Authors: Héctor Tobar
The next day Víctor is writing with the new pen and notebook he’s asked his family to send him. Mario Sepúlveda comes to speak to him. Víctor’s diary is a “holy object,” Mario says, it might be the book that tells their story one day, and thus worth money to them all. Víctor thinks about this a bit and writes: “I wrote this diary to survive, not to turn it into a book … I didn’t realize it was such a big deal.” Víctor, whose education ended when he got kicked out of school in the fifth grade for fighting, never imagined that putting words to paper could make him feel better about himself or that he would one day think of himself as a writer. He’s never traveled beyond the desert cities and towns around Copiapó, but underground he’s become the chronicler of a story that will one day circle the world.
* * *
In the trailers and bungalows on the surface of the San José Mine where the leaders of the rescue have set up shop, it seems as if the entire world is moving to support them. “We could ask for anything, from anywhere, and people would try and get it to us,” Cristián Barra says. Drilling experts and drilling technologies from around the world are headed for the mine: from Johannesburg, South Africa, and Berlin, Pennsylvania; from Denver, Colorado, and Calgary, Alberta; and from a U.S. Army forward-operating base in Afghanistan. The Chileans are planning on restaging one of the great rescues in mining history—at Quecreek Mine in Pennsylvania in 2002—and they’re going to need a global cast to pull it off.
At that American coal mine, nine men were trapped when they inadvertently triggered an underground flood. They were rescued by the drilling of a vertical shaft 240 feet deep and thirty inches wide, through which they were raised up in a steel basket. The Chileans will need to drill a hole that’s eight times as deep. To do so, they summon one of the biggest drill rigs in Chile, an Australian Strata 950 raise borer, from the Andina Division of Codelco in the nearby Fifth Region of Chile. Unlike the smaller machines that have drilled three diagonal boreholes to reach the men, this 31-ton machine can only drill straight down, and it begins working on August 30, near the spot once judged too unstable when Eduardo Hurtado’s Terraservice team tried to drill its first hole three weeks earlier. This is the drill that will take until December to reach the men. But even before it begins working, Igor Proestakis, a mechanic with one of the drill teams, presents an alternative plan to his bosses. Why not take that third, six-inch drill hole that reached the men at the workshop, and simply widen it, using a series of ever-bigger drill bits? A few days later, André Sougarret approves the drilling of this second rescue hole, to be called Plan B. It will be drilled in two stages, the first twelve inches wide, the second twenty-nine inches wide.
There’s one problem with Plan B, however: No one in Chile has ever drilled a twenty-nine-inch hole sideways that’s as deep as the one they’ll need. The best machine to drill such a large diagonal shaft is a Schramm T130XD, and soon one such rig is on its way to Copiapó from the Collahuasi mine, more than 600 miles to the north. After soliciting advice from mining companies around the world, Sougarret’s team decides that to speed up the drilling it will accept an offer from Center Rock Inc. in Pennsylvania to use one of its clustered drills, which is essentially four drill bits, each the size of a volleyball, attached to a single shaft. This equipment will be used to drill the second phase of Plan B, and it weighs 26,000 pounds. UPS agrees to ship it for free: first overnight by truck from Pennsylvania to Miami, thence on a flight to Santiago, and finally by truck to Copiapó, where it arrives on September 11. There are very good drillers in Chile, of course, but the depth and angle of the borehole needed will require an operator who can make the equipment do things it wasn’t designed to do, so the Chileans reach out to the Kansas-based drilling experts at the Layne Christensen company. Who is the best driller you have on a Schramm T130? The company calls Jeff Hart, who’s in Afghanistan, drilling holes to provide drinking water and showers for U.S. troops.
Plan A and Plan B will soon be in motion, but both will push their drilling equipment beyond design limits and the probability of failure is high. Sougarret decides, then, to add a Plan C: a massive oil-drilling rig that will take days to assemble, but which will actually drill faster than Plan A once it gets going. The Canadian company Precision Drilling Corporation has one such machine sitting idle in southern Chile; thirty-seven truckloads are required to bring Rig 421 from a work site a thousand kilometers away. The technology that will guide it to its target and some of the technicians will come from the South African company Murray & Roberts.
