Memo to Mayor Mike: Wouldn't it just have been easier and more honest to say "I'm sorry, we screwed up"?
via Ping.fm
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Sunday, December 26, 2010
The Night Escape
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Charleston Harbor, Dec. 26, 1860
The rowers strained at their oars, gasping with exertion, their breath visible in the chill night air. By good fortune, the water lay almost flat, with just the slightest rolling swell, and each pull drew them several lengths farther on.
None of those men knew that their brief but perilous transit would end up changing American history. Their only thought was of swiftly and silently reaching their destination, barely a mile across the channel: Fort Sumter.
In the second of the three longboats crouched Capt. Abner Doubleday, scanning the moonlit harbor around him. Ahead, in the lead boat, he could make out an unmistakable figure, hawk-like with its beaked nose and enshrouding cloak, clutching something tightly under one arm. This was the garrison’s commander, Maj. Robert Anderson. For weeks, as hostile secessionists drew an ever-tighter cordon around their tiny Union force, Doubleday had speculated endlessly about his close-lipped superior’s intentions. Did Anderson plan to stay put in their pathetically indefensible little citadel at Fort Moultrie, docilely awaiting orders from Washington, until the enemy overwhelmed him? Was the major, a known apologist for slavery, scheming to betray his loyal men to the rebels? Or could he – as Doubleday fervently hoped – be plotting somehow to slip the trap and make a run for the far more secure position that Sumter offered?
The moment of truth had arrived only an hour or so earlier, back at Moultrie. As the sun set over Charleston Harbor, the officers had gathered for their customary late-afternoon tea with the commander. Arriving slightly late, Doubleday greeted his comrades and was met with distracted silence. Then Anderson rose and approached him.
“I have determined to evacuate this post immediately, for the purpose of occupying Fort Sumter,” the major said quietly. “I can only allow you 20 minutes to form your company and be in readiness to start.”
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Civil War Timeline
An unfolding history of the Civil War with photos and articles from the Times archive and ongoing commentary from Disunion contributors.
Anderson had not previously confided his intentions even to Doubleday, the garrison’s second-ranked officer. He had told only a couple of trusted staff members, whom he’d instructed to charter some vessels, ostensibly to carry the fort’s women and children out of harm’s way. (Many of the men, including Doubleday, still had their families living with them.) On Christmas Day, with Charlestonians distracted by the festivities, crates of essential supplies had been loaded aboard, on the pretext that these were only the noncombatants’ personal effects. A couple of local busybodies showed up at the wharf to supervise the preparations – barring them would have put the secessionist forces on alert – and became suspicious when they saw a crate marked “1,000 ball cartridges” among the cargo. They were quickly assured that this had just been an error, and left after seeing the box offloaded.
As Doubleday realized, the major’s stubborn sense of military honor had trumped his political sympathies. To save his force from ignominious surrender, he would defy the express wishes, if not the explicit commands, of his own superiors in Washington, who wished to do nothing that might offend the aggrieved South. (Anderson, ever the careful West Point academic, had discovered a slight ambiguity of phrasing in the orders that could serve as a loophole.) He would also defy the local secessionist authorities, who had put Moultrie under round-the-clock watch, with armed steamers patrolling the channel between the two forts, under orders to stop or sink any vessel carrying Union soldiers to Sumter.
So now Anderson and his little garrison – barely six dozen officers and men – were crossing just that stretch of water. He had left a small detachment back at Moultrie, manning six heavy cannons. These were loaded, primed and pointed at the channel, ready to fire at any rebel vessel intercepting the troops.
Staying close together, the three boats crossed the broad belt of moonlight, hastening toward the deep shadows cast by Sumter’s hulking walls. As Doubleday peered at the fortress, a strange thought came into his head, one that had occurred to him before: it looked like a prison.
