33 Men by Jonathan Franklin Page B

very poor and they treated me worse than the animals,” said Sepúlveda. For the now-middle-class thirty-nine-year-old with a wife and two teenage children, escape from the mine was the very mission for which he felt his life had been preparing him.
    The miners divided up into separate groups. One team used heavy machinery to create noise. Despite the massive collapse, the men had at their disposal a flotilla of vehicles ranging from pickups to the Jumbo, a 30-foot-long truck with a drilling platform on the front end used to perforate the roof and make holes for dynamite. The men moved all the vehicles to the highest point of the tunnel. Once astride the blockage, they began to create a cacophony of sounds. Honking horns. Exploding dynamite. Bashing huge metal plates against the bulldozer. The short crack of dynamite and the echoing metallic clang reverberated through the tunnel, but was it enough to be heard? Would at least one member of the rescue team be alerted? The men continued to attack the roof of the mine with the Jumbo—like a mad woodpecker, the machine pecked wildly, making an infernal racket.
    â€œWe used the trucks to smash against the walls,” said Samuel Ávalos. “We connected the horns on the truck to tubes that ran up to the surface so we would be heard above. We took turns screaming into those tubes. . . . We were desperate.”
    Alex Vega wanted to climb out of the mountain by following a series of cracks that led, he guessed, all the way to the surface. He was convinced that an escape path was possible but the men had limited battery power on their lamps and no way to carry enough water for what might be a daylong expedition. “We were afraid of getting crushed by falling rock,” he said. “There was a chance of being trapped.”
    A second team of miners, led by Sepúlveda and Raúl Bustos, scouted an escape route via a ventilation duct. This chimney—one of an estimated dozen air ducts that made the air in the mine nearly breathable—rose vertically for 80 feet. “We started to look for alternatives; we climbed up 30 meters [100 feet] on a hanging ladder. We reached the level 210 and saw that it was also blocked,” Bustos wrote his wife in a letter later. “There was another chimney but it did not have a ladder.”
    In many Chilean mines, every chimney would have been a clean circle, shooting up like a skylight to the next level of the mine and lined with safety equipment ranging from a ladder to escape lights. Apart from providing a vent for air to circulate inside the mine, the chimneys are designed to provide an adequate secondary escape route if a tunnel collapses. In the San José mine, the second chimney shaft was unlit and the ladder decrepit. Furthermore, the chimney was astride the main tunnel, meaning that a single accident could simultaneously wipe out both escape routes. It was a basic failure that the miner’s union, led by Javier Castillo, had denounced for years. The trapped miners now understood his logic.
    Sepúlveda scouted the chimney and decided an ascent was risky but possible. A cascade of rocks was ricocheting down the tube—but he had a helmet. He adjusted the lamp on his helmet skyward and began slowly advancing. The ladder was designed for just such an escape effort but decades of constant humidity had eaten away the rungs. As he reached up, Sepúlveda could feel them giving way. Some metal rungs were missing. Like a desperate rock climber, Sepúlveda began to improvise. The tunnel was four feet wide, far too big for him to brace a leg on each side. So, grabbing a plastic tube that ran the length of the chimney, he tried to find a nub and a foothold on the slippery stones. Meanwhile, a constant hail of rubble continued to clang down on his head. The mountain was still crying, peeling apart. Determined to claw his way out, Sepúlveda summoned his muscles to obey. He reached his hand up and had