes, tents, satellite dish rigs, temporary plywood broadcast platforms and, increasingly, the cream of the world press. Photographers began to chain their tripods to key spots in an effort to guarantee a clean shot of the drilling rigs. TV crews argued over who had first claimed a towering boulder that served as a base for satellite transmissions. Every day a parade of new faces arrived at San José, lugging tripods, struggling with new phone codes, and gawking at the surreal scene.

  Just beyond the crowded site near the mine, the desert was empty in every direction. Not a tree on the horizon, just sweeping golden dunes interrupted by the occasional tracks left by motocross racers from the legendary Dakar to Paris marathon. After being chased off the African continent by a combination of political instability, security fears and the tragic death of a pedestrian squashed by the careening crowd of foreign motorists and cyclists, in 2009 the race was transferred to this remote corner of Chile. Hundreds of journalists had covered the race and camped in the nearby hills. Now they were back to cover another competition: the race against time.

  Photographers began to brawl and shove. With so many cameras and microphones, obtaining a clean shot was nearly impossible. The dust wreaked havoc on expensive lenses. And worse, the best shots had all been taken a thousand times over. One local newspaper dubbed the entire scene “the Woodstock of Media.” A building war erupted when TVN, the Chilean national broadcaster, built a broadcast platform directly in front of the one used by CNN Chile, forcing the latter to add a story to its own construction. Ramon Vergara, a local carpenter who made a business off the broadcasters’ competition, was cashing in. Vergara built three platforms in as many days. “I charge one hundred twenty thousand pesos per platform [$250],” Vergara told The Clinic. “I try to do one a day.”

  While the miners were reported to be in good health, the ACHS ambulance stationed high on the hill as part of the miner rescue was now regularly seen wailing down the hill, on a mission to rescue injured journalists. Ten separate accidents involving journalists and cars had been reported.

  With a troupe of clowns and roaming Franciscan monks in robes, the scene began to feel like a circus. “It lacks only the lions,” said Vinka Ticona, a relative of the trapped miner Ariel Ticona. Children playing in superhero costumes were so common that it was no longer strange to see a flock of little kids dressed as Spider-Man climbing the rocks like monkeys.

  Nightly bonfires became the hub of the now eclectic friendships between journalists, policemen, politicians and family members. Isabel Allende, daughter of Chile’s late leader Salvador Allende, could be seen giving an interview to CNN one moment, then sharing a fish sandwich and chatting with Isabel Allende, the Chilean novelist and a distant cousin of the former president. Long lines snaked away from a stand that delivered fish tacos. Free grilled seafood, homemade soups and a truckload of cookies kept everyone fed. Officially, the mine area was an alcohol-free zone. But the early-morning piles of empty beer, wine and pisco bottles were abundant evidence that the area was only alcohol free because it had all been consumed.

  Worldwide, millions of viewers were obsessed with the story line: Would the men make it out? Who would be first? The story was now a combination of Reality TV and live disaster, edited and fed to the media with the invisible but slick editing of Piñera’s communications team. Instead of fulfilling expectations of chaos, violence or a Lord of the Flies–style disintegration, the miners were offering a rare moment of global unity focused on joy, hope and solidarity. The traditional TV slogan “If it bleeds, it leads” was temporarily upended by a nonviolent drama featuring a cast of underdogs.

  At Camp Hope, an early wave of talent scouts and TV producers began to battle for the life rights to the miners’ story, in particular to a 150-page diary kept by the miner Victor Segovia, who had been chronicling the daily activities, including the darkest moments of the seventeen days without food. Segovia’s family began negotiating with publishing houses. The starting price for the unique memoir was $25,000. Tabloid reporters began sleuthing for the first exclusive interview with a miner, as they began signing up families and offering promises to whisk the men away on junkets to Los Angeles and Madrid.

