by Héctor Tobar
* * *
The men who were at the Refuge try twice to escape on foot during lulls in the explosions. After a first attempt ends with a retreat back to the Refuge, they try again, only to find the rumbling of an underground earthquake beginning anew. The solid rock of the mountain is transformed into a breathing, pulsating mass. The ceiling and floor of the Ramp become undulating waves of stone, and the mountain hurls boulders that emerge from the blackness of the tunnel and roll and bounce downhill, each a lethal weapon aimed at their bodies. “We were a pack of sheep, and the mountain was about to eat us,” José Ojeda later says. For Víctor Zamora, the sound of exploding rock feels like machine-gun fire aimed at him and his fellow miners. It’s too much, too scary, too dangerous, so they start running back downhill, but it’s as if they were running on a bridge swaying in the wind, one of the miners says. Luis Urzúa and Florencio Avalos arrive at this moment, and see this group of panicked men running toward their pickup truck. They watch, mesmerized, as another blast wave rushes through the tunnel. It seems to pick up Alex Vega, the smallest and slightest of the miners, and lifts him off his feet, as if he were some miner-shaped kite that caught a sudden gust of wind. Others are knocked over, falling, flailing at the air. They stumble, these big men in overalls, men with bodies shaped by red wine and beer and backyard barbecues, babied by their wives and mothers and mothers-in-law. The blast knocks Zamora against the wall of the Ramp, face-first, knocking out some of the teeth he was born with and a few others that a dentist made for him, adding a sharper pain to the already dull lingering pain of a rotting molar. When he and the others see the supervisors’ pickup truck, they rise to their feet and rush toward it. Zamora squeezes his dust-covered body and bloody mouth into the narrow seat behind the driver.
Most of the other men jump into the bed of the pickup. “Go! Go! Let’s get out of here!” they yell once everyone is on board. At the wheel, Avalos heads toward the surface. The Toyota Hilux pickup truck sags under the weight of two dozen men, “pushed together like bees in a hive,” Carlos Mamani says. He’s standing on the back bumper, wrapping his arms around the legs of the men standing in the truck bed. To the men in the cab, with the hood seeming to rise in the air, the pickup is like an overloaded aircraft straining to take flight. The dust once again gets too thick to see, so Mario Sepúlveda gets out of the cab and walks ahead with his flashlight, guiding the driver forward. Marching and driving this way into the dust cloud, they meet Raúl Bustos and the other three contract mechanics who were at the workshop, and the mechanics pile into the back of the pickup, too, all the while sharing the story of the explosions they felt from their perch on the edge of the cavern. Advancing deeper still into the dust, the men hear a mechanical rattling approaching: It’s the personnel truck, with Franklin Lobos and Jorge Galleguillos. Sepúlveda shines his light in the faces of the older men and sees the blood-drained look of mortal fear. The older men recount the collapse they escaped, with Galleguillos insisting on having seen a butterfly moments before. Urzúa orders them to turn the truck around and head back uphill. When Lobos does so, most of the men leave the pickup and become his passengers. The ascent continues, but with each turn higher up in the spiral, past Levels 150 and 180, more debris appears in the roadway of the Ramp, as if they were getting closer to the scene of a battle that had been fought with stones. Up one curve, and then another, they go forward, until, after the eighth loop from the Refuge, they approach Level 190. A few times they stop because the dust is too thick, and they wait five, ten, fifteen minutes for it to clear a bit. Finally, there are too many rocks to drive any farther, and all the men get out of the pickup truck and the personnel truck and walk on foot. Uphill, on a 10 percent grade, it’s a climb that can quickly wear a man out, especially given the heat and humidity, but not for men being carried upward by their own adrenaline, trying to imagine the midday sunlight that awaits them at the end of this slow, oft-interrupted journey, if the Ramp has held together the way the mine’s managers and owners have promised. They advance on foot another fifty yards or so, following the lights of their headlamps and flashlights through a gravelly cloud, until the beams strike an object that appears to be blocking the way forward. It’s the gray surface of a stone slab, its size and shape not quite clear in the still swirling dust. They sit and wait in that cloud for several minutes, for the air to turn less gravelly. As it does, the full size of the obstacle before them becomes apparent.
