Free 33 Men by Jonathan Franklin

to leave,” said miner Pablo Rojas, a third-generation miner known as a hard worker with few words. “Each man had his own personality.” And many of the men had their own addictions. In addition to tobacco, many had a prodigious addiction to alcohol. For these men, entrapment also meant enforced cold turkey, the accompanying mood swings and desperation making their ordeal all the worse.
    Three days had now passed. The men had been trapped for seventy-two hours. This was far longer than any of them had ever spent underground. Despite their efforts to attract attention, there had still been no contact with any rescue team. Food was scarce, the water terrible. The eerie echo of cracking, shifting rock was followed by silence—a reminder that they were deep inside the belly of a beast, swallowed and trapped far below civilization.
    The miners grew desperate. While they tried to avoid the question, a singular reality began to haunt them all: Will we get out of here alive?

FOUR
SPEED VS. PRECISION
    DAY 3: SUNDAY, AUGUST 8
    Copiapó, Chile, is a city surrounded by undeveloped beaches, vast desert and barren mountains packed with rich deposits of gold, silver and copper—worth millions, in some cases billions, of dollars. These hidden treasures were first mined in 1707, when the population of Copiapó was 990 residents. Today the city is still modest-sized—125,000 residents including the surrounding areas—yet the local airport is literally buzzing. There are fourteen daily flights to and from Santiago, flights often fully booked as a flood of mining engineers, geologists and surveyors arrive in Copiapó. They disembark the airplane, stepping down a steep metal staircase, then wander unescorted across the tarmac—sometimes mistakenly heading to the baggage area—to a miniature terminal where vendors sell oysters, crab claws and locos (abalone), a delicious local shellfish with firm white meat and a delicate taste like lobster.
    These executives are forward scouts for an army of entrepreneurs seeking to harvest the profits from the most recent worldwide copper boom, which began in 2002 and by August 2010 showed no signs of collapsing. With Chinese industry maintaining an apparently insatiable appetite for copper and minerals, mining operations in Chile continue to boom. Every day Chile exports approximately $70 million worth of copper, and every few months a new multimillion-dollar mining project is announced. This region of northern Chile is also home to one of the world’s great concentrations of high-tech mining equipment—machines capable of pounding, drilling and grinding through thousands of feet of solid rock.
    Four days after the collapse of the San José mine, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera mobilized the vast fleet of mining machinery like a rogue army general. Rejecting advice from aides to be cautious, Piñera bet everything that he could save the miners, putting his face forward as a guarantee for a successful mission, thus provoking panic throughout his inner circle of advisers, who thought the president had just volunteered for a kamikaze mission at a workplace where even the miners who dared work there gave themselves the same brave moniker.
    Among Piñera’s first assignments: find a general manager for the rescue operation. Long a fan of hiring multilingual MBA whiz kids as his personal inner circle, Piñera was out of his element in the world of mining. The mining minister, Laurence Golborne, whom Piñera appointed in March 2010 at the start of his presidential term, was also an outsider to the mining world. Golborne had been appointed to Chile’s top mining post in recognition of his management skills as a chief executive with Cencosud, an $11-billion-a-year chain of retail stores and upscale South American supermarkets. The leaders of the Chilean mining industry were unimpressed by the dashing executive with a penchant for blasting