33 Men by Jonathan Franklin Read Free Book Online Page A

upset,” said Commander Villegas. “We were frustrated, but that changed when we had contact with the families. The hope and faith they had encouraged us.”
    Chilean mining minister Laurence Golborne arrived at the mine on Saturday. He had struggled to find commercial flights back to Chile, and so was picked up in Lima, Peru, by the Chilean Air Force and flown to the mine. Upon arrival, Golborne was stunned by the disarray he found. Clearly, the mining executives running the San José operation were overwhelmed and undercapitalized for a major rescue effort. After taking the lay of the land, Golborne was proud to inform Piñera that he had organized the arrival of the first drilling rig. The president was unimpressed. “Okay, well done. Now I want you to get not just one but ten drilling rigs,” he told Golborne. The president’s obsession with maintaining multiple rescue options would become a hallmark of Operation San Lorenzo.
    The rescuers told Golborne they had hope the men might be alive. Despite the rumors, no evidence of crushed vehicles or broken bodies could support the fear that the men had been wiped out in a single crushing blow. Daily routine inside the mine was predictable enough to deduce that when the collapse hit, the men were in the lower reaches of the mine and at least some of the group could still be alive in the blocked tunnels.
    â€œWe knew the miners had enough water because during drilling they need to have big tanks of water. The problem was the oxygen,” said Golborne. “When the shaft collapsed, we really felt angry and powerless. We informed the relatives about this collapse and that we couldn’t carry out a traditional rescue [via the mouth of the mine]. . . . I didn’t try to give them false hopes. I committed myself to tell them only the truth. I didn’t want to cause any gossiping. In this type of situation people talk a lot. You could expect people to say they were all dead.”
    Golborne’s announcement to the families was brutally honest. He told them the rescue effort was suspended. He broke down and cried in front of the families as he announced, “The news is not good.” Then rescue workers packed up and began leaving. Firefighters, rock climbers and the GOPE police began to exit the mountaintop. Segura and Ñancucheo were discouraged and humbled. They had been certain they could rescue the men.
    â€œWhen I saw the GOPE guys go, the rescuers go, I thought if they are going, it is because the miners are all dead,” said Carolina Lobos. “I cried. We all cried.”
    â€œI felt helpless and desperate,” said Lillian Ram í rez. “All the relatives went on strike and wanted to get the mine bosses with wooden sticks—like vandals. We made a human chain and told them that we were not going to let anyone leave the mine. The anger and desperation made me push a policeman. . . . Then I realized it was a mistake, what we did, but desperation makes you do many things. And to recognize that is human. We really did not know what was happening.”
    Pablo Ram í rez protested. A shift supervisor at the San José mine who had been among the first to volunteer for the dangerous rescue operations, he insisted they needed to push forward, to continue looking for the men. Ram í rez was sure that on one of his missions deep inside the mine he had heard the bleat of truck horns. His rescue colleagues ridiculed him. “No one believed me,” he said. “They said it was the souls of the dead miners haunting me.”

THREE
STUCK IN HELL
    THURSDAY, AUGUST 5—AFTERNOON
    Pablo Rojas had arrived at the San José mine that morning with such a hangover that as soon as his group had finished reinforcing walls and propping up the ceiling, he went to lie down in the peace and quiet of the safety shelter, 2,250 feet deep, near the bottom of the mine. Rojas’s father had died days earlier and even