The Ramp is blocked, from top to bottom, and all the way across, by a wall of rock.
To Luis Urzúa it looks “like the stone they put over Jesus’s tomb.” To others it is a curtain of rock, and to one miner a “guillotine” of stone. It’s a flat, smooth sheet of bluish gray diorite, and it’s dropped across the roadway of the Ramp in the same way trapdoors fall suddenly and theatrically in action-adventure movies. To Edison Peña it’s the stone’s newness that’s most disturbing—it’s clean, unsoiled by the soot and dust of the mine, as if created anew to trap them.
Only later will the men learn the awesome size of the obstacle before them, to be known in a Chilean government report as a “megabloque.” A huge chunk of the mountain has fallen in a single piece. The miners are like men standing at the bottom of a granite cliff: The rock before them is about 550 feet tall. It weighs 700 million kilograms, or about 770,000 tons, twice the weight of the Empire State Building. Some of the men can already sense the enormity of the disaster. Mario Gómez believes, as do others, that the collapse originated up at Level 540, where a large crack had split the Ramp and leaked water several months earlier. That is where, at the insistence of Jorge Galleguillos and some of the older miners, the mine owners had placed mirrors in the crack to see if the rock was shifting. The mirrors had never broken, but in their gut, at this moment, Gómez and Galleguillos and the older men know the mine failed at that spot. By their quick (and largely correct) calculations, it’s likely at least ten levels of the ramp have been wiped out.
“Estamos cagados,” one miner says. Loose translation: We’re fucked.
Alex Vega looks to his fellow miners to be the most desperate among them to leave. On an ordinary day, out in the sunshine, Alex has the muscled, melancholy handsomeness of a model in a cigarette ad, with longish sideburns and a well-defined brow. He’s about five feet, three inches tall, and here before the stone he looks especially small, though his smallness is what gives him hope. He slithers onto his stomach and stares into a small opening beneath the gray stone blocking the way out—he might be the only guy who can fit into that space.
Like many people from the north, Alex Vega is a quiet homebody. He got his girlfriend, Jessica, pregnant at the age of fifteen and later married her, and they’ve been together for fifteen years since then. At the San José his nickname is “El Papi Ricky,” after a soap opera character who, like Alex, is a father with a young daughter. Some years back Alex and Jessica took out a loan to buy an empty lot in Copiapó’s Arturo Prat neighborhood, and they’re slowly filling that lot with rooms, and building a low cinder-block wall around their property that’s a symbol of their good fortune and hard work: It’s just three feet tall now, and Alex has kept his well-paying job as a mechanic in the mine so that he can finish it, despite being warned by his father and two of his brothers (who used to work in the San José) about how dangerous the mine is. Alex wants to get back home, and the only path is this opening where the fallen block has blasted out the floor of the Ramp. He tells the men he thinks he can squeeze through.
“No,” Urzúa says, and several other men say it’s a crazy thing to do.
Vega insists, and finally Urzúa tells him, “Just be careful. We’ll be out here listening, and if the rock starts to crack or move we’ll tell you.”
Vega squeezes his small frame into a crevice of jagged rock. “At that moment, I was feeling all this adrenaline,” he later says. “I didn’t think, or measure the risk.” Not long afterward he’ll think: What a stupid thing I did.
With his lamp in hand, he
crawls twenty feet into the crack, until he can advance no farther.
“There’s no way through,” he announces after he crawls out.
For some of the older men and lifelong miners, the sight of the stone and Vega’s words bring an overwhelming sense of finality. Many have been trapped in mines before, by small rock falls that a bulldozer can clear in a few hours, but this gray wall is something completely outside their experience. The flat stone is a vision of death, and it causes them to reflect, as they stand before it, on the world they’ve been separated from: the realm of the living, of families and fog-laden breezes, of homes and paternal obligations. All the things they are leaving unsettled in their lives begin to gather in their thoughts. Galleguillos thinks he’ll never see his new grandson, and feels the tears running down his cheeks. Gómez realizes that, like his miner father, who died of silicosis, he’s worked too long and pushed his luck until he had one accident too many: first two fingers, and now his life. He will die a miner. This is as far as I’ll ever go, he thinks. Hasta aquí llego.