Then, off to one side, he saw a smaller black shape, drawing swiftly closer across the water. Doubleday recognized it: the rebel steamer Nina. An ordinary packet boat in peacetime – a decade earlier, she had borne the body of John C. Calhoun to Charleston – she had recently been pressed into patrol duty. She would be packed with armed militiamen, he knew.
Anderson’s boat and the other one were already veering away, making for the dark shoreline of nearby Sullivan’s Island. Doubleday ordered his own rowers to turn sharply and follow, but the soldiers, inexpert at the oars, bungled the maneuver, leaving their boat flailing in the path of the oncoming steamer.
The Nina drew closer and closer. In an urgent whisper, Doubleday told his men to take off their uniform coats and drape them over their muskets, lest the moonlight reveal the telltale glint of a brass button or polished bayonet. Perhaps, the captain hoped, the rebels might mistake their boat for a civilian vessel. It seemed a desperate, feeble improvisation, but it was now their only hope of escape.
The anxious soldiers saw the Nina’s paddlewheels slow, then stop. Someone aboard seemed to be scrutinizing, pondering. Doubleday’s men, for their part, did not pause; finding their rhythm once more, they pulled hard at the oars, passing within 100 yards of the enemy’s bow. Then the Nina’s engine let off a puff of steam and her wheels turned again, carrying the vessel placidly past.
Minutes later, Doubleday’s boat bumped against the wharf at Sumter. Here his party would have other opponents to contend with. Though the fort was still federal property, not yet seized by the Carolinians, it was superintended by just a single military engineer who oversaw a large team of civilian laborers at work on the fortifications. Many of these men were known to be secessionist sympathizers.
Library of CongressEntry of Maj. Anderson’s command Into Fort Sumter, published in Harper’s Weekly.
And in fact, they were now crowding through the gate toward the wharf. Doubleday saw that many wore blue ribbon cockades, badges of Southern radicalism. “What are these soldiers doing here?” someone shouted angrily.
The captain ordered his small squad into formation. Before his antagonists knew what was happening, they were facing a bristling thicket of bayonets. The startled laborers stumbled back into the fort as Doubleday seized control of the guardhouse. Shortly thereafter, the two boats carrying Major Anderson and the other troops pulled up to the wharf. They placed the disloyal workmen under guard, to be sent ashore to Charleston in the morning. Anderson entered the fort, carrying the bundle he had been holding in the boat: a tightly folded flag.
From the ramparts of Sumter a signal gun rang out, its sharp crack echoing across the water. The detachment back at Moultrie would know that its comrades had arrived at their destination.
As for the secessionists over in Charleston, they would soon awaken to a very unpleasant surprise. “They must have looked upon us as a mouse to play with and eat up at leisure,” one of the Union officers gloated, “but we gave the cat the slip however, and are now safe in our hole.”
At the two forts, men labored through the night, bracing for the fast-approaching moment when that startled cat would unsheath its claws. Midnight passed and dawn approached: one of the last days in a waning year.
Sources: Abner Doubleday, “Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-’61”; Samuel Wylie Crawford, “The History of the Fall of Fort Sumpter”; Harper’s Weekly, Jan. 12, 1861; “Official Records of the War of the Rebellion,” Vol. 1; Abner Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter” (“Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,” Vol. 1); Gaillard Hunt, “John C. Calhoun”; J.G. Foster to J.H.B. Latrobe, Jan. 10, 1861, in Frank F. White, Jr., “The Evacuation of Fort Moultrie in 1860” (The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Jan. 1952).
Adam Goodheart is the author of the forthcoming book “1861: The Civil War Awakening.” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
What were they thinking?
To the geniuses at AMC who saw nothing wrong with running Trojan vibrator commercials during "White Christmas" and "Miracle on 34th Street" - what were you thinking?
Friday, December 24, 2010
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Saturday, December 11, 2010
It's a Wonderful Life...
That scene with George and Mary on the phone with Sam Wainwright? Sexiest scene ever put on film.
