33 Men by Jonathan Franklin Read Free Book Online Page B

before the big night out, his head had ached with pain. The massive cave-in roused the bedraggled Rojas, but he was slow to appreciate the magnitude of the disaster.
    Claudio Yañez had been preparing to set dynamite charges when the blasts of air from the collapse nearly knocked him over. Yañez was among the first group to arrive at the shelter, and he watched the other miners struggling to do the same, as the mine continued to heave and shift. “They arrived little by little,” he said. “The guys came down to try and use the telephone, but it didn’t work. We looked at each other for the first time and in desperation. We couldn’t believe what was happening.”
    Raúl Bustos had been working inside a mechanic’s workshop just up the tunnel from the shelter when the collapse hit. In a letter he later wrote to his wife, he described the scene: “The suction and the air knocked us all over.”
    Inside the shelter, best friends and relatives sought to find out who had survived. Florencio Ávalos, thirty-one years old, found his twenty-seven-year-old brother, Renán. Florencio felt paternally responsible; he had encouraged his younger brother to work at San José. Neither of them saw it as a career, but compared with the alternative of seasonal work picking grapes in their tiny pueblo in the mountains near the Argentine border, the job here was quite literally a gold mine.
    Esteban Rojas hugged his three cousins—a gracious thanks that they were all alive. Best friends Pedro Cortés and Carlos Bugueño also celebrated their survival; neighbors since childhood, they were inseparable and had started work at the mine on the same day.
    Franklin Lobos, however, was distraught. As the driver of the last vehicle into the mine, Lobos had passed Ra ú l Villegas’s truck rumbling up the ramp. Calculating the time of the collapse and the estimated position of the truck, Lobos feared the worst and could practically see the crushed vehicle in his mind’s eye. Given the massive collapse of rock, the men had little doubt that la mina maldita (the cursed mine) had stolen the life of another colleague.
    Lobos knew the shelter well; one of his many tasks was restocking the safety shelter. He had never liked working in the mine. At his previous mining job he had been trapped by a cloud of smoke and forced to retreat to the bottom of the mine to avoid suffocating. For eight hours, as his family gathered outside, Lobos and his colleagues had wondered if they would be given a second chance to live. Now Lobos was looking for a third chance.
    All thirty-three men had somehow survived the massive collapse. Several were bruised and a few bloodied but not one had a broken bone. No one was missing.
    Inside the shelter, Luis Urzúa, the highest-ranking man in the mine, sought to control the men. As shift foreman, Urzúa was not required to participate in the physical work but instead guided, prodded and motivated the men under his command. In the hierarchical world of Chilean mining, the foreman is absolute leader, his word followed with military discipline. Questioning an order from the shift foreman was sufficient reason to be disciplined or dismissed. “The world of natural selection functions quite strongly in this environment,” explained Dr. Jaime Mañalich, the Chilean minister of health. “To arrive at the position of shift foreman, you have to pass through many a test.”
    Urzúa was a solidly built man with soft eyes and a leadership style built not on being a brute but on most often being right. With more than two decades’ experience inside mines, Lucho Urzúa had the experience to command his troops, but he was a recent arrival to San José. That he had worked there for less than three months now hung heavily in the tense and dirty air inside the safety refuge. The men questioned his ability to coordinate the disaster response. Why should he be the