"At least thirty-four men were missing (that was later corrected to thirty-three). They were about nine hundred feet underground, which meant some four and half miles of winding road corkscrewed down to them, and it was entirely blocked by the seven hundred thousand tons of rock that had fallen down. No one was sure why the cascade of rocks had sealed off the mine—whether men were given poor directions and blasted off rocks that should never have been touched, setting off the avalanche, or if the earth moved on its own."
The Atacama region governor, Ximena Matas, made a public announcement about what was known so far to that point. This is the substance of that announcement. This passage outlines the fundamental basis of the book's very existence. A mining accident had occurred nearly one-thousand feet below the surface which had put almost three dozen in potential mortal danger. The title of the book is a reference to the state of the circumstances which has those miners trapped with no way out. The key element in this quote is the final bit of information provided. The inability to pinpoint the precise reason for the cave-in taking place means that determining a means of rescue would delay any actual rescue attempt.
"In 1972 an airplane carrying forty-five people, including a professional professional rugby team from Uruguay, crashed in the Andes on its way to Chile. Seventy-two days later two members of the team made it to civilization, bringing word that fourteen more passengers were still alive. This was the most impossible story of survival under terrible conditions...lost in the snow and ice of the mountains, the passengers realized there was one, and only one, way that anyone might make it home: The living would eat the frozen flesh of the dead."
The one word that was not allowed to be spoken by any of the miners trapped underground at any point was cannibalism. This quote relates the now-infamous true story of survival through cannibalism which inspired a best-selling book, theatrical film, and multiple fictional reinventions such as the Showtime series Yellowjackets. Survival under the most extreme conditions where food is limited always carries the potential for resorting to cannibalism when the situation reaches a critical point. That point was on the verge of being reached—or, possibly, had already been passed—by the time the finite supply of meal rations had been reduced to the point where the miners were literally limiting themselves to one single bite every three days. Despite having reached this stage, the miners were still forbidden to speak the dreaded word cannibalism out loud.
"Glancing back, it was as if he were looking down the heart of an erupting volcano. He rushed up the endless, sharp turns of the corkscrewing mine and finally made it to the surface. He, at least, was safe. But when he described the sound and dust cloud to his bosses, no one listened."
A truck driver named Raul Villegas is the first to realize that something very wrong happened. He was driving a truck up a ramp located nearly two-thousand feet beneath the ground. His job was to haul rock from copper mines in Chile. On this day his truck is impacted by an invisible wave that felt like what happens after a huge dynamite explosion. The difference this time was the view upon looking backward. This vision of something that looks like a volcanic eruption is the moment that the tragedy occurs which leaves the miners trapped deep underground for so long and with so little to eat that cannibalism becomes the dirtiest word in the language. Raul, however, is just another truck driver. Just another unskilled laborer who may be able to describe the strange things he felt and saw, but cannot explain them. The unspoken message is that if Raul had instead been a college-educated scientist, then perhaps the situation might not have become so dire.