Thursday, December 09, 2010
Sunday, December 05, 2010
Saturday, December 04, 2010
Friday, December 03, 2010
Thursday, December 02, 2010
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
GoodShit › What good is Wall Street?
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Monday, November 15, 2010
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Friday, November 05, 2010
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Wednesday, October 27, 2010
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Saturday, October 23, 2010
Death of a Fulton Fish Market Fixture
For several decades, Annie was the profane mother of the old Fulton Fish Market, that pungent Lower Manhattan place fast becoming a mirage of memory. Making her rounds, running errands, holding her own in the blue banter, she was as much a part of this gruff place as the waxed fish boxes, the forklift-rocking cobblestones, and the cocktail aroma of gasoline, cigarettes and the sea.
Some ridiculed and abused her; others honored and protected her. Young men new to the market were occasionally advised to make acquaintance with Annie’s prodigious breasts; kiss them for good luck. And the veterans, young men once, often slipped her a dollar, maybe five, for a copy of a fresh tabloid; pay her for good luck.
Young and old, they all had heard that the faded color photograph on display at Steve DeLuca’s coffee truck — of a striking young woman, a raven-haired knockout in a two-piece bathing suit, running barefoot against a glorious sky — was of Annie in her younger days, decades before her dark fish-market terminus. But some could not see the coffee-truck goddess in this bent woman at shadow’s edge, clutching the handle of the shopping cart she used to hold wares and provide balance, wearing a baseball cap, layers of sweaters, and men’s pants, navy blue, into which she had sewn deep, leg-long pockets to keep safe her hard-earned rolls of bills.
The supposed link between pinup and bag lady sounded too much like an O. Henry tale of Old New York, and begged too many questions.
Who are you, really, Annie? How did you wind up here, at the fish market, receiving your boys, their taunts, the slaps of the East River winds? Where does all your money go? What is the larger meaning of your life’s arc?
Never asked; never answered.
Annie was just there, always, as rooted to the market as the cobblestones.
Five years ago, when the city pried the 175-year-old fish market from Lower Manhattan and moved it to Hunts Point in the Bronx, Annie came with it, at first, often paying for a ride from her home, somewhere in Manhattan. She was in her 80s by then, and she struggled to find warmth in the new market’s chilled air. The men would sometimes see her in a corner, huddled against herself, sleeping.
So maybe it was for the best when the city regulators at Hunts Point told Annie she could no longer hawk her best seller, her untaxed cigarettes — an order that would have been laughable in the old market’s wide-open days. Soon the raucous market chorus, of curses and price calls and forklift beeps, was missing the occasional, punctuating “Yoo-hoo.”
Then again, maybe the market was her life’s oxygen. A few weeks ago, word spread among the fishmongers: South Street Annie, also known as Shopping Cart Annie, also known as their Annie, had died. She was 85. Her given name was Gloria Wasserman. And the larger meaning of her journey’s arc was this: Life is a wondrous gray.
WHEN someone dies, the rest of us cobble together old photographs, faint remembrances and snippets of things once said to make sense of the life lived. It is folly, but it is what we do. So here is Annie, incomplete, partially hidden still in the market’s eternal dusk cast by the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive above.
According to one of her two daughters, Barbara Fleck, Gloria Wasserman’s parents were Polish immigrants who tried to make a living as egg farmers in rural New Jersey before settling in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The father, Pincus, found work as a tailor; the mother, Sadie, was a homemaker. Together they fretted over their only daughter.
“She was almost too beautiful, which caused her to — well,” Ms. Fleck said. “She had a lively spirit, which was almost frightening for these poor Jewish immigrants. Very beautiful and very spunky.”
A portrait from the mid-1940s shows Ms. Wasserman in pearls, her dark hair swept up and sculpted, her expression that of a confident starlet waiting to be discovered. “I think in her heart she would have wanted to have been an actress,” Ms. Fleck said. “She didn’t make it to the screen, but she acted in real life.”
