by Héctor Tobar
2
THE END OF EVERYTHING
When the diorite “mega-block” first breaks loose, it emits a loud, percussive sound. Many of the thirty-three men trapped below will not hear it, because they’re wearing ear protection deeper in the mine, or because they’re operating loud, heavy machinery. The mechanics at Level 150 are working on a twenty-seven-ton Toro 400 “load-haul dumper,” parked just thirty feet or so from the precipitous drop-off where the Pit begins. They’re behind schedule, and trying to finish before lunch, because they’ve spent ninety minutes waiting for a special wrench that someone had to go up to the surface to fetch. At 1:40 p.m., three men are using that tool to tighten the last two bolts on one of the squat machine’s five-foot-tall wheels when they hear what sounds like a gunshot. A moment later, they are knocked off their feet by a blast wave, and then enveloped by the sound of falling rock, and the walls around them begin to shake, and stones the size of oranges are falling around them. Raúl Bustos, who survived an earthquake and tsunami five months earlier, scurries under the chassis of the Toro 400. So does Richard Villarroel, a twenty-six-year-old whose young girlfriend is six months pregnant with their first child. Juan Carlos Aguilar, the man who’s traveled here from the rain forests of southern Chile, grabs on to a nearby water pipe. For two minutes, their ears are filled with the sound of the mountain’s collapse: One will describe it as like hearing many jackhammers taking apart a sidewalk all at once. Then a second blast wave, going in the opposite direction from the first, sweeps through the corridor, causing more rocks to fall. Stones falling from inside the nearby cavern begin to fill their informal workshop, and when the noise and the crashing sounds finally ease a bit, they look and see that one of the other vehicles closer to the edge of the cavern is half-buried in rock.
The three men gather themselves and in shouts agree to head on foot to the Ramp, to search for the fourth member of their work crew, a man who is driving a pickup truck they might use to escape.
* * *
A few minutes earlier, Juan Illanes had been ordered by his boss, Juan Carlos Aguilar, to leave the informal workshop to go get some drinking water. This requires a short drive down to the Refuge in a pickup truck. Illanes is driving a bit past Level 135 when he comes upon a slab of rock that’s fallen. It’s about six feet long, and maybe ten inches thick, too big to drive over. He has to get out and move it, or find a way around it. So he puts the pickup in reverse, and is just taking his hand off the gearshift when he hears a powerful “rocket blast” (un cohetazo). The walls of the Ramp begin to spit small stones and he hits the accelerator to go back up, in reverse, but only for a second or two, because then he feels the blast wave hit his truck, followed by a dust cloud, and an earthquake, as if the Ramp were inside a cardboard box that someone had decided to shake, he later says. He waits a bit and then, remembering his coworkers back at Level 150, he turns the pickup around and drives back up the Ramp toward the workshop, steering the vehicle into the angry cloud of oncoming dust. The dust is so thick he can’t see where he’s going, and he keeps crashing into the side wall of the tunnel. Finally he stops, and waits, with the lights on and the motor still running. He’s sitting there, inside the cab, when a figure steps out of the dust cloud and into the short beam of the truck’s headlights—it’s his boss, Aguilar. Two more men are running toward him, the other mechanics, Raúl Bustos and Richard Villarroel.
Illanes tells them it’s impossible to drive the pickup truck through the dust, so the four men find a section of the Ramp where there’s a wall that’s been fortified with steel mesh. They huddle against this wire net, the flimsiest of defenses against a mine that’s crumbling all around them.