In a series of phone conversations, Sougarret outlines the three drilling plans to Luis Urzúa. It doesn’t really matter which one reaches them first, of course. But when it’s all explained to Urzúa, it seems the Plan B drill will likely be the fastest.
The government of Chile is marshaling resources from dozens of different agencies, and several top-level officials are living at or near the mine site, including two members of the president’s cabinet. The entire operation has the feel of a Chilean moon shot, and like an expedition to outer space it should have a name. The minister of health, Jaime Mañalich, telephones President Piñera and suggests they call it “Operación San Lorenzo,” after the patron saint of mining.
The president does not warm to the idea, according to Carlos Vergara Ehrenberg’s behind-the-scenes account. “Lorenzo,” the president repeats. No, that sounds too much like Laurence, as in Laurence Golborne, he says. At La Moneda, the president’s advisers have continued to conduct private polling on the rescue, and recently the numbers have begun to show something of concern: As high as the president’s approval rating is, Minister Golborne’s is higher. Golborne, who once occupied one of the more obscure posts in Piñera’s cabinet, has become the face of the rescue, and he’s starting to outshine his boss.
“Let’s call it ‘Operation Jonas the Prophet,’” the president says. The name never catches on, however. Instead, the Chilean and world media assembling at the site continually refer to the operation to reach the buried men by the name that’s already been adopted, informally, by the men and women working in the rescue crews: “Operation San Lorenzo.”
* * *
To keep up the spirits of the men living below as Operation San Lorenzo unfolds, and to keep them from turning on one another, the psychologist Iturra has access to a powerful, joy-inducing medicine: the voices of the people they love, as heard in a telephone connection. One by one on August 29, wives, brothers, mothers, sisters, fathers, sons, and daughters are guided past the lines of police officers and the security fences, to a small metal communications shack, roughly six by eight feet wide, that rests on the sandy dirt just a few paces from the hole that reaches to the thirty-three men below. There is a camera and a microphone, linked to another camera and microphone in a gallery inside the mine. In preparation for this moment, the psychologist has written a letter to the trapped men. Among other things, he’s told them that those with two households, or with amorous complications, should give preference in these teleconferences to their wives and families. “I told them this because I could already see the conflicts with the girlfriends that were unfolding in the camp,” he later says. “And I also told them it would be easier that way: because, after all, lovers and girlfriends tend to be a lot more forgiving than wives are.”
Some of the girlfriends are having trouble getting into the camp anyway. Susana Valenzuela, Yonni Barrios’s girlfriend, says that not long after the Farkas money showed up, Yonni’s wife, Marta, “betrayed me” and the Carabinero police escorted her away from the new Camp Esperanza that’s been built to give family members privacy, away from the media. On August 28, the Associated Press photographs Susana outside the camp, holding a sign with large letters that read “The Courage to Be Present,” along with a picture of Yonni and much smaller letters that say: “For you, my love, your Chanita.” The caption that circulates around the world calls Susana Yonni’s “wife” but just a few days later the truth will come out, as social workers attached to the rescue effort realize that Yonni is in fact married to another woman at Camp Esperanza, and then learn from Yonni himself down below that he hasn’t been living with said wife (exclusively) for years. Marta is photographed in Camp Esperanza holding a poster covered with portraits of Yonni, and journalists will begin using their imaginations to deduce—and report as fact—that Marta first became aware of Susana when they met at Camp Esperanza after the accident. In truth, they’ve known about each other for quite a long time.
Susana is both determined and crafty, and to get into those parts of Camp Esperanza closed off to her, she resorts to a spy-like deception. She sees a load of fish and vegetables being delivered to the big kitchen that’s making food for the families and rescue workers. “I put on an apron, and grabbed a fish and an onion, and I walked right past the guards,” she says. “The journalists saw me inside and asked if I was a relative, and I said, ‘No, I’m just a cook.’” In this way, Susana will eventually work her way into that shack to talk to Yonni, despite the psychologist’s advice.