While working in Manhattan’s jewelry district, Ms. Wasserman met an ex-soldier named Fred Fleck, who planned to bicycle to Alaska, where he would attend college on the G. I. Bill. He suggested that she accompany him. “And she did,” Ms. Fleck said. “A free-spirited woman.”
The front page of the Sept. 5, 1947, edition of The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner featured an article with the headline: “ ‘Bike-Hikers’ Reach City 83 Days Out of New York.”
“Clad in clean white duck slacks, faded colored wool shirts and moccasins, the young couple, deeply tanned, looked as though they had been on an afternoon’s jaunt. Gloria’s nut-brown shoulder-length hair glistened in the sun. ... Glowing with enthusiasm, Gloria left her job as a manufacturer’s model and amateur entertainer, bought a bicycle, and came along. She plans to get a job in Fairbanks, possibly as an entertainer.”
She was 22.
After that, details get blurry. Ms. Wasserman married Mr. Fleck, gave birth to Barbara in 1950, and broke up with Mr. Fleck. She lived a bicoastal life, it seems, working in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest — running a bar, then a record store — but returning to New York often to visit and provide financial support for her widowed mother, who by now was raising Barbara.
“She had a knack,” Ms. Fleck said. “She could make money.”
Ms. Wasserman married a second time, to a man named Grinols, and gave birth to two sons. Then, after this marriage broke down, she had a relationship that produced another daughter, Robin, in 1964. During these years, and in the many that followed, Ms. Fleck often had no idea what her mother did for a living.
“I don’t know how you could put it nicely,” said Ms. Fleck, who lives in Los Angeles. “But she had a flamboyant life.”
At some point, Ms. Wasserman returned to New York for good. And, at some point, she assumed the role of Annie and began appearing at the Fulton Fish Market, selling her wares and, her close friends at the market gently say, herself. Exactly when is lost to time, but far enough in the past that it seemed as though she was as permanent as the skyscrapers, as permanent as the river, calling out to the late-night fishmongers and early morning Wall Street suits. When Frank Minio, an erudite, reflective man, joined the market in 1978, she was already a fixture.
No matter the weather, he said, “She was always there.”
WHAT a brutal way to live. She cleaned the market’s offices and locker rooms and bathrooms. She collected the men’s “fish clothes” on Friday and had them washed and ready for Monday. She ran errands for Mr. DeLuca, known as Stevie Coffee Truck, hustling to Chinatown to pick up, say, some ginseng tea. She accepted the early morning delivery of bagels. She tried to anticipate the men’s needs — towels, bandannas, candy — and had these items available for sale.
“If the Brooklyn Bridge could fit in her shopping cart, she would have sold it,” Ms. Fleck said.
Since all this hustling meant carrying around a lot of cash, she tucked away wads of bills in those deep-pocketed pants and other hiding places, including her brassiere. “She tried to look shabby so people wouldn’t give her a hard time” when she left the market, recalled one of her protectors, Joe Centrone, better known as Joe Tuna. “But she was regularly robbed.”
Away from the market, Annie lived as Gloria Wasserman, in the East Village, in a city-owned apartment building that later became part of the Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association. She found joy in her family — a grandson, Travis, in California, and a granddaughter, Chelsea, in New Hampshire — but also sorrow. One of her sons, Kenneth Grinols, died in a fire while squatting in a building in the city. The other, Karl Grinols, struggling with drugs, moved into her apartment at one point, while she slept in a room at the market — “between the mackerel and the salmon,” Ms. Fleck said. But he died young, too, hit by a car in the East Village.
All the while, Annie kept working, rarely missing a day, and gave nearly everything she had to others.
