The disaster began on a day shift around lunchtime at a mine in Chile's Atacama Desert: Miners working deep inside a mountain, excavating for copper, gold and other minerals, started feeling vibrations. Suddenly, there was a massive explosion and the passageways of the mine filled up with a gritty dust cloud.
Deep Down Dark
Deep Down Dark
The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free
by Hector Tobar
Hardcover, 309 pagespurchase
When the dust settled, the men discovered the source of the explosion: "A single block of [stone] as tall as a forty-five-story building, ha[d] broken off from the rest of the mountain and [had] fall[en] through the layers of the mine ... causing a chain reaction as the mountain above it [began] collaps[ing] too."
Thirty-three miners were sealed inside the mountain by this "megablock" of stone, some 770,000 tons of it, "twice the weight of the Empire State building." Staring at that flat, smooth wall, Luis Urzua, the crew's supervisor, thought: "It [was] like the stone they put over Jesus's tomb."
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