  Though the men were still trapped, a movie about their experience was already in production. In a nearby abandoned mine, Chilean and Mexican actors were reenacting the drama, adding more than a few touches of literary license, as many details of the men’s day-to-day routines remained a mystery. Chilean director Leonardo Barrera also announced plans to film a porn movie based on the miners trapped underground. Barrera claimed his film would not be “a massive orgy” but a sympathetic and fictionalized account of miners having sex with minas, the Chilean slang for a sexy woman. The miners were about to be hauled from the dark, damp world of mining and tossed into the klieg lights of Hollywood. There would be virtually no time for a transition.

  DAY 57: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 1

  On September 30, Edgardo Reinoso, the miners’ lawyer, filed a suit against the government, seeking $27 million in damages and alleging government negligence in the reopening and continued operation of the San José mine. Reinoso was now representing all but three of the families. A month earlier he had successfully embargoed a quarter-million-dollar payment due to the San Esteban mining company. Originally recruited by the mayor of Caldera, a coastal city near the mine, Reinoso hoped to have that money turned over to the miners, a part of what he saw as a multimillion-dollar settlement due the men.

  The rotund showboat attorney was famous for winning a 2007 lawsuit against a local municipality when a pedestrian overpass collapsed, killing two spectators at a New Year’s Eve celebration in the coastal city of Valparaíso. An avowed opponent of Piñera and the Chilean right, he was now determined to get money from the government. “We, the families, want them to pay for all the damages, and we want justice,” said Katty Valdivia, Mario Sepúlveda’s wife, who supported the lawsuit.

  Reinoso’s attack on the government was seen as a cheap shot by Piñera’s aides, who never failed to mention that the dangers of the San José mine had been known for a decade and that El Concertación, the progressive center-left coalition that ruled Chile from 1990 to 2010, had done little to protect the workers and, in fact, repeatedly allowed the dangerous mine to avoid a permanent closure.

  Opinion polls showed the new president’s approval rating—the rather cheap and unreliable barometer of success in the contemporary political arena—had jumped from 46 percent pre-disaster to 56 percent as the rescue progressed. In August, President Piñera had placed his credibility on the front lines of the miner rescue. Now, with Reinoso’s lawsuit, he risked losing that huge capital gain.

  President Piñera was also coming under criticism at the mine, where some rescue workers were appalled by the president’s actions. They accused him of using the rescue for political advantage. Dr. Díaz, the lead doctor for ACHS, criticized Piñera and Golborne for altering medical and technical protocol to steal the spotlight. “These guys want to be in front of the cameras as the great saviors,” he said, frustrated that the rescue operation was being compromised by staged PR moments that, as he saw it, were designed to benefit the president. “At some point it is going to be pretty difficult to bite my tongue.”

  In an article on CNN’s Latin American page titled “Family Members Accuse Chilean President of Using Them,” Nelly Bugueño, mother of the trapped miner Victor Zamora, denounced Piñera. “This is all politics. It is dirty. It is a fraud and propaganda,” she said. “They are playing with the sentiments of our dear families.”

  Other family members acknowledged that they had no love for Piñera or his politics but that his government had done everything possible to save the miners. “Personally, I can’t stand the guy and have vast differences of opinion. But he’s made great decisions,” said Cristian Herrera, nephew of the trapped
miner Daniel Herrera. “If you ask me do I have to thank him? Yes. If the previous government had been in charge, the miners would have died.”

  On October 1, Minister Golborne ended a month of rumors and speculation by confirming what was by then an open secret: the rescue effort was advancing far faster than publicly acknowledged. “The good news is that thanks to an analysis that we have done together with the technical team, we can estimate that the rescue of our miners will happen in the second half of October.” Golborne noted that the drills had passed through the loose top layer of rock and were now in a geologically more solid section of the mountain. “This allows us to be slightly more optimistic,” said Golborne, who also announced that he had already informed the miners of the same good news.

  With the rescue of the miners now speeding ahead, deeper questions were beginning to be asked and a broader debate erupted in Chile. Why were the miners trapped in the first place? Why was such a notoriously dangerous mine still operating? A congressional investigation in Chile begun in late August had unearthed a damning history of fatal accidents at mines owned by San Esteban, the holding company that owns the San José mine as well as San Antonio, an adjacent mine.