Barbara Grinols, Karl’s ex-wife, who lives in New Hampshire, said that Ms. Wasserman often sent as much as $4,000 a month, usually through money orders, to her relations on both coasts. She also routinely sent along boxes of used clothing that she had culled from places like the Catholic Worker’s Mary House, on East Third Street, where she was known as that rare visitor who searched for items that fit others, and who had a gift for using humor and kindness to deflate the tensions arising from hardship.
“She became like a grandmother to dozens of women on the street who had nobody,” said Felton Davis, a full-time Catholic Worker volunteer. Sensing the lack of esteem in a woman beside her, he said, “She would say: `I have just the shirt that you need. I’ll get it for you.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in New Hampshire, the clothes kept coming. “The boxes would be opened, and it would be like: `Who wants this T-shirt?’ ‘Who wants this sweatshirt?’ ” Ms. Grinols recalled. “So many people in this area got gifts from her.”
In 1999, Ms. Wasserman decided to retire as Annie, telling the men at the fish market that she had health problems — circulation problems in her legs, Ms. Fleck said, related to years of working in the wet and cold. Joe Tuna and Stevie Coffee Truck raised $3,000 for her by hitting up all the hardened fishmongers. Off she went, to live with her daughter Robin in California, and then with Ms. Grinols and Chelsea in New Hampshire. After nine months in the country, though, Annie was back at the market, calling yoo-hoo and forcing Joe Tuna and Stevie Coffee Truck to do some explaining.
WITH the money she earned by working in all weather, in the hours when the rest of us slept, Annie bought Chelsea a used Toyota Tercel. She paid for Chelsea’s tuition at the University of New Hampshire, and provided financial support to a ballet school in Los Angeles. Whatever money she took in, she sent out, while owning little more than a bed and a radio. Her relatives, in turn, regularly visited her in New York, where she would always tell them, “If we see anyone, I’m Annie.” They called her often, sent her gifts that she probably gave away, and constantly begged her to retire from a job whose parameters were left vague, but whose pull for her was undeniable. “She would always say, ‘We’ll see,’ ” Chelsea recalled. “She never wanted to leave New York and stop doing what she was doing.”
About 10 years ago, Joe Tuna and Stevie Coffee Truck heard that Annie had been hospitalized. They went to New York Downtown Hospital and asked to see — actually, they didn’t know whom to ask for. “Annie?” they volunteered. “Shopping Cart Annie?”
“Gloria Wasserman,” the clerk said, and directed them to her room, where their tough, tough Annie now seemed so vulnerable.
“That was the first time I ever saw her with her hair down,” Joe Tuna said. “You could see the remnants of a beautiful woman.”
Then Annie got out of the hospital, and went back to work. She continued to flash her breasts, more for the shock and a laugh than for anything else. She sold her goods, ripped into those who owed her money, accepted a hot cup of coffee when offered, and slipped away now and then to read from one of the books she always carried, like a stage actress resting between scenes.
She also continued her other life, as Gloria Wasserman, traveling to New Hampshire to attend Chelsea’s wedding, in 2006. There she is in the photographs, smiling with the bride and groom, a proud, beloved grandmother.
For the last year of her life, the reluctantly retired Gloria Wasserman spent her days charming the East Village and her nights sharing dinner at Mary House. In spirit, she remained defiantly independent. In truth, she needed help: with her hygiene, with her apartment, with climbing the stairs.
She suffered a stroke in the brutal August heat and was admitted to Bellevue Hospital Center, where Mr. Davis, from the Catholic Worker, visited nearly every day. She was released after a month, spent a couple of weeks in New Hampshire, and then a couple more in California, with her daughter Barbara. But she refused to eat or to take her medication, and died in her sleep, 2,800 miles from the fish market.
“New York was her life,” her daughter said. “Work was her life.”
Word of Annie’s death gave pause to the fish men. Mr. Minio reflected on that space between black and white where all of us reside. And Joe Tuna has discovered that whenever someone in a crowd calls out, “Yoo-hoo,” his head jerks up and he is instantly back on South Street, amid the beds of glassine ice, and the dead-eyed fish, and here she comes.
