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  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

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  ISBN 978-1-101-51322-4

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  33

  MEN

  JONATHAN FRANKLIN

  INSIDE THE MIRACULOUS

  SURVIVAL AND DRAMATIC RESCUE

  OF THE CHILEAN MINERS

  G.P. PUTNAM’S SONS · NEW YORK

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE: THE EYES OF THE WORLD

  ONE BURIED ALIVE

  TWO A DESPERATE SEARCH

  THREE STUCK IN HELL

  FOUR SPEED VS. PRECISION

  FIVE 17 DAYS OF SILENCE

  SIX A BONANZA AT THE BOTTOM OF THE MINE

  SEVEN CRAWLING BACK TO LIFE

  EIGHT THE MARATHON

  NINE TV REALITY

  TEN FINISH LINE IN SIGHT

  ELEVEN THE FINAL DAYS

  TWELVE THE FINAL PREPARATIONS

  THIRTEEN THE RESCUE

  FOURTEEN FIRST DAYS OF FREEDOM

  EPILOGUE: THE TRIUMPH OF HOPE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  This book is dedicated to my family, who barely saw me for the duration of this dramatic tale: Toty, my ever patient and daredevil wife, and my six precious daughters, Francisca, Susan, Maciel, Kimberly, Amy and little Zoe. And finally to my grandson Tomas, who hardly saw me.

  Writing this book was a challenge and a journey, not nearly as wrenching as that lived by the thirty-three miners, but I, too, am excited to finally be at home and at peace.

  Jonathan Franklin

  December 2010

  Santiago, Chile

  PROLOGUE

  THE EYES OF THE WORLD

  On October 12, a dense dawn fog covered a packed mountainside in northern Chile. Dreamy banks of mist climbed up the slopes. The sun was still hidden over the horizon; a cold damp air rose up from the Pacific Ocean and sucked away body heat. The few figures that meandered through the makeshift camp at this early hour were ghostly silhouettes—like fleeting mirages here in the Atacama Desert, one of the world’s driest locations.

  In the media encampment, a maze of floodlights illuminated fields of antennae. Dozens of satellite transmitters were propped atop a field of boulders.

  Huddled around a campfire, fingers and arms entwined, the Ávalos family prayed and talked in quiet reverence directly above two buried relatives: twenty-nine-year-old Renán and thirty-one-year-old Florencio Ávalos. Nine weeks earlier, on August 5, the brothers had entered the San José mine for a twelve-hour shift. By mid-afternoon a massive slab of rock—the size of a skyscraper—had sheared off the mountain and sealed them at the bottom of the mine.

  For nine weeks the Ávalos family had hoped and prayed for a miracle. First to hear word that the brothers were alive and then to have them safely rescued from the depths of a mine that even on the best days was notorious for killing and maiming miners.

  From the moment the mine collapsed in early August, hundreds of professional engineers, rescue workers, drillers and diggers had descended on this previously remote and deserted corner of northern Chile. They arrived to volunteer, offering their ideas, their equipment and their hard labor. Using both diplomatic channels and contacts in the business community, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera made a simple but profound call for help. He said, “We have these guys trapped at seven hundred meters [2,300 feet]. What technologies do you have that could possibly help?”

  The response was overwhelming.

  Now the rescue was in its final stage. In less than twenty-four hours, a rocket-shaped capsule known as the Phoenix would be slowly lowered into the earth, to the bottom of the mine. Florencio Ávalos would be the first miner to open the door of the contraption and attempt to ride to the surface. His family knew the designation was both an honor and a risk.

  Hundreds of rescue workers had worked for months for this moment, most of them laboring in silence. All now brimmed with pride at the chance to play a small part in what was increasingly a global drama and what they all knew was a massive experiment. Never before had miners been rescued from such a depth after months of entrapment. Despite numerous theories that such a rescue was possible, everyone knew the law of averages—never great in an industry as dangerous as mining—was stacked against the probability that all the men could be rescued alive.

  Named “Operation San Lorenzo”—in homage to Saint Lorenzo, the patron saint of miners—the rescue was led by Codelco, the Chilean state-owned mining company that, over the past two months, had gathered the world’s most sophisticated drilling and mapping equipment.

  Codelco, a modern company with profits in excess of $4.5 billion a year, had used a fleet of borrowed, rented and improvised drilling rigs to find the men, and to feed them for sixty-nine days. Now was the moment of truth. Could they pull the men to safety? From a depth more than twice as high as the Eiffel Tower? The rescue hole was so small that the miners had been instructed to exercise strenuously to make sure they would actually fit inside the capsule.

  Despite the early hour, hundreds of journalists were already awake, lugging camera equipment in an effort to reserve a privileged spot for a drama that had captured the hearts and imaginations of viewers worldwide. Not since the moon landing had a technical challenge so intrigued and captivated the world. And in 2010, the wired world offered dozens of new ways to follow and comment on the proceedings.