The men’s confused silence is soon filled by the sound of the shift foreman counting. Raúl Villegas, who was driving one of the ore trucks, is missing, but Franklin Lobos and Jorge Galleguillos saw him on his way to the surface, and it seems likely that he got out. “Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two…” Urzúa counts again, and again gets thirty-two, but all the men are shifting around, and he’s not quite clear that this is the right count, because in the San José Mine the lists of workers always shift from one day to the next. Nothing in the mine is ever certain, though the supervisor is pretty sure of one thing: There’s probably no way to escape, and no way for rescuers to reach them, in this haphazard collection of passageways cut into a mountain.
3
THE DINNER HOUR
There is nothing especially remarkable about the phone call the off-duty miner Pablo Ramirez gets at about 2:00 p.m. It’s from Carlos Pinilla’s secretary at the San Esteban Mining Company. “There’s a problem in the mine,” the secretary says. “A problem with the Ramp. Don Carlos says to get over here. And it looks like you’ll only need a few operators for your shift.” Ramirez is at home in Copiapó, enjoying his last few hours of rest before beginning work on the night shift at the San José Mine. When the shift currently inside the mine ends its workday, he will take the reins from Luis Urzúa as the supervisor of the night shift: but that’s not supposed to be for another five hours or so. Judging from the secretary’s matter-of-fact tone, there’s been another spillover of rock from the cavern of the Pit, and getting the guys out will be a routine but arduous task involving a few machine operators clearing out rock from the Ramp. A day of production will be lost.
This is what Ramirez thinks as he drives to the mine. He’s not worried for all the guys he knows inside. He knows about half of the men quite well: The shift foreman, Florencio Avalos, is one of his best friends, and Florencio’s two sons call Pablo “tío,” or uncle. Ramirez and Avalos are both about thirty, smart young guys with good careers ahead of them in mining, and at this moment Ramirez hasn’t heard anything to disabuse him of the belief that he’ll be able to sit down and have a beer with his friend fairly soon. At 4:30, Pablo arrives at the mine and sees something significantly more troubling than he expected. The mouth of the mine, its one and only entrance, is spewing dust. A bit of dust coming from the mine isn’t that unusual, but Ramirez has never seen quite the billowing cloud he sees now, rising up from the cavelike entrance, “like a volcano,” he later says. And then there are the noises: the explosions produced by rock falls, a moaning crash repeated again and again. But even this is not terribly unusual, because the mountain is constantly broadcasting noises from its innards to the outside world: Whenever a team of workers sets off a blast deep inside, for example, the sound usually follows the mine’s passageways and rises to the surface. But neither the sound nor the spewing dirt stop. Past five, six o’clock, the dust is still making it impossible to enter the mine and go for the men inside. As the hours pass, mine workers and managers gather outside, looking a bit lost, with Carlos Pinilla standing there in his white helmet among them. Pinilla has tried twice before to go inside, reaching only as far as Level 440 before the cloud of dust became too thick to continue.
At about five o’clock, with the dusk of Southern Hemisphere winter fast approaching, Pinilla leads a team of men back inside: Pablo Ramirez and two other mine supervisors enter with him.
They descend in a pickup truck, making several switchback turns without incident, until, at Level 450, they see a two-inch-wide crack all across the floor of the Ramp. The “good” diorite of the only passageway into and out of the mine has fractured wider than Ramirez has ever seen before, and he will remember this as the moment he first grasped the seriousness of the accident. As they advance a bit farther, Ramirez follows the light of the pickup truck and expects to see, at any moment, the loose rock produced by a cave-in from the excavated cavern of the Pit. Instead, at Level 320, after driving 4.5 kilometers from the mine entrance (2.8 miles), the pickup comes to an unexpected obstacle, its headlights shining upon a flat, gray mass. The Ramp is blocked, top to bottom, by a single piece of rock. Ramirez thinks he’s seen or prepared for every mining disaster possible, but never in his musing or his planning has he imagined anything like this. It feels as if someone had gone through with a knife and cut the mine in half. The men get out of the pickup and stand before it, a solid wall of rock that couldn’t possibly be there.
