33 Men (4 page)

Instead of their usual battles with dust, the men now faced a muddy, slippery slope outside the refuge. The frequent downpour of stones and boulders echoed like a madman's drum inside a one-mile stretch of rocky caverns where they were now imprisoned. The men lurched awkwardly in the darkness, shutting off their lanterns in an effort to conserve precious battery power.

Their nightmare had begun.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 5, 5:40 PM

Mario Segura was wet and cold when he returned to the police station in Copiapó, Chile. After four hours of rescue training in the frigid Pacific Ocean, the wiry commando was ready for a hot shower and a cold beer with his colleague José Ñancucheo. Both Segura and Ñancucheo are members of GOPE, the Chilean Carabineros Special Operations Group, an elite police unit trained in everything from dismantling bombs to rappelling down the innards of the hundreds of volcanoes that crown the Andes Mountains—a spine that runs the 2,700-mile length of the Chilean landscape. When an adventure tourist exploring the lip of a volcano in Chile crosses the fine line between extreme adrenaline and sudden slip, these are the guys who search for the remains. When an anarchist bombs a business (a monthly event in Santiago), these are the men sent to the
scene.

Highly trained and respected throughout South America as one of the most professional police units on the continent, GOPE members spend many of their waking hours at the gym or shooting range or unraveling disaster scenarios. On August 5, after hours of scuba rescue training, Segura and Ñancucheo were nearing the end of their shift when the phone rang. “I bet it's a rescue,” joked Segura, as he sat down for hot tea and sandwiches with his squad mates. As his colleague listened to the call, Segura recognized the instant metamorphosis from relaxed end-of-the-day attitude to mission critical operational mode. The phone call was curt; so were the details. Another mining accident. This one at the San José mine, 27 miles into the hills.

“I looked at my watch when we left. It was six [
pm
],” said Segura. “I said to Mendez, ‘We will be back in three hours.' Rescues always take three hours. I said, ‘
Compadre
, we'll have our snack when we come back.' I turned off the kettle, but I left the tea ready to be served.”

The six men loaded 300-foot coils of rope, gloves, climbing harnesses, and crates of carabiners and helmets with head lamps into their 4x4 Nissan pickup. An orange suitcase packed with a LED lighting kit, similar to those used on professional photo shoots, was also packed in the back, but in the rush the men forgot a key piece of equipment: a tripod stand that allows a rope to be centered over a rescue hole to aid climbers in speedy ascents and descents inside a mine. An error for which one man would later pay dearly.

As the sun dipped lower, the police pickup sped up to the mine—flashing lights parting what passes for evening rush hour in this sparsely populated desert. The men spoke infrequently as they silently ran through rescue procedures in their minds. The drive took only thirty-five minutes but was deceptively dangerous. Sharp curves and an irregular fog that often dumped a slippery and invisible layer of water on the road explains in part why rental cars in the region typically include not only double roll bars and two spare tires but also an extensive first aid kit.

When the GOPE team arrived at the mine, a geologist and geophysicist were waiting to deliver an impromptu lecture in which they sketched the structure of the mine and the estimated position of the trapped miners. Accurate maps were not available on such short notice and guesswork was a major factor in the rescue planning. The geologist was serious and worried. “This is a complicated operation,” he told the six GOPE members. “This one will take time.” The geologist pointed out a ventilation shaft on the rough map of the mine and suggested the police first find it and, if possible, lower themselves into the bowels of the mountain. There were miles of tunnels to search. Had the men reached the safety shelter near the bottom of the mine? Or the vehicle workshop a quarter-mile higher? With more than a dozen vehicles inside the serpentine tunnels, the commandos prepared for the possibility that the men were alive but trapped inside crushed trucks.

The men, if they were alive, might be anywhere.

At first the administrators at the San José mine were unwilling to acknowledge the scale of the disaster. According to Javier Castillo, a union representative for the mine who said it was his call that first alerted authorities, the management initially banned the men from using company telephones to call for help. Angelica Alvarez, wife of the trapped miner Edison Peña, told a similar tale: “The miners wanted to call down, and since there is no cell phone coverage up at the hill, they asked for a land line. . . . They strictly prohibited them from contacting firefighters, an ambulance or the police. The company wanted to fix this on their own terms.” As a growing clan of rock climbers, veteran miners and GOPE commandos studied their options at the mine, family members and ordinary citizens around Chile stared in shock at the newscast. The San José mine had collapsed, and now the names of the miners on duty at the time scrolled down the television screens.