The impressions and old photographs that Ms. Wasserman left behind are, in the end, only impressions and old photographs. In fact, whenever reporters, including this one, referred to her in a news story, she would always complain that they had failed to capture her “essence” — which may, again, be true.
via nytimes.com
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Sunday, October 10, 2010
From collapse to rescue: Inside the Chile mine disaster
Latest NewsUpdated:
From collapse to rescue: Inside the Chile mine disaster
2010-10-10 12:0
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SAN JOSE MINE, CHILE—In early August, 33 miners descended deep below the dusty surface of Chile’s Atacama Desert and did not come back out.
From the depths of a century-old gold and copper mine, the men — 32 Chileans and one Bolivian — have since celebrated birthdays, welcomed new babies into their lives, proposed to their lovers.
But on Saturday, more than two months after a rock collapse sealed the Mina San Jose, or San Jose Mine, a rescue hole was finally completed for the miners.
Their escape is now imminent, arriving weeks earlier than expected, and within days, the miners will once again breathe fresh air and feel the desert sun on their faces. They will be able to eat birthday cake, hold their children, kiss their women on the lips.
But these miners will not return to the lives they remember. When they descended down that hole, they were anonymous men, 33 out of thousands of miners trying to eke out a living chipping away at rock. This week, they will return to the world as celebrities.
Never before have so many men survived being trapped underground for so long — nor has the world ever witnessed a rescue operation of such complexity and depth — one that has had a Canadian presence from the start.
Half a century ago, trapped miners were considered lost causes. A caved-in mine would simply be sealed off and crosses would be hammered into the ground.
Shortly after the Mina San Jose collapse on Thursday, Aug. 5, miners in the area were already placing wooden crosses outside its entrance, some hung with helmets and miners’ lamps.
But for the rescue team, leaving those men to die in that hole was never an option.
In today’s Chile — an economic superpower in South America with a multi-billion-dollar mining industry — there is no shortage of technology or resources available, and experts from around the world have united in the rescue effort.
It has been a giant task, getting to the men trapped under 700 metres of granite. Hundreds have contributed, but one of the first to go after the miners was Raul Villegas.
Villegas, a grizzled 57-year-old truck driver with a missing finger, was the last miner to escape the Mina San Jose collapse. He was also nearly the only one killed.
About 2 p.m. on that fateful day, Villegas had just finished filling his truck with rock when he heard a loud crack. He was 600 metres below the surface and dust was filling the cavern but in that moment, Villegas was only faintly concerned — he was used to the sounds of crumbling rock and moaning earth. The mine, owned by a company called San Esteban, is notoriously dangerous in the mineral-rich region and, according to an official with the Chilean Safety Association, eight workers have died at the mine in 12 years.
As Villegas ascended the spiralling ramps of the mine, he passed Frank Lobos, an ex-soccer player who was heading down the mine to fetch some men for lunch, and Mario Gomez, one of his oldest friends. Villegas joked with Lobos and mentioned the strange disturbances to Gomez but both men continued down the mine, disappearing into the darkness.
Closer to the surface, a cloud of dust suddenly overtook Villegas’s truck, enveloping him in dirt and darkness. Just as he began to see the light at the surface, there was a massive collapse.
“I felt an expansive wave, like when there is a dynamite explosion,” Villegas recalled. “The truck’s engine almost went off.”
Villegas burst from the mine and into the glaring desert sun. Looking back, he saw a huge cloud of dust streaming from the mine’s opening. It looked as though a volcano had erupted.
Villegas reported the accident to his manager but it would be hours before they notified authorities. Villegas was sent down the mine along with some of the other mine workers but after descending about 400 metres, he realized the ramp was gone. Villegas could hear the hill groaning and he was frightened.