* * *
The sound and the blast wave continue to race downward through the mine, past another group of workers at Level 105 who are perforating rock, including a forty-seven-year-old widower named José Ojeda. At Level 100, Alex Vega is waiting for Franklin Lobos and his lunch truck, taking a break, chitchatting with other workers, including Edison Peña, a thirty-four-year-old Santiago native and mechanic with a reputation at the San José Mine as a troubled and anxious individual. Peña keeps physically fit by riding back and forth across Copiapó on a bicycle he’s named Vanessa, after a porn star whose athleticism he admires. As the lunch hour approaches, Peña is depressed because he had been hoping that with all the commotion about the mountain making noises, the rest of the workday would be canceled, but it hasn’t been. Both men hear the thunder blast from above, a noise that’s dampened a bit after traveling through a few hundred feet of granitelike stone to reach them. “We were used to noises,” Alex later says. “It was normal for the mountain to crunch and crash. Like the boss would say to us: ‘The mountain is a living thing.’” But this noise is unlike any other they’ve heard before, and it’s followed by a rumbling sound that grows in volume with each passing second. The resting miners in blue, yellow, and red helmets standing with Vega and Peña at Level 105 begin to look around, and to look at one another. Their faces ask, Does anyone know what that is? Finally, someone shouts, “La mina se está planchoneando.” The mine is pancaking. There is a burst of wind, and then they see a cloud of dust flowing into the Ramp from tunnels leading to old, no-longer-worked sections of the mine. The cloud races down the Ramp toward them, and soon it is upon them, showering them with dirt and pebbles as they run downhill for the safety of the Refuge.
* * *
About ten vertical yards below Vega and Peña, Samuel Avalos is among a second group of workers waiting for the lunch truck, gathering inside or near the Refuge itself. Avalos’s recent past is even more unsettled, his work history more scrappy, than that of most of his fellow miners. Until recently, he worked as a street vendor, and he’s still hawking pirated discs as a side job, and has thus earned the nickname “CD.” He’s a small, funny man, at once shy and possessed of an ironic sense of humor that’s allowed him to endure a life in which he also sold flowers and other wares on street corners to survive. Once inside the Refuge, he performs a midday ritual that would seem eccentric or lunatic in any other workplace: He strips down to his underwear while several of his fully clothed coworkers stand by. After just half a shift of work, his overalls are sweat-soaked, so he takes them off, wrings the moisture out, and hangs them on one of the water pipes in the Refuge to dry. The Refuge is a room carved out of stone, with a white tile floor, a cinder-block wall, and a steel door that separates it from the Ramp. Other men come in and go out, but no one says anything to Avalos as he stands there half-naked, relaxing. Avalos has been waiting at the Refuge for quite a while, long enough for his uniform to be a bit drier, and he’s putting the overalls back on when he hears the thunderclap.
At first Avalos wonders if someone is blasting rock in the mine: but there is no blasting scheduled for that day. It’s bad if someone is setting off explosions without warning the men working in the mine, though it’s been known to happen. At the same time, the sound is louder than any controlled explosion. What could it be?
The curly-haired Víctor Zamora, who grew up in the town of Arica on the Peruvian border, is near the Refuge, too, sitting on a stone that’s like a bench. A chain-smoker, he’s puffing on another cigarette and feeling pretty good, pretty relaxed, despite the dull, sometimes throbbing pain of a molar that’s got a cavity. He’s there with the members of his fortifying crew, and later he will remember this moment as one of contentment and brotherhood. The men who work together in any given shift refer to one another as los niños, whether they be twenty-one or sixty-one, and Zamora actually likes working in the San José Mine with his fellow “boys”: He feels comfort in the way men treat one another as equals, “no one better than anyone else.” Now Zamora hears the explosion, too, and since he’s worked in mines on and off since he was a young man, the first thing he does is nothing more than take another drag on his cigarette.
A minute or so later, the first blast wave reaches Zamora and knocks him off his stone bench and violently throws open th
e heavy metal door to the nearby Refuge. He rises to his feet and runs inside.
In the panicked minutes that follow, Alex Vega, Edison Peña, and several other miners who had been waiting for the lunch truck nearby run into the Refuge to join Samuel Avalos, Víctor Zamora, and the others there. Soon, about two dozen men have huddled inside. Outside, beyond the steel door, the mountain is caving in upon itself. After fifteen or twenty minutes, the noise isn’t as loud, and then men drum up the collective courage to make a run for safety, heading out past the steel door and the cinder-block wall, stepping onto the Ramp to walk, scurry, and run to the surface, nearly four miles away.
