Deep Down Dark (3 page)

When the buses arrive, the half-asleep men take seats inside. They putter through the city and the fog, past the mustard-colored buildings of the University of Atacama near the northern edge of the city, where one of the men of the A shift has a daughter studying civil engineering. They reach the northbound stretch of the Pan-American Highway, which leads away from Copiapó toward the bones of the disappeared and the old saltpeter mines of the inner Atacama Desert. The San José is thirty-five miles outside Copiapó, and the last landmark on the drive to the mine is a rocky mountain just beyond the edge of the city known as the “Roaring Hill.” Darwin saw this hill, Cerro Bramador, and wrote about the distinct noise it made. Today the sound is most often compared with that of a Latin American instrument known as a rainstick. One local legend has it that the noise is the roar of a lion guarding a golden treasure inside the mountain; another, that it’s the flow of an undiscovered underground river. The quasi-scientific explanation is that the mountain’s deposits of magnetite are attracting and repelling grains of sand that vibrate in the wind.

Darwin followed this road past the hissing mountain to a nearby port where the HMS
Beagle
was waiting for him; he then sailed on to the Galápagos Islands, where his observations of the local birdlife would lead him to the theory of natural selection. But the men of the A shift turn right just past the roaring mountain, off the Pan-American Highway, heading northward and inland on a narrow road of battered asphalt. For the first few kilometers, the road runs in a long, straight line across an ugly plain of grayish brown sand covered with broken rocks and windblown plants. The buses pass a cutoff to Cerro Imán, or Magnet Hill, which contains an iron ore mine, and then the road begins to curve as it enters a narrow valley surrounded by barren, rocky hills. The hills rise like reddish islands in a sea of taupe-colored sand, and shrubs the shape and size of sea urchins appear along the roadside. A man entering this landscape today still sees the relentless Atacama emptiness that Darwin saw: There are no wandering or scampering animals, nor are there any gas stations or roadside stores or any other sign of human habitation. The mountains turn maroon and orange, and resemble photographs of the surface of Mars. Finally, the buses enter another valley and come upon a blue roadside sign announcing the cutoff for the San Esteban Mining Company and its two brother mines, the San Antonio and the San José. From here, the men inside the buses can begin to see the mine’s corroded and windblown structures of wood, tin, and steel, looking tragic and lonely in the alien landscape. They slowly begin a gentle climb and soon the familiar buildings on the hillside come into sharper focus: the administration bungalows, the locker and shower rooms, the cafeterias. But the men know the mine is like an iceberg city, because these surface structures represent only a small fraction of its underground sprawl.

Below the ground, the mine expands into roads that lead to vast interior spaces carved out by explosives and machinery, pathways to man-made galleries and canyons. The underground city of the San José Mine has a kind of weather, with temperatures that rise and fall, and breezes that shift at different times of day. Its underground byways have traffic signs and traffic rules to keep order, and several generations of surveyors have planned and charted their downward spread. The central road linking all these passageways to the surface is called La Rampa, the Ramp. The San José Mine spirals down nearly as deep as the tallest building on Earth is tall, and the drive along the Ramp from the surface to the deepest part of the mine is about five miles.

The San José Mine, founded in 1889, rests on top of mineral deposits that take the form of two parallel strips of softer rock embedded at a 60-degree angle inside a much harder, gray granitelike stone called diorite. An old wooden building on a mountainside marks the spot where the ore reached closest to the surface. The building once housed a working winch that lifted men and minerals out of the mine, but it hasn’t been used in decades, and today it looks like a relic from an old Western. One hundred and twenty-one years after the San José Mine opened, and two thousand feet below that old building, the night shift is finishing its work during the early morning hours. Men covered in gray soot and drenched in sweat begin to gather in one of the caverns below, at a spot that is like an underground bus stop, waiting for the truck that will take them on the forty-minute drive to the surface. During their twelve-hour shift these men have noted a kind of wailing rumble in the distance. Many tons of rock are falling in forgotten caverns deep inside the mountain. The sounds and vibrations caused by these avalanches are transmitted through the stone structure of the mountain in the same way the blast waves of lightning strikes travel through the air and ground. The mine is “weeping” a lot, the men say to each other.
“La mina está llorando mucho.”
This thundering wail is not unusual, but its frequency is. To the men in the mine, it’s as if they are listening to a distant storm gathering in intensity. Thankfully their shift is about to end. A few will tell the next group of men to enter the mine, the men of the day A shift, “
La mina está llorando mucho
,” but it is unlikely the San José will close as a result. The men who work there have heard these gathering storms before. The thunder always recedes and eventually the mountain returns to its steady and quiet state.