  With their heads bowed toward a scorching mound of orange embers, testament to weeks of waiting, the Ávalos family appeared oblivious to the growing commotion. They offered a few comments, then ignored the arrival of a stray cameraman. The journalist—with cables and soundman in tow—waded in for a few minutes of live broadcasting, every word transmitted to an audience around the world, and then migrated to the next family.

  Behind the Ávalos family was the banner “Buried Perhaps . . . Overcome Never.” The miners’ faces stared out from the sign, half hidden in the dark. As individuals, their faces were unremarkable—serious, dour and weathered. As a group, they were Los 33, a worldwide symbol of resilience.

  Throughout
September and October 2010, as the rescuers drilled through a mountain of granite in search of the trapped men, the fate of Los 33 had become a collective narrative. The world’s leading journalists flooded in, battling over scarce airline tickets to travel to Copiapó, a city so forgotten that when Chilean broadcasters delivered the national weather forecast, this was the only major city in Chile they simply skipped. “When the World Cup trophy toured all of Chile, they didn’t stop here,” groused Copiapó mayor Maglio Cicardini, a ponytailed showman who looked like a backup rock-and-roll guitarist for ZZ Top.

  Despite the worldwide interest, the cameras rarely were allowed access to either the front lines or below the surface of this worldwide tragedy. Locked behind police lines by a strict and slick public relations campaign run by Chilean President Sebastian Piñera, most reporters were reduced to two months of interviewing family members and politicians, while a world audience measured in the hundreds of millions was transfixed by a more profound story line: What was happening down

  below?

  Entombed in a sweltering, humid and crumbling cave, how could thirty-three miners be alive after all these weeks?

  By early afternoon, the final countdown had begun. Crowds of relatives stood in awe as huge TV screens mounted on the side of motor homes and on the flaps of the press tent showed images of the rescue workers putting the final touches on the Phoenix rescue capsule. Painted the colors of the Chilean flag—blue, white and red—the Phoenix had been built on specifications developed by NASA and the Chilean Navy.

  At 11 pm, the Phoenix was ready. A winch hoisted the capsule. A yellow wheel threaded the cable and slowly rotated. The scene was hypnotic. It looked like an industrial operation from the 1930s. Hidden from view were the modern tools that made the whole operation possible, including GPS units that allowed the massive drills to find a tiny underground target, miles of fiber optic cable and wireless transmitters that relayed the miners’ pulse and blood pressure to a physician’s laptop.

  Sixty-nine days earlier, the men had been lost underground. More than two weeks of searching had failed to find the tunnel where they were slowly starving to death. Death was so certain that the men had written goodbye letters. The government had even begun to design a white cross on the hillside to mark their tomb. Now they might be reborn, resuscitated and rescued. Could such an incredible feat actually be pulled off?

  As the world held its breath, the Phoenix was slowly lowered, and then it was gone. In a land of massive earthquakes, the number of ways for the rescue to fail were too numerous to calculate. In order to work, the rescue required not only precise engineering but also a leap of faith. Specialists from around the world had been consulted throughout the rescue, helping to develop medical plans and engineering protocol. Now even the NASA team was speechless. On this mission, the manual would be written by the Chileans.

  ONE

  BURIED ALIVE

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 5, 7 AM

  The fifty-minute commute to the San José mine was more beautiful than ever. Fields of tiny purple flowers painted the hills in sensual curves, bringing thousands of tourists flocking to view the “flowering desert.” Few of the workers aboard the bus noticed; many were asleep as the bus careened around the curves up to the San José mine—a nondescript hill so packed with gold and copper that for more than a century, miners had burrowed like badgers, leaving zigzag tunnels that chased the valuable veins of minerals that laced the mountain innards like blood vessels through a body.

  Inside the bus, Mario Gómez could not sleep. The cell phone alarm that had awakened him at 6 am had been so early and annoying he had asked his wife, “Should I go?” “Skip work,” his wife, Lillian, urged. She had long been encouraging her sixty-three-year-old husband to file his retirement papers. Gómez did not need much convincing. He had begun life in the mines when he was twelve years old, a Dickens-like experience, and over the next fifty-one years he had learned every possible permutation of how to die underground. His left hand was a reminder of one way: a dynamite charge had exploded too close and ripped two of his fingers clean off. His thumb was torn away above the knuckle.

  From the window of the bus, Gómez watched a desert that offered not a shrub or a tree yet felt full of life compared with the underground world the drowsy men were about to enter. The San José mine was the most dangerous mine in the region and one that not coincidentally paid abnormally high wages. Where else could a cargador de tiro—who spent the day cramming sticks of dynamite into recently drilled holes—earn such a succulent salary? The paycheck explained why the men (who called themselves “The Kamikazes”) maintained loyalty to their job despite the mine’s fearsome reputation. Every worker had come to the same conclusion after completing the cold calculation of danger vs. cash. The cash always won.

