Extract from The 33

Extract from The 33 by Jonathan Franklin
Original full-length version published by Transworld Publishers, a Random House Group Company
Condensed version © Reader’s Digest (Australia) Pty Ltd

Between August and October of 2010, the world held its breath over the fate of thirty-three men buried alive in a copper mine in Chile. Entombed in darkness, they could only cling to the hope that rescue teams would be able to dig down to them. In the end, their ordeal was to last sixty-nine agonising days.

Day 5: Tuesday 10 August
On the fifth day of their entrapment, a faint rumble sent vibrations down to the men.

 

The distant echo was an unmistakable sound: a drill was coming towards them. Some men later wrote that it was on 8 August, Day 3 of their entrapment, that they heard the sound; others insist it was 9 August. With almost all reference points, including the sun and stars, obliterated by solid rock, the miners’ recollections of timing are less than exact—and hardly significant compared to the unanimous sensation of hope inspired by the distant drilling.

 

Alex Vega held a piece of hollow bamboo to the wall, amplifying the sound and providing clear evidence that a drill was headed straight towards them. Vega’s enthusiasm sagged, however, when he soon discovered that from any portion of the nearly 2 kilometres of tunnels, the bamboo to the wall provided a similar sensation of proximity. Two of the men had worked with borehole drilling machines, and they knew the process was fraught with failure. ‘I told them that the first fifty metres would be fast, but after that, the drilling slows down,’ said Jorge Galleguillos.

 

With Galleguillos’s words of caution reverberating as loudly as the drill itself, the drilling sound became both heartening and frightening. A rescue attempt had begun, yet the men realised that at 700 metres deep any tunnel would take weeks to drill and extreme precision to find them. Even in soft rock, the machines rarely advanced more than 76 metres a day, and this mountain was packed with some of the hardest rock they had ever encountered—twice as hard as granite. At night, several of the men would jump up from their beds and begin screaming at the drills. The men would fall back asleep, but wake up two hours later to again hurl curses at the walls.

 

On Day 9, food rations were reduced again. From every 24 hours, the men decided to eat just once every 36 hours. They spent the day sleeping on cardboard, conserving what little energy remained. Food was so scarce, the men’s small intestines shrivelled.

 

‘God gave me the strength to combat the anxiety and hunger we suffered,’ Raúl Bustos later wrote in a letter to his wife, Carolina. ‘I prayed and asked for us all, if death happened, that we would take it well.’

 

On the eleventh day, their leader, Mario Sepúlveda, collapsed. The stress of the extraordinary responsibilities he had hoisted upon himself were too much. He cried. He lay on his makeshift bed. The other men rushed to help him. Bringing Sepúlveda back was key to the group’s survival.

 

‘We were like a family,’ said Samuel Ávalos. ‘When someone falls, you pick them up. But he was giving up. He simply collapsed, threw in the towel. As a group we understood the pressure he was under, but we also made him understand that he could not abandon the boat. We had given him this leadership.’

 

The group resuscitated him. Zamora told him jokes. Ávalos began to take long walks with Sepúlveda.

 

As Sepúlveda came back to life, the group coalesced. More than ever they appreciated their eccentric leader. Alex Vega said, ‘Mario. Even with his madness, he saved us.’

 

The 33 trapped miners became the unwilling subjects of a cruel test, a unique psychological challenge experienced by few humans. Cut off from the world, they lived in a tunnel with no natural light and—barring the gurgle of water—no natural sounds. Instead they were subjected to an unpredictable but ongoing soundtrack that included the shrieks, groans and fracture of rock.

 

‘What happened down in the mine is a lot of things which, put together, amounted to torture. They were trapped underground—that’s one; in the dark—that’s another; no food—another; bad water … You’re piling on these things which individually are insignificant but put together you have this recipe for potentially a psychological breakdown,’ said Dominic Streatfeild, author of Brainwash, an extensive study of mind control and interrogation techniques. ‘The gold standard for an interrogator is uncertainty, fear of impending death, loss of time, sensory deprivation, no routine. These things unhinge human beings … and a lot of them were present in the mine.’

 

Young Jimmy Sánchez continued to hallucinate and suffer from nightmares. He imagined ghosts haunting the caverns. Hallucinations are so frequent among solo sailors, lost explorers and lone fishermen that they become enshrined as myths. The luscious vision of a mermaid at sea is a fantastic solution to a deep desire. The ghosts may well have been part of that same fragile mindset.

 

Mario Sepúlveda had a conversation with the Devil. ‘I would go to pray in a place that was very isolated, the same place where Gino Cortés lost his leg. In one of those prayers, I was praying very loudly and a huge rock fell next to me. I knew it was not God, but that it was the Devil. He was coming for me. All the hair on my body stood up.’ Sepúlveda began to scream at the rock, ‘How much longer will it take you to understand? You too are a son of God, be humble.’ After that, the Devil left Sepúlveda in peace.

 

Throughout the mine, the men saw figures and beings that would later melt away. They called these apparitions mineros chicos, or ‘little miners’. ‘There are a lot of paranormal things in that mine,’ said Sepúlveda with the conviction of a true believer. Even the non-believers began to pray.

 

Victor Zamora began describing luscious meals—steaks with tomato and a beer. Only Alex Vega sat back somewhat comfortably, as he had dismantled the seats from a truck and converted them into one of the cave’s finest sleeping devices. Another man made a set of dominoes by cutting up the safety triangle he found in one of the vehicles. The miners gathered in small groups as they confessed fears and shared dreams.