*   *   *

As the men of the A shift reach the mine property, they pass a guard shack and then the entrance to the Ramp, a tunnel first blasted from the hard diorite rock of the mountain more than a decade ago. The opening to the San José Mine is an orifice five meters wide and five meters tall, and the edges that face the outside world resemble a series of stone teeth. Trucks filled with men and ore now begin to emerge from this mouth, because the prior shift is finishing its workday. They’ve removed a few hundred tons of ore-bearing rock, with copper sulfide in fingernail-size specks that glimmer with the same marbled pastels of art nouveau paintings: crimson, forest green, maroon, and the brassy yellow, tetragonal crystals of the copper ore known as chalcopyrite. When processed, each metric ton of this rock produces as much as forty pounds of copper (worth about $150), and less than an ounce of gold (worth several hundred dollars). The gold is invisible, though many older men of the A shift grew up listening to their fathers say you could taste it in rock like this.

The men file into changing rooms that are as moldy and cramped as those on an old sea vessel. They put on overalls, attach freshly charged battery packs to their belts, and lamps to their blue, yellow, and red helmets. Luis Urzúa puts on the white helmet that’s a symbol of his managerial status, and also straps a palm-size “self-rescue” oxygen canister to the leather belt on his waist. Urzúa is a relative newcomer to the San José, easygoing for a shift supervisor, and doesn’t know his crew as well as he would like, in part because the crew is always changing from one day to the next. Today, one man will join the A shift and work underground for the first time; and as Urzúa enters the mine he notes that another of the two dozen or so men working for him today hasn’t even made it to work yet.

After his long journey from Santiago, Mario Sepúlveda has arrived in Copiapó too late to catch the minibuses to the mine. He stands on a Copiapó street corner and thinks that this is a good thing. The last time he was in town he talked to a friend who runs another small mine. This friend was well aware that the San José Mine is in a perpetually precarious financial and structural state, and offered Sepúlveda another job. Now it’s 9:00 a.m., the day A shift at the San José started an hour ago, and Sepúlveda thinks that if he’s lucky they’ll fire him at the San José for not showing up today, which will make it easier for his friend to hire him at that other mine. These thoughts are running through his head when the driver of another minibus passes by and spots him.

“Perri!” the driver calls through the window, using Sepúlveda’s nickname. “You missed your bus? I’m going that way. I’ll give you a ride. Jump in.”

The man with the heart of a dog arrives at the San José Mine after 9:30, more than ninety minutes late. The fog has burned off by then, and Sepúlveda stands in the desert sunlight for a final few moments before getting a ride down into the mine and his workplace.

PART I

BENEATH THE MOUNTAIN OF THUNDER AND SORROW

1

A COMPANY MAN

In the San José Mine, sea level is the chief point of reference. The five-by-five-meter tunnel of the Ramp begins at Level 720, which is 720 meters above sea level. The Ramp descends into the mountain as a series of switchbacks, and then farther down becomes a spiral. Dump trucks, front loaders, pickup trucks, and assorted other machines and the men who operate them drive down past Level 200, into the part of the mountain where there are still minerals to be brought to the surface, working in passageways that lead from the Ramp to the veins of ore-bearing rock. On the morning of August 5, the men of the A shift are working as far down as Level 40, some 2,230 vertical feet below the surface, loading freshly blasted ore into a dump truck. Another group of men are at Level 60, working to fortify a passageway near a spot where a man lost a limb in an accident one month earlier. A few have gathered for a moment of rest, or idleness, in or near El Refugio, the Refuge, an enclosed space about the size of a school classroom, carved out of the rock at Level 90. As its name suggests, the Refuge is supposed to be a shelter in the event of an emergency, but it also serves as a kind of break room because fresh air is pumped into it from the surface, offering a respite from the humidity and heat, which often reaches 98 percent and 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit) in this part of the mine. The San José is said by the men who work there to be like hell, and this is a description with some basis in scientific fact, since it’s the geothermal heat emanating from the bowels of the Earth that makes the mine hotter the deeper they go.