1. Luis Alberto Urzúa Irribarren

2. Florencio Ávalos Silva

3. Renán Anselmo Ávalos Silva

4. Samuel Ávalos Acuña

5. Osmán Isidro Araya Araya

6. Carlos Bugueño Alfaro

7. Pedro Cortez Contreras

8. Carlos Alberto Barrios Contreras

9. Jonny Barrios Rojas

10. Víctor Segovia Rojas

11. Darío Arturo Segovia Rojo

12. Mario Sepúlveda Espinaze

13. Franklin Lobos Ramírez

14. Roberto López Bordones

15. Jorge Galleguillos Orellana

16. Víctor Zamora Bugueño

17. Jimmy Alejandro Sánchez Lagues

18. Omar Orlando Reigada Rojas

19. Ariel Ticona Yáñez

20. Claudio Yáñez Lagos

21. Pablo Rojas Villacorta

22. Juan Carlos Águila Gaeta

23. Juan Andrés Illanes Palma

24. Richard Villarroel Godoy

25. Raúl Enrique Bustos Ibáñez

26. José Henríquez González

27. Edison Peña Villarroel

28. Alex Richard Vega Salazar

29. Daniel Herrera Campos

30. Mario Gómez Heredia

31. Carlos Mamani

32. José Ojeda

33. William Órdenes

For many of the families, the TV broadcast was their first indication that disaster had struck. Not only had the mine owners been slow in alerting relatives, but the list was riddled with errors. Two miners were not on the list—Esteban Rojas and Claudio Acuña. Their families would live hours of distress and shock as they sorted out the truth. So too did the families of William Órdenes and Roberto L
ó
pez, both of whom had been listed as victims but were soon discovered to be safely outside the mine. The informal nature of employment, safety and record keeping at the San José mine was becoming evident by the hour.

Relatives who heard about the collapse from the national television broadcast began to arrive and clamor for action.

With the magnitude of the rescue mission hitting home, the rescue team was presented with new challenges. How were they supposed to search 2,300 feet deep? Was it possible to evacuate injured men from such a distance? Was the mine even safe enough to enter?

They simultaneously began planning for two options: finding the miners alive or finding them dead. Even in the worst-case scenario, government officials immediately developed contingency plans to evacuate the corpses; a major effort would be made to deliver the bodies to distraught families. Given Chile's notorious trauma between 1973 and 1990, when three thousand citizens were murdered and their bodies “disappeared” under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, leaving the bodies underground, out of sight and thus “disappeared” from their families, was, simply, never an option.

In the hours since the collapse, attempts by mine workers to enter the mine, first in a truck and then on foot, had proved futile. Headlights and searchlights failed to penetrate the dust-choked air. Thick cracks—many with water streaming out—illustrated the sheer force of the collapse. The rescuers could see little beyond a massive cloud of dust. The continuing crash of rock slabs slamming to the ground and the eerie groans made by the mountain sounded like a monster being strangled. As the mountain wept, the men dodged the tears. “Miners always say that the mountain is alive, which means that it is moving,” said Lieutenant José Luis Villegas, commander of the GOPE unit inside the mine. “They say this because the rocks make a sound like a roar. In this case the whole mountain was roaring.”

The entrance to the San José mine is a crudely carved, lopsided rectangular hole, nearly twice as high as it is wide, giving the impression of an open mouth. A rough road slopes gently down into a black abyss, like the passageway into a haunted underworld. Behind the mouth, the body of the mine coils around and around, and for almost four miles, it stretches deep into the earth, like a hidden snake. Seen from a cutaway side view, the mine looks like a boa constrictor—a long, lumpy body with bulges at random intervals.

Beside the entrance stands a battered green sign with the company name—“San Esteban Primera S.A.” (or “Saint Stephen the First”)—and a huge drawing of a helmet and work boots with the company's slogan: “Work Dignifies, Doing It Safely Makes It Worthy.” Rescue workers passed the sign as they entered the mine and found the floor cracked, the ceiling cracked, the walls split. There were no signs of life but there was abundant evidence of destruction.

