to organize her life from inside her temporary home at the mine site. With rumors of death and entrapment swirling in her head, Valdivia watched as her world disintegrated. âPeople were running everywhere and screaming,â she said. âMy son was crying and I was trying to console him. It was a very difficult moment. . . . I couldnât sleep. I asked myself, Why me? Why me? Why is this happening to us?â
Chilean President Sebastian Piñera was in Quito, Ecuador, when he first heard of the mining tragedy. He could be excused for thinking the same as Katty Valdivia: âWhy me? Why is this happening to us?â It was Piñeraâs second successive tragedy in his short tenure as president. When he took office just four months earlier, Piñera inherited a nation shattered by the February 27, 2010, earthquake. That quake left hundreds of thousands homeless and hundreds more dead when a tsunami crushed the coastline. Piñeraâs ambitious political agenda was also leveled by the 8.8 Richter scale quake, the fifth largest ever recorded. Instead of a fresh slate to highlight new ideas, Piñeraâs team was dealing with thousands of collapsed adobe structures, destroyed hospitals and the wreckage along an estimated 1,200 miles of Chileâs modern highways.
âI was with President Correa in Ecuador,â said Piñera. âOur diagnosis that first evening was clear. We knew there were thirty-three men. They were trapped at seven hundred meters [almost half a mile] and after a diagnosis of the company, it was seen as a precarious situation. There was no possibility for them to respond. The option was thus very simple. The government would assume responsibility for the rescue or nobody would. It was much more simple than people think.â
Piñera ditched protocol, canceled a strategically important reunion with Juan Manuel Santos, the newly elected Colombian president, and rushed back to Chile. He ordered top aides to the scene that very night.
In an effort both caring and self-serving, the Piñera administration saw the crisis as a perfect stage to highlight the can-do attitude of the nationâs first elected right-wing government in half a century. Piñera bet his dwindling political capital on the fate of thirty-three unknown miners. It was a gamble that would later reinforce the billionaire businessmanâs reputation as a brilliant short-term stock trader.
DAY 2: SATURDAY, AUGUST 7
The men had now been trapped for two full days, yet no sign of life had been found. Basic, primal fears began to haunt the rescuers. Did the men have air? Were they injured and dying slowly? How would they eat?
Below ground the rescue effort hit another setback. The rescue workers had been trying to find a route around the blocked ventilation shafts, but with the mine still shifting, the shafts began to collapse. The massive battleship-sized rock slipped a fraction, sending more small avalanches through the mine. Now the GOPE mission changed from rescuing trapped miners to evacuating the rescuers and avoiding a second entrapment. Without the tripod to guide the rope, the police rushed to extricate their colleagues who were being bombarded by rocks. If they pulled too fast or to one side, they risked slicing the rope and delivering a rescuer to his death. If they went too slow, the chance of a large rock knocking him unconscious grew by the second.
âWe train for this. We have to study geology, and part of our curriculum is mine rescues,â said Hernan Puga, a GOPE member who mentioned that the local mountains housed an estimated two thousand small-scale mines. He compared the vertical descent and ascent to the type of training the police regularly carried out for special operations inside prisons.
When all the rescue workers had been pulled free, instead of celebrating their near escape from death, the police commandos were filled with frustration.
âThey were very
Garth Nix, Joan Aiken, Andi Watson, Lizza Aiken