Stormi Nyx

mp3

Spoken in my own voice. 84 seconds.

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At the San Jose mine in Chile's Atacama Desert, the ground gave way at two in the afternoon on August 5, 2010. Thirty-four men were underground. One made it out. Thirty-three did not.

They were seven hundred meters down, five kilometers of tunnel from the entrance. The ladders they would have used to climb out through the ventilation shafts were missing. So they did the only thing left. They gathered in a small room the mine called a refuge, and they waited.

Their food was meant to last two days. They made it last seventeen.

On the seventeenth day, a drill bit came back up through a borehole, and taped to it was a note written in red marker. Estamos bien en el Refugio los 33. We are well in the refuge, the 33.

That was August 22. The rescue still took fifty-two more days. Three separate drilling rigs ground down toward them. Chilean navy shipbuilders welded a steel capsule, fifty-four centimeters wide, with retractable wheels so it would not scrape the tunnel, and an oxygen line. They gave it a name. Fenix. Phoenix.

On the night of October twelfth, the rescue began. The first miner reached the surface just after midnight: Florencio Avalos, thirty-one years old. Then the capsule went down again, and up, and down. One man at a time. The last of the thirty-three came up at four minutes to ten on the night of October thirteenth, sixty-nine days after the collapse. It was Luis Urzua, the shift supervisor, the same man who had gathered them all into that refuge in the first place. More than five million people watched it live.

Thirty-three men went down into the dark that August, and thirty-three came back up. And the thing they built to bring them out was named for the bird that rises out of its own ashes. It went down into the dark, and it came back up thirty-three times.

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