Flourish

Chapter 1

The Singers

At 2:05 p.m. on August 5, 2010, in the San José Mine in northern Chile, the mountain began to make a strange, low-pitched groan. Working in the tunnels hundreds of feet below the surface, thirty-three miners stopped and listened as the groan morphed into a monstrous roar. Seven hundred and seventy million tons of mountainside, honeycombed by decades of drilling, began to collapse onto itself. As the mountain fell around them, the miners ran downward, escaping into the intact tunnels below.

Hours later, at the surface, a rescue team gathered to assess the situation. The good news: Based on the cave-in’s location, the miners had likely been able to reach a refugio, a bunker-like shelter two thousand feet below. The bad news: Drilling a borehole to deliver food and water to the refugio could take days or weeks; drilling a passage wide enough to rescue them could take months.

“Bad news” was putting it mildly. Everyone knew the refugio contained scant provisions—a couple days’ worth of canned food at most. Everyone knew the conditions down below were nightmarish, with ninety-plus-degree temperatures and 98 percent humidity that would wreak havoc with any injuries the miners had sustained. And everybody knew that the miners were a hard-bitten crew, products of a high-risk, Darwinian culture governed by an unwritten rule: every man for himself.

For sixteen days, six rescue drills inched toward the refugio. With every hour, the odds of survival diminished. The rescue team psychologist, Alberto Iturra, advised against holding out too much hope. He was all too aware of what had happened in similar disasters: rescuers arriving only to find scenes of unspeakable horror.

On day 17, one drill punched through the refugio’s ceiling. Rescuers detected a faint pounding; when they retrieved the drill, they found a note that said all thirty-three miners were alive. As the team lowered a makeshift telephone line to establish voice contact, Iturra kept the miners’ families well away. The miners will be in a state of altered consciousness, severe malnutrition, and mental instability, he said. We don’t know what we are going to find.

A handset was lowered. Up top, the rescue team huddled around a speakerphone, prepared for fear, desperation, and delirium. But what they got was far stranger: a normal conversation.

They exchanged polite, slightly formal greetings. Yes, they were alive, and, yes, they were in a state of starvation, eating one teaspoon of tuna each per forty-eight hours. Yet the miners didn’t want to talk about themselves. They wanted to know about someone else.

“We had a colleague who was headed outside, a driver,” they said. “We don’t know if he made it out.”

Yes, the rescue team informed them, the driver had made it out.

The miners shouted for joy. The conversation continued with updates and information. Then, toward the end of the call, the miners started to sing the national anthem.

Puro, Chile, es tu cielo azulado.

Puras brisas te cruzan también

(How pure, Chile, is your blue sky

And how pure the breezes that blow across you)

Up top, Iturra and the rescue team stared at each other, faces slack with wonder. How do thirty-three roughnecks spend seventeen days suffering through darkness, starvation, and the near-certain prospect of death—and the first things they do are ask if their friend is okay and then sing together?

***

The rescue took fifty-two days, but eventually all thirty-three miners were safely brought to the surface. In the days after, experts sought to explain the source of their extraordinary energy, cohesion, and morale. Most theories focused on the leadership qualities of certain individuals and how those individuals took charge to create a plan that gave the group a sense of stability and purpose.

But it turned out that those theories weren’t accurate. The group didn’t have one or two leaders; it had many. What’s more, no one person took charge or executed a plan. In fact, according to studies by Matías Sanfuentes of the University of Chile, the cohesive energy didn’t emerge from the actions of individuals but from moments that allowed the miners to “emotionally link” in ways that “activated the resilience pathway.” The strange thing was, these moments mostly consisted of pauses.

The first pause happened in the chaotic hours just after the cave-in. The miners were scattered, frenetically searching for escape routes. “I screamed like a madman,” recalled Mario Sepúlveda. “I ran without stopping, looking for mates, trying to find them all. The more I ran, the more anxious I got, and the more anxious I got, the more I ran.” The shift supervisor, a stern man named Luis Urzúa, repeatedly tried and failed to maintain order.

The group eventually tired and quieted, gathering in a circle at the foot of the cave-in. Sepúlveda sketched a diagram in the dust, showing the blocked tunnels above. “In other words, chiquillos, even if we’re superoptimistic about things, the best you can say is we’re in a load of shit,” he said. “The only thing we can do is be strong, superdisciplined, and united.”

Then Urzúa, the boss, stepped to the center of the circle. The miners expected him to start issuing orders. Instead, he bowed his head.

“We are all equal now,” Urzúa said. “I take off my white helmet. There are no bosses and employees.”

The miners looked at one another in silent shock; some thought he was joking. Urzúa was the jefe, fifty-four years old, with a college degree and decades of experience—a pillar of authority. We are all equal now? The miners looked around the circle at each other, feeling themselves in a new space, one that resonated with a question: What if we all were leaders?

The second pause happened a few moments later. There were extra workers in the mine that day, and at some point the group belatedly realized they had no idea how many they were. So they lined up and counted: thirty-three. Sepúlveda was the first to make the connection.

“La edad de Christo! (the age of Christ),” he shouted. “Mierda! There are thirty-three of us! This has to mean something. There’s something bigger for us waiting outside.”

Another silence, as Sepúlveda’s words echoed around the cave. Thirty-three: the age Jesus was crucified. To the miners, most of whom were Catholic, it was a goosebump-inducing moment, radiating with mystery. Is there a deeper meaning to all this?

Starting with those moments—which Sanfuentes described as “spaces in which collective sense-making can be actively developed”—group life began to take shape. Without being told, the miners swung into action, setting up sleeping areas, locating water sources, and counting headlamps. Over the next hours, they continued to self-organize, dividing into three groups: one to clean the refugio, one to search for possible escape routes, one to listen for rescue drills. They also began to develop a rhythm of group life.

At the first mealtime, Sepúlveda lined up thirty-three plastic cups and carefully placed one teaspoon of canned tuna into each cup, followed by some water and two cookies. They waited together until all were served, said grace, and ate. After one miner looked after another at night, the group started to pair up into what they called guardian angels, where they checked on each other to make sure they were breathing. After one miner apologized for his faults, the group started a nightly habit in which each miner would apologize to the others for any missteps they might have committed. I’m sorry I didn’t help get water. I’m sorry that I shouted. Though each practice looked different, beneath the surface each was the same: a moment when everyone ceased individual activities and circled up in silent awareness, a moment that radiated with shared meaning: We are all leaders, and Something bigger is waiting. As the days passed and the suffering mounted, the practices gave the group energy and resilience to navigate the difficult moments, of which there were plenty.

For instance, on day 15, a miner named Edison Peña cracked and started to shout that they were all going to die. The miners responded by joining hands around the two remaining cans of tuna. Some smiled and joked, praying that the two cans might multiply, like the loaves and fishes. The crisis passed, replaced by renewed connection. “The more the men worked, the more civility bloomed, and they came together as a team,” wrote Jonathan Franklin in 33 Men.

The world celebrated on October 4, when the first group of miners rode the rescue capsule to the surface. The order of the extraction kept changing, because the miners kept deferring to their friends, wanting them to get out first. “In the end, the thirty-three were leaders,” one miner told Sanfuentes. “All of us were strong, we fought, we clung to life, we had faith we would be found, sometimes there was depression, and then our spirits were lifted by others.”

The story of the Chilean miners is compelling because it’s the story of an unlocking—the emergence of a connective energy they didn’t know they possessed. The miners tapped into a hidden capacity to form a meaningful, cohesive whole. The story also contains two questions: What is this capacity made of? And how do we unlock it in our own lives?