* * *
After a morning spent driving to every level of the mine where men are working, the shift manager, Luis Urzúa, is at Level 90, not far from the spot where Mario “Perri” Sepúlveda is operating a front loader. At 1:40 p.m. he hears a loud crash that’s audible over the roar of the front loader, what sounds like a huge rock falling in the Pit. It’s normal to hear such noises coming from the mine’s excavated caverns when workers have been extracting ore at higher levels, and Urzúa isn’t especially concerned. Five minutes later, he hears another crash, and he tells Sepúlveda to stop his machine, but Mario is already doing so, because he’s just felt what he thinks is one of the large tires on his rig blowing out. Sepúlveda is taking off his ear protectors when the pressure wave passes through the tunnel and plugs up his ears. What is this, he wonders, and then Florencio Avalos pulls up in the shift manager’s white Toyota Hilux pickup truck to announce that the mine appears to be collapsing. Sepúlveda and Urzúa jump into the pickup and the three men drive up the Ramp toward the Refuge, where they find that all the men that should be there, seeking shelter from the collapsing mine, are gone.
With Sepúlveda still in the pickup with them, the two supervisors, Urzúa and Avalos, circle back downhill. They drive away from the surface and safety because there are men deeper in the mine. “We have to make sure those huevones1 get out,” he says. Getting each and every man working underground out at the end of the day is the responsibility Urzúa assumes each time he enters the mine.
* * *
Thirty vertical meters farther down, at Level 60, the Bolivian immigrant Carlos Mamani is at work inside another front loader. These are his first hours underground at the mine: He passed an aboveground test to operate the loader a few days before, and that very morning he’d taken a kind of final underground exam, supervised by one of the mechanics. After watching him awhile, the mechanic left Mamani to work alone for the first time. It’s the kind of moment Mamani, an earnest, baby-faced twenty-four-year-old, had imagined for many years. He grew up speaking Aymara on a rural farm on the desolate, beautiful Altiplano, one of the poorest corners of the poorest country in South America. As a teenager he joined the immigrant stream to Chile to work picking grapes and construction, all the while secretly dreaming of being a police detective. Instead of going to college he settled for a bit of technical training, and today he’s soloing at the controls of a big, Swedish-built machine with a joystick and digital gauges for the first time. The gauges glow in the darkness of the cavern, adding to the sense that he’s operating a complex and modern piece of equipment.
Mamani’s loader is attached to a big basket, with two men suspended inside, working on the roof of a tunnel, using jackhammer drills to do what’s called “fortifying.” The four-man crew working with him includes Yonni Barrios, the man with two households, and Darío Segovia, the man who gave his wife an unusually long and heartfelt embrace that very morning. They’re drilling six-foot-long metal rods into the stone to hold up a steel mesh that’s meant to keep any slab from falling on the people working below. Mamani doesn’t know it, because it’s his first day, but the miners inside the basket do: This is the spot where one month earlier the miner Gino Cortés was crushed by a falling slab of rock weighing more than a ton, causing his left leg to be amputated. Mamani has forgotten to bring down the lamp he was issued—he left it in the locker room up above, but Barrios told him not to worry, he can go pick it up at lunchtime. Mamani doesn’t even know what the daily routine of the mine is supposed to be, and he’s looking at his watch, and seeing it’s almost 2:00 p.m., he’s wondering: When are we going to eat? When are these guys going to stop working? Are they ever going to stop working? Next time, I’ll have a bigger breakfast.
Above him, the men stop working suddenly. Through the glass of the cab, Mamani watches them. Barrios and Segovia are looking at themselves as if to say, “What was that?”
Barrios is operating a jackhammer and has earplugs in, and hasn’t heard the distant explosion. Instead, he’s just felt a kind of pressure wave pass through his body. He feels his entire body being squeezed, and then a bit later, unsqueezed, as if he were inside the cylinder of a hand pump while someone pushed down on the plunger and then pulled it up again. Segovia has heard the explosion, and looks down at the two men standing below them, their assistants Esteban Rojas and Carlos Bugueño. “Something is happening,” one of them shouts. “Our ears are all plugged up.” But the crew keeps on working for several minutes more, until pebbles begin to fall from the roof of the tunnel, and dust blows inside.