  As the bus sped along the serpentine road, it passed a row of small altars (animitas), each a shrine to a tragic, violent and sudden death. In local lore, an accidental death leaves the dead person’s soul in limbo between heaven and earth. By building these shrines, family and friends sought to expedite their loved one’s journey skyward, which explains why the lonely temples had lit candles, fresh flowers and crisp photos of the victim. Days later, this same route would have dozens more.

  Many of the men carried a hearty lunch. While the mine owners calculated that two sandwiches and a carton of milk were sufficient energy for the twelve-hour shift, the men often brought reinforcements—a bar of chocolate, a Thermos of soup, a neatly wrapped steak and tomato sandwich. And water. Bottles, canteens, even 500cc (2 cups) in plastic bags sold at the Unimarc supermarket. Inside the mine, the temperature rarely dipped below 90 degrees Fahrenheit and the men guzzled three liters (about 3 quarts) of fresh water a day, yet still lived on the fragile border of dehydration. Humidity was so thick that their cigarettes would routinely droop in submission to the elements.

  At the entrance to the mine, the men changed into their work clothes: work pants, T-shirt, helmet and head lamp. A simple metal card holder marked their presence—and often their absence. With seven days of work, then seven days of rest, the men were living the ultimate boom and bust cycle—sweating like animals for a week then whirling in the pleasures of instant excess during the “down week.” When the men missed work on Monday they would jokingly say they were paying homage to the god of hangovers, locally known as “Saint Monday.”

  Company BBQs were frequent, and the owners were known to look the other way when workers showed up hours late. Working on a barren hill, the estimated 250 workers of San Esteban Primera (the holding company for several mines in the region, including San José) had no cell phone coverage, few safety features, frequent accidents, and a near total absence of women. Though it was 2010, in many ways the men lived a frontier existence. The countryside is pockmarked with signs that this is mining country—ranging from the all-night brothels ($40 a shag), to the rows of rugged pickups at Antay, a recently inaugurated casino helping the miners indulge what appeared to be a genetic predisposition to squander a month’s salary in a single binge.

  The northern deserts of Chile are the world’s largest producer of copper, and most Chilean miners work in modern copper mines under the supervision of highly professional multinational companies including Anglo American and BHP Billiton.

  With more than 50 percent of the nation’s export earnings coming from mining, Chile has long been a world leader in both mining technology and mining operations. Chuquicamata, the world’s largest open-pit mine, is run by the Chilean government copper company known as Codelco.

  Mining jobs are highly coveted as both lucrative and safe—considering that “safety” in the world of mining is relative. Combine the risks of young men driving truckloads of ammonium nitrate explosives, hundreds of miners setting dynamite charges inside caves every day, and all of this taking place in Chile, a nation known to have the world’s biggest earthquakes, and accidents are almost a certainty. Factor in a Chilean party culture fueled by massive quantities of cheap
yet head-poundingly strong grape brandy known as pisco, and the equation was known to every emergency room nurse in the region: dead miners.

  The men entering the San José mine worked not at the safe modern mines but instead belonged to the most risky subculture of this entire industry—low-tech, rustic miners known locally as “Los Pirquineros.” While the classic Chilean pirquinero had equipment no more sophisticated than a donkey and a pickax, the men at the San José mine called themselves “mechanized pirquineros,” meaning they operated modern machinery inside the rickety infrastructure of a classically dangerous operation. Unlike other mines that had rats and insects, the San José mine was sterile—except for the occasional scorpion. Inside the mine, the daily routine was akin to the lifestyle of a California forty-niner searching for gold in the days of Abraham Lincoln. These miners were regularly crushed—“ironed flat” in local lingo—by thousand-pound blocks of rock that unlatched from the roof with terrifying regularity. The rocks inside the San José mine were so sharp that the miners knew that even brushing up against the wall was like scraping a razor across their skin.

  A stark reminder of the potential risks came on July 5, 2010. The miners of San José had watched first the rescue operation, then the disappearing pickup that hauled away what was left of Gino Cortés. A block of rock that weighed the equivalent of twenty refrigerators let loose as Gino passed underneath. His leg had been severed clean off. For a moment he looked at his amputated leg in wonder. The cut was so swift he initially felt no pain. A coworker had gingerly brought the leg, wrapped in a shirt, along with Cortés to the emergency room. As he reflected on the accident from his hospital bed in Santiago, Cortés repeated, “I am lucky,” as he thanked God for having intact both his right leg and his life. Yet there is no mistaking the crude violence—his now mutilated left leg is sewn neatly into a sausage-like knot below the knee.