“Cagamos,” someone says, unknowingly repeating the same word uttered by the men trapped by this same rock 425 feet below. We’re fucked. Ramirez, a man who takes pride in being able to tackle any problem a mine can give him, suddenly feels a sense of powerlessness, that there is nothing he or his boss can do to rescue the thirty-three men on the other side of this rock. The best remaining hope is the chimneys, but only a special police unit, a team with mountain climbing gear, will be able to enter them.
Standing before that solid stone in his white helmet, Pinilla looks stunned. He is the most powerful man in the daily working lives of the men of the San José Mine, the high-strung boss who hurriedly left behind his underlings just before this rock fell in his wake. But now he begins to weep. “He’s usually a jerk, real macho when it comes to those things,” Ramirez will say later. “But he started crying, right away.”
“I thought, no, I knew for certain that someone had to be dead,” Pinilla says later. At 1:45, the moment of the collapse, the personnel truck was supposed to be headed uphill, taking the men out for lunch; the contractor mechanics weren’t even supposed to be in the mine at that hour, and more than likely they, too, were headed out of the mine for lunch. Pinilla imagines those men crushed in the massive failure of the Ramp and can’t help but think: I’m the bastard who sent them all down there.
They drive back up to the surface, and find the owners, Marcelo Kemeny and Alejandro Bohn, waiting in white helmets. They have to call for help, there’s no other way. This requires Bohn and Kemeny to get in their truck and drive down the hill away from the mine and toward the highway in search of a cell-phone signal—there’s a phone line at the mine but for some reason they choose not to use it. At 7:22, more than five hours after the collapse, the owners of the San José Mine call the authorities for the first time.
The call reaches the local fire department, then the offices of the National Geology and Mining Service, and eventually the disaster office of Chile’s Ministry of the Interior, which supervises all of Chile’s police and security forces. An hour later, six men from the Chilean police’s Special Operations Group (GOPE, in Spanish) arrive at the San José Mine with climbing gear. They enter the mine in a pickup truck and are on the Ramp, passing Level 450, when they get a flat tire while driving over the new crack in the roadway. Following behind them in another pickup, Carlos Pinilla and Pablo Ramirez see the crack has doubled in size.
If the police unit were to know that the crack is new, and how much it’s grown in the past t
wo hours, they might realize how unstable the mountain is and halt their rescue effort. So in Ramirez’s account of the moment, as the police rescuers get out to quickly change the tire, Pinilla looks over to Ramirez and places a finger against his lips. Ramirez understands and doesn’t say a word about this frightening, growing fissure in the mountain, a warning sign of another collapse that will surely follow.
* * *
As the hours pass with thirty-three men trapped behind a cloud of dust and a curtain of stone, the administrators of the San Esteban Mining Company put off calling the families of the men. “In certain mines, the first instinct is to just try and hide these things as much as possible,” one Chilean official later says. At 3:00 p.m., they might have called and said: There’s been a collapse, it’s going to take a while to get them out, don’t expect them for dinner. At 7:00 p.m., they might have said: It’s looking more serious than we expected, and we don’t know when exactly we’ll get them out, but as far as we know they’re safe. Instead, for more than eight hours after the accident and deep into a Thursday night rumbling toward a Friday morning, the company’s representatives say nothing, and word of the accident first reaches wives, mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons in Copiapó and other cities and towns across the narrow spine of Chile via the vague, alarming, and often inaccurate bulletins of various radio and television stations.
One of the few loved ones to hear quickly from someone with more or less direct knowledge of what’s going at the mine is a woman not listed on any mining company document, and with no legal claim to any private information: Yonni Barrios’s big, rosy-cheeked, and incessantly happy mistress, Susana Valenzuela.
Susana’s brother-in-law works in a mine in Punta del Cobre, just outside of Copiapó, and learns of the accident as word goes out to the mining community that men might be needed for a rescue. That brother-in-law calls his wife, Susana’s sister, who at 7:00 p.m. shows up at the door to Yonni and Susana’s home in Copiapó and asks, “Is Yonni here?”
