69 Days Underground

On 5 August 2010, a mountain in the Atacama Desert of Chile gave way. A slab of rock the weight of a skyscraper sealed the San Jose mine and trapped thirty-three men seven hundred meters underground. For sixty-nine days they lived in the heat and the dark while, above them, one of the greatest rescues in history slowly took shape.

For the first seventeen days, no one on the surface even knew they were alive. The men rationed a few days of food across more than two weeks. They held together when despair would have been easy. Then a drill broke through, and a note came up in red ink: they were well, in the refuge, all thirty-three. What followed was watched by much of the planet, an improvised feat of engineering and cooperation that brought the men, one by one, back to the light.

Built from the public record, the book-length accounts written with the miners, the reporting of the world's press, and the official record of the rescue, this book tells the whole story. The mine and the men. The collapse and the silence. The lifeline through the rock. The three drilling plans and the race against time. The breakthrough, the capsule named for rebirth, and the day the world watched thirty-three men rise from the earth.

Clear, fair, and deeply human, it keeps the miners at its center as the working men they were, honors the vast effort that saved them, and asks the harder questions the triumph can hide, about the dangerous mine that should never have trapped them, and the lives they returned to. It is the story of sixty-nine days, and of the half mile of rock that gave thirty-three men back.