About 700,000 tonnes of rock — more than six times the volume of all the concrete in Toronto’s CN Tower — had collapsed in the mine, cutting off ramps and destroying the mine’s ventilation shaft. It was later revealed that a ladder was missing from this shaft, which might have allowed the miners to escape.
The Atacama region’s six-person special operations emergency squad was called in and entered the mine at 9 p.m., seven hours after the collapse. They would not emerge until 6 a.m. the next day — shaken, drenched in sweat and empty-handed.
By the next morning, relatives and reporters had begun arriving on the site, demanding answers. A handful of pirquineros, or independent miners, later showed up with shovels and machines, pledging to sacrifice their own lives to dig out the trapped men.
After the special operations squad failed a second time to enter the mine, the Chilean government began to assemble its own rescue team. It recruited the help of Codelco, the state-owned mining company and the largest copper producer in the world. One of Codelco’s operations, El Teniente, is the world’s biggest underground mining operation and has experts trained for such emergencies. Two of El Teniente’s best men — engineer Andre Sougarret and Rene Aguilar, a risk management expert — were lent to the rescue operation full-time. The miners’ lives were now in their hands.
The Codelco-led team would spend nearly a week trying to secure the mine for a final attempt at rescuing the men through the main opening. But rocks continued collapsing, at one point sending rescuers running from the tunnels, and geotechnical instruments confirmed the earth was not finished moving.
That rescue strategy was abandoned. At the base of the mine, anguished relatives were distraught to see the fire trucks and ambulances on scene suddenly driving away.
But Codelco had a second plan hatching — there was another way to get the men out without using the mine’s main tunnel. Chile is a mining country and they would do what they always did when it came to extricating precious objects from deep inside the ground.
They would drill.
While few Chileans dared say it out loud, most of the country felt the miners were probably dead. But Fidel Báez believed in his heart they were alive.
Days after the collapse, Báez was reading emails in his office at Codelco’s headquarters in Santiago, about 800 kilometres south of the Mina San Jose. When news of the accident broke, mining and drilling companies from around the world began contacting the Chilean government with offers of help or ideas on how the rescue could be conducted. Báez, Codelco’s corporate manager for underground mines, was asked to sift through the emails and find the one that held the answer.
Báez estimates he received proposals from more than 25 companies in at least seven different countries. It was soon determined that there were nine drills available near the Mina San Jose that could be quickly mobilized and delivered to the site. They would punch 14-centimetre holes in the ground until one made contact with the miners.
Rescuers had topography plans for the mine but Báez says much of the information was inaccurate. The Mina San Jose, first exploited in 1889, is about 800 metres deep, the first 400 metres of it dug in the early 20th century. Much information has been lost along the way.
It was predicted the miners had probably made their way to a refuge chamber 700 metres below the surface — comparatively, the CN Tower is about 550 metres tall. The nine drill rigs were set up in an arc formation, most pointing their drill bits toward that target.
There was no real plan behind the drilling and 15 holes were ultimately pierced through the ground in a frantic, haphazard effort to reach the miners. Some drills encountered problems along the way; two were unable to dig deeper than 500 metres and another hit an unexpected cavern in the mine.
Kelvin Brown, an Australian drilling expert who flew to Chile to assist, recalls the chaos of having nine drills pounding into the rocky terrain in such close proximity.
“Everyone was trying very hard and very fast but it was a little bit hopeless in the early days,” Brown says. “It was just a real lot of people, too many people . . . they just drilled very fast.”
By that point, relatives of the miners had begun moving into a makeshift tent village at the entrance of the mine, dubbed Campamento Esperanza, or Camp Hope. As time wore on and despair deepened, the families had a standoff with the local police, or carabineros, frustrated by the slow pace of the rescue and demanding to be allowed on the site.
“It was getting extremely tense outside the gates where the families were,” Brown says. “It became very heated and emotional and it was like a powder keg.”