In those first chaotic hours when dust still drifted from the mouth of the mine and a winter night's cold air chilled the men, Mario Segura was one of the first policemen to enter the mine. “We went down into the mine and followed it as far as possible, and then we came to a spot where the road was blocked by debris and rock. Usually you find a way around the edges of a cave-in. But this was a smooth rock, like a door that sealed off the shaft,” said Segura. “The way the mountain collapsed, even the experts in mining did not understand how so much rock fell. That a whole mountain fell like that? For them it was inexplicable.”

The massive chunk of rock that had fallen was not like a dagger, as had originally been thought, but more like a massive ship, roughly 300 feet long, 100 feet thick and 400 feet high. Later estimates would put the weight of the fallen rock at 700,000 tons, nearly twice the weight of the Empire State Building or, measured in the vocabulary of disasters, 150 times the weight of the
Titanic
. With no possible way to burrow through such a rock, the GOPE commandos explored until they found the ventilation shaft—known as a
chimenea
—and, using rock climbing equipment, they began a slow descent into the still-collapsing, still-groaning mine shaft.

With four policemen keeping an eye on the collapsing roof and anchoring rescue lines, two others lowered themselves slowly into the 6-foot-wide circular shaft. Without the proper tripod stand to guide the flow of rope and prevent it from being frayed on the sharp walls of the shaft, the men improvised. They fixed the ropes to a bumper on their pickup and yanked the lines to keep them from shredding away on the sharp rocks. “There was a rain of rocks five meters [sixteen feet] away from us. . . . When it started it sounded like a drizzle of water. Then there was a crash and the whole roof came down. Right next to us,” said Segura. “When that rain begins, you have to be careful; you are never sure where that rock is going to land.”

Under Chilean mining law, every such chimney shaft is required to have an escape ladder. But the San José mine was never a place where safety regulations were strictly observed. One miner, Ivan Toro, remembers that when he started working in the mine in 1985, the standard-issue footwear was sneakers. In September 2001, Toro was sitting down, waiting for a truck to take him topside when a section of the roof collapsed. “We could hear the machines perforating in the level above us when suddenly a slab of rock fell. I was the most affected because it fell on my leg. There were just little strands left and they amputated it. When I arrived at the hospital I lost consciousness,” he remembered. The company initially refused to pay because Toro had been sitting on the job. Eventually Toro won his lawsuit, but in Chile's free market economy, the price of a lost leg did little to soothe his trauma. The courts awarded Toro 15 million pesos (adjusted for inflation, roughly $45,000).

The innards of this mountain offered a deadly gamble—the promise of gold versus the risk of death. At first glance, the mine looked definitively dangerous, like a set from an Indiana Jones movie without the snakes. Pools of fetid water. Hidden caves. The roof sagged in spots, and crude mesh nets bolted to the ceiling caught rocks as they fell. The smell inside the mine combined dank humidity with the stink of ammonium nitrate explosives. Clouds of cigarette smoke from the chain-smoking miners were hardly noticeable; in this environment the fantasy of living long enough to die of lung cancer was laughable.

Instead of following standard mining practices and leaving reinforcement pillars throughout the excavated chambers, the San José mine began to resemble a gigantic chunk of Swiss cheese attacked by feral rats. No perfect science exists to explain the collapse of a mountain, but later analysis would suggest that haphazard extraction of valuable copper and gold had stripped the mine of its essential vertebrae. “They even mined away the support pillars,” said Vincenot Tobar, former security superintendent at the San José mine. “That can't be. You have to leave support every fifty meters [160 feet]. . . . It is those pillars that prevent a cave-in.”

Regardless of the exact mechanics, the policemen were inside a major collapse. And now, without the legally required escape ladders to climb down, the policemen rappelled slowly to the bottom of the 50-foot chimney and found themselves in the main chamber. The rescue workers scanned the otherworldly scene in front of them—casting a cautious eye on the uneven ceiling where rocks hung by what appeared to be invisible threads. The tunnel was 16 feet high and 20 feet wide, large enough for an oversized dump truck to haul out the ore and minerals. With the temperature a constant 90 degrees Fahrenheit and laden with a combined 260 pounds of equipment, the men sweated continuously as they explored the tunnel.