The mechanics led by Juan Carlos Aguilar find respite from the heat by setting up a workshop at Level 150, in a passageway not far from the vast interior chasm called El Rajo, which translates loosely as “the Pit.” Air circulates through the Pit and the faintest hint of a breeze flows from that dark abyss into the makeshift workshop. The mechanics have decided to start their workweek by asking Mario Sepúlveda to give them a demonstration of how he operates his front loader. They watch as he uses the clutch to bring the vehicle to a stop, shifting from forward directly to reverse without going into neutral first.

“Who taught you to do that?” the mechanics ask. “That’s wrong. You’re not supposed to do it that way.” He’s mucking up the transmission by doing this, wearing out the differential.

“No one ever showed me,” Sepúlveda answers. “I just learned from watching.” The mechanics work for a company that contracts maintenance services to the mine, and they are not surprised to learn that an employee of the San José is operating an expensive piece of equipment without having received any formal training. The San José is an older, smaller mine known for cutting corners, and for its primitive working conditions and perfunctory safety practices. Among other things, it has vertical escape tunnels that will be useless in an emergency because they lack the ladders necessary for the miners to use them.

Newly informed as to the proper use of the clutch, Sepúlveda leaves the mechanics to work down at Level 90.

Throughout the morning, the mountain has continued its intermittent thundering wail, the sound of a distant explosion followed by a long whining sound. Carlos Pinilla, the general manager of the San Esteban Mining Company, hears this noise as he travels in a pickup truck between the levels of the San José Mine. He has an office on the surface, but is now deep inside the mountain to impose some discipline on a workplace that’s much too casual for his liking. “I had to reprimand everyone from the shift supervisor on down,” he says. “None of these guys was a little white dove. I didn’t want them to be afraid of me. But if I’d go down there and find six guys sitting around chatting, I wanted them to at least stand up when they saw the boss. Without that, everything would start to fall apart…”

Pinilla is a jowly man of about fifty who’s worked his way up from lowly office jobs in mining companies to one in which he’s the general manager of the two mines run by the San Esteban Mining Company. He’s described by his underlings as imperious, the kind of a man who will bark an order and who treats the miners as if their sweating, helmeted presence were offensive to him somehow. In a country of rigid class distinctions, such as Chile, laborers are often subjected to bald condescension by the salaried classes. Even in this context, to the miners Pinilla stands out as an especially domineering “white helmet,” particularly in contrast to the soft-spoken white helmet beneath him in the mining hierarchy, the shift supervisor Urzúa. In recent weeks, one of the members of the A shift, Daniel Herrera, had asked Pinilla several times for replacement air filters for the masks the men wear, until, he claims, the general manager finally replied, sarcastically: “Yeah, I’m going to get you a whole truck filled with filters!” Pinilla is “
el amo de la mina
,” the miner Jorge Galleguillos says, lord and master of the mine. Galleguillos is fifty-six, and older men like him are afraid of Pinilla because he can fire a man in an instant, leaving him in the unenviable position of looking for work in an industry where youth and a stout constitution are especially prized. At the same time, it’s only the older, most experienced miners who have dared to speak out in the face of the mounting evidence of the San José Mine’s structural weakness.

After 121 years in which men and machines have emptied and hollowed the mountain, the San José Mine is still intact thanks to the hard, gray diorite stone that makes up most of the mountain’s mass. In mining slang, the diorite is “good” rock in the sense that it holds together when you drill through it. If the ore-bearing rock is like a crumb cake that begins to disintegrate as soon as you poke it, the diorite is more like a stiff custard. Generally speaking, the diorite provides an excellent, stable structure for a tunnel, requiring relatively little reinforcement. The Ramp has been carved through this stone, and is the only true way in and out of the mine. Until recently, no one who works in the San José believed it was in danger of collapsing. Then, several months back, a finger-wide crack was discovered in the Ramp at Level 540.