Deep Down Dark (6 page)

Inside the cab, Mamani wonders if the gritty cloud beginning to build outside his front loader is somehow part of the work, too. But no, it isn’t, because the miners begin gesturing for him to lower the basket, and to back up the loader out of the tunnel, quickly. Mamani does this, then turns and sees Daniel Herrera reaching for the door to the cab. When Herrera opens the door, Mamani’s ears plug up suddenly and he loses much of his sense of hearing: He sees the lips of people moving but struggles to make out the words.

One of the workers starts to move his flashlight in circles, a signal that Mamani knows, from other mines he’s worked in, means something very frightening:
Get out! Evacuate the mine! Get out now!
From where they find themselves, it’s a five-mile drive to the surface, a vertical climb of two thousand feet, some forty minutes going downhill, and God knows how long uphill, because it’s a drive Mamani has never taken.

Moments later Mamani is driving the loader onto the Ramp, carrying several men into a tunnel filling and then filled with dust, headed for the Refuge, the big machine hitting the wall because he can’t see.

A little way forward, at Level 90, they see the shift supervisor, Urzúa, and the foreman, Avalos, coming down. Keep going up, the bosses say. We’ll catch up to you. We’re going down to look for the two men working deepest in the mine.

*   *   *

During the course of morning, Mario Gómez has made three trips down into the mine, and then back up to the top. Going downhill with an empty truck, he can do it in about thirty minutes; back up, fully loaded with gold- and copper-laden rock, it’s more than an hour, grinding the engine in first and second gears. Just after noon, he’s at the top with an empty truck and decides to take his lunch break. He enters the corrugated-metal company cafeteria and puts the container of rice and beef he’s brought and sticks it into the microwave, then takes it out: After just one spoonful, he stops. Gómez is paid a base salary, but also a set fee for each trip down into the mine. He thinks about the money and decides he should probably eat his lunch down at the bottom while the loader is filling up his truck, and thus squeeze in an extra trip for the day. The additional trip, which will nearly cost him his life, is worth 4,000 Chilean pesos, or about $9.

Gómez gets into his cab and drives down to Level 44, where he parks inside a corridor with piles of ore-laden rock waiting to be carried to the surface. He is, at that moment, the man working deepest in the mine, some 2,218 vertical feet from the surface. The man operating the loader that’s supposed to lift the ore into his truck isn’t there, so Gómez starts eating his lunch in the cab, with the engine running and the air-conditioning on against the 100-plus-degree heat. Ten minutes later the loader operator arrives: white-haired, fifty-six-year-old Omar Reygadas. He lifts one scoopful of rock and tosses it into the bed of the truck. At that moment, Gómez feels a puff of air against his face, which is odd, because the windows of the truck cab are all closed. Then he feels a burst of pressure between his ears, as if his skull were a balloon being inflated, he says. The truck’s engine stops, and after a few seconds it starts again, all by itself. All the while Reygadas keeps working his loader, and the crash-grind made by stone hitting the truck’s metal bed leaves both Gómez and the loader deaf to any other sound. Reygadas has felt the rumbling and the pressure wave, too, and thinks that the shift supervisor, Urzúa, has ordered some blasting without bothering to tell everyone. It’s another dangerous screwup in this already screwed-up mine, and the last straw for Reygadas.
That’s it
, he tells himself:
I’m going to finish this job and go cuss out that idiot Urzúa and tell him I quit
.

When Gómez’s truck is fully loaded, he begins his drive upward to the surface. But he advances only a few hundred feet or so up a steep section of the Ramp when the tunnel around him begins to fill with a dust cloud. This isn’t especially worrying, because he’s seen it happen before, and he tries to push the truck through the cloud, but it gets so thick he can see only a few feet in front of the windshield. Gómez is in danger of crashing against the wall, so he stops and opens the door and feels the wall—it’s straight, not curved, and he gets back in the cab and points the steering wheel straight and goes faster, driving blindly until Urzúa appears next to his window, gesturing for him to stop and get out. Gómez lowers the window, and at that moment he is assaulted by a deafening noise, the memory of which will haunt him in the days, weeks, and months to come, causing him to weep when he remembers it: He hears the rumble of many simultaneous explosions, the sound of rock splitting, the stone walls around him seeming to crack, as if they might burst open at any moment.

*   *   *

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
.