Inside the cab, Mamani wonders if the gritty cloud beginning to build outside his front loader is somehow part of the work, too. But no, it isn’t, because the miners begin gesturing for him to lower the basket, and to back up the loader out of the tunnel, quickly. Mamani does this, then turns and sees Daniel Herrera reaching for the door to the cab. When Herrera opens the door, Mamani’s ears plug up suddenly and he loses much of his sense of hearing: He sees the lips of people moving but struggles to make out the words.
One of the workers starts to move his flashlight in circles, a signal that Mamani knows, from other mines he’s worked in, means something very frightening: Get out! Evacuate the mine! Get out now! From where they find themselves, it’s a five-mile drive to the surface, a vertical climb of two thousand feet, some forty minutes going downhill, and God knows how long uphill, because it’s a drive Mamani has never taken.
Moments later Mamani is driving the loader onto the Ramp, carrying several men into a tunnel filling and then filled with dust, headed for the Refuge, the big machine hitting the wall because he can’t see.
A little way forward, at Level 90, they see the shift supervisor, Urzúa, and the foreman, Avalos, coming down. Keep going up, the bosses say. We’ll catch up to you. We’re going down to look for the two men working deepest in the mine.
* * *
During the course of morning, Mario Gómez has made three trips down into the mine, and then back up to the top. Going downhill with an empty truck, he can do it in about thirty minutes; back up, fully loaded with gold- and copper-laden rock, it’s more than an hour, grinding the engine in first and second gears. Just after noon, he’s at the top with an empty truck and decides to take his lunch break. He enters the corrugated-metal company cafeteria and puts the container of rice and beef he’s brought and sticks it into the microwave, then takes it out: After just one spoonful, he stops. Gómez is paid a base salary, but also a set fee for each trip down into the mine. He thinks about the money and decides he should probably eat his lunch down at the bottom while the loader is filling up his truck, and thus squeeze in an extra trip for the day. The additional trip, which will nearly cost him his life, is worth 4,000 Chilean pesos, or about $9.
Gómez gets into his cab and drives down to Level 44, where he parks inside a corridor with piles of ore-laden rock waiting to be carried to the surface. He is, at that moment, the man working deepest in the mine, some 2,218 vertical feet from the surface. The man operating the loader that’s supposed to lift the ore into his truck isn’t there, so Gómez starts eating his lunch in the cab, with the engine running and the air-conditioning on against the 100-plus-degree heat. Ten minutes later the loader operator arrives: white-haired, fifty-six-year-old Omar Reygadas. He lifts one scoopful of rock and tosses it into the bed of the truck. At t
hat moment, Gómez feels a puff of air against his face, which is odd, because the windows of the truck cab are all closed. Then he feels a burst of pressure between his ears, as if his skull were a balloon being inflated, he says. The truck’s engine stops, and after a few seconds it starts again, all by itself. All the while Reygadas keeps working his loader, and the crash-grind made by stone hitting the truck’s metal bed leaves both Gómez and the loader deaf to any other sound. Reygadas has felt the rumbling and the pressure wave, too, and thinks that the shift supervisor, Urzúa, has ordered some blasting without bothering to tell everyone. It’s another dangerous screwup in this already screwed-up mine, and the last straw for Reygadas. That’s it, he tells himself: I’m going to finish this job and go cuss out that idiot Urzúa and tell him I quit.
When Gómez’s truck is fully loaded, he begins his drive upward to the surface. But he advances only a few hundred feet or so up a steep section of the Ramp when the tunnel around him begins to fill with a dust cloud. This isn’t especially worrying, because he’s seen it happen before, and he tries to push the truck through the cloud, but it gets so thick he can see only a few feet in front of the windshield. Gómez is in danger of crashing against the wall, so he stops and opens the door and feels the wall—it’s straight, not curved, and he gets back in the cab and points the steering wheel straight and goes faster, driving blindly until Urzúa appears next to his window, gesturing for him to stop and get out. Gómez lowers the window, and at that moment he is assaulted by a deafening noise, the memory of which will haunt him in the days, weeks, and months to come, causing him to weep when he remembers it: He hears the rumble of many simultaneous explosions, the sound of rock splitting, the stone walls around him seeming to crack, as if they might burst open at any moment.