At any rate, the miners and their family members can’t talk about much in these first conversations, since Iturra will limit their first call to about fifteen seconds; their next call will last about one minute. Iturra is thinking about the mental marathon the miners will have to run and he believes that, as with the miners’ food, a smaller dose of family love at the start is better. “In fifteen to thirty seconds you can’t convey information—there is only the personal encounter. You’re present,” he says. “You say ‘I love you, you can count on me.’ And that’s it. You don’t have time to say, ‘Your father is sad, your grandmother is sick, your son isn’t going to school.’”
Iturra is following advice from NASA, but the thirty-three men aren’t astronauts, they didn’t volunteer to be trapped in a hole for months. After the too-short phone calls, the miners begin to feel, understandably, that they’re being treated like children. Let us talk to our wives, our kids, they say. We’re men: We’re not helpless. The paternalism of the psychologists is plain to see in a video, shot on the surface, in which one miner’s wife is speaking to her husband on the phone in that small shack.
“
Hola
, my love,” the young woman begins, in a weak voice.
Iturra is sitting nearby. The woman is about to be overcome with emotion, it seems, and he quickly snaps at her to cheer up.
“¡Ánimo!”
“Everyone is fine,” the woman continues, sounding a bit more upbeat. She lists all his relatives, then says “I miss you” in a voice of hinting at despair.
“
¡Ánimo!
” the psychologist orders, and the young woman again tries to sound more cheerful, until a few seconds later the psychologist says, “Start wrapping it up.”
Even after the rescuers establish a permanent fiber-optic link with the surface—which will include a television feed and uninterrupted phone connection—the psychologist will continue to limit the contacts with the family to roughly eight to ten minutes a week, which is about the time NASA gives its astronauts. (Eventually, Víctor Zamora will lead a brief “strike” against the psychologist by turning his back to the camera and refusing to talk to his own family until the psychologist grants all the men longer time for the video chats.) Contact with the outside world “takes you out of your reality,” Iturra says. “It puts you in a world where you have no power.” Iturra is trying to protect the miners from the feeling of helplessness: They can do things below to aid with their own rescue, but they can’t be home to be good fathers or good sons. At home they are needed and they are rich, they are famous, and their kids need to be fed and protected. The men can’t be in that world, but even with Iturra trying to shield them, they are pulled into it, because, despite the miners’ many suspicions, no one is censoring or monitoring the letters that go down below. Via the “mail” that flows down the
palomas
, Zamora learns that his young son is being bullied in school: “Your dad is never going to get out! He got crushed under a rock!” Franklin Lobos learns that his ex-wife is up on the surface, and that his children are hoping he’ll make amends with her. Others learn that the women in their lives have heard the voice of God and have decided they should take the next step and just get married already. In one of the first letters Edison Peña receives, his girlfriend, Angelica Alvarez, brings up the topic of marriage, to which Edison answers: “I don’t understand why you’d want to marry me … I’ve had a lot of time to think about all the things I’ve destroyed, and about all you’ve suffered thanks to me … But I wouldn’t want you to be with anyone else either and I’d like to make you happy, even though I’ve never managed to do that.”
That letter finds its way, somehow, into the Madrid newspaper
El País
, and Edison’s confessional is soon circulating around the Spanish-speaking world. The miners may not be entirely powerless to help their families—they can now send instructions and keep tabs on things, at least, via the phone—but they are undeniably without protection against the media. Some reporters are willing to pay their families for a glimpse at the miners’ letters, but most simply charm them away, and soon the Chilean newspapers are reprinting many of the words written by the men below. Those letters then recirculate down into the mine, because despite the miners’ suspicions, Iturra and the other leaders of the rescue team on the surface have decided that they shouldn’t censor the newspapers either.
The Santiago newspapers are rolled up and stuffed into the
palomas
by workers at the regional governor’s office who are in charge of sending the men reading material. Opening these precious relics of the surface world for the first time, the men can see just how famous they’ve become, the way their pictures are covering all the front pages. Yes, some of the more prudish surface workers have cut out assorted photographs and advertisements featuring scantily clad women, but no one stops the August 28 edition of
La Tercera
, for example. It has a feature article about a miner whose newfound fame is leaping off the page, and it quotes from a letter he’s written from inside the mine. When thirty-two other miners read these words, they get an unexpected glimpse into the mind of Mario Sepúlveda.