But the next morning, between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., the rescue operation had its first breakthrough. Seventeen days after the collapse, one of the drills — a Schramm T685 operated by the Chilean company Terraservice — hit a cavernous space deep inside the mine.
They knew the drill had hit an opening because the air pressure disappeared. The drill was turned off and lowered into the hole.
Then, a distant tapping was felt on the end of the drill. As it was pulled back to the surface, rescuers were stunned to discover two notes tied to the probe.
They were both written by Mario Gomez, the oldest of the miners. One was addressed to his wife, Lilianett Ramirez; the other was a now infamous message that has been reproduced on T-shirts and billboards, written in red letters. It said: “Estamos bien en el refugio los 33,” or “we are fine in the refuge, all 33 of us.”
The entire country erupted in jubilant celebration at the stunning discovery and Chile’s president, Sebastián Piñera, was flown to the Mina San Jose, where he brandished the note before media and elated family members. The miners became instant national heroes and in the nearby town of Copiapó, where many of the miners live, the sound of honking horns filled the narrow streets.
The miners were alive, having survived on meagre rations of tuna and milk. But the question now was how they would be kept that way — and how they would get out. The initial drill holes — three of which ultimately reached the miners — were only 14 centimetres wide, just large enough to fit a grapefruit. Rescuers would need a hole of about 71 centimetres to hoist the men out.
Báez had been doing research and learned of past rescue operations that used drills to reach trapped miners, who were then lifted out in rescue cages.
This became the plan for the Mina San Jose miners, and rescuers decided they would need three drills working 24 hours a day. The drills were dubbed Plans A, B and C — if one failed, there would be two more keeping the rescue on track. The miners had access to about two kilometres of galleries inside the mine and three targets were chosen for the drilling — the refuge chamber, a workshop in the mine and a ramp about 600 metres below ground.
Each drill uses a different method. The Plan A drill, mainly used for creating ventilation shafts in underground mines, is known as a raise borer, meaning it drills a pilot hole first before using a reamer to widen the opening from the far end. The drill in Plan B is used for everything from mining to geothermal energy exploration and has a rotopercussion drilling system — one used in past rescue efforts. Plan C uses a massive drill rig from Alberta, designed primarily for oil and gas exploration.
Never before have three such different drills worked side-by-side toward the same purpose.
Ideally, once the rescue hole is drilled, the shaft will be encased with steel pipe, thus ensuring the safest possible journey back to the surface.
Three metal rescue capsules were also manufactured by the Chilean navy to lift out the miners. Painted in the blue, white and red colours of the Chilean flag, the 419-kilogram capsules were dubbed “Phoenix.”
It was an ambitious undertaking and there was plenty of room for mistakes. The real challenge, rescuers knew, was only just beginning.
Plan A
Perched on the side of a mountain at the Mina San Jose is a white drill rig flying a Chilean flag. On the front, there is a brass plaque, the words “Strata 950” stamped across in red lettering. This is the drill for Plan A. Although set against the seemingly Martian landscape of the Atacama Desert, it resembles a small spaceship.
The Strata 950 was the first drill recruited to assist with the rescue efforts. Shortly after the miners were discovered alive, a company called Terracem — a joint-venture between the Chilean-based drilling company Terraservice and an international engineering group named Cementation — presented rescuers with an idea. They had a powerful little machine capable of drilling in a perfectly straight line, reaming holes up to 1,000 metres deep and six metres wide.
There are only five Strata 950s in the world, and this one happened to be in Chile already. It is owned by a Canadian company, Cementation Canada Inc., but at the time of the mine collapse, it was working for a Codelco-owned copper mine called Andina, located some 80 kilometres northeast of Santiago.
The drill was quickly mobilized and moved to the Mina San Jose. The team needed a site supervisor, someone familiar with this particular type of directional drill, and the man they wanted was Glen Fallon, a Cementation driller from North Bay, Ont.
Fallon, a giant of a man who wears size 15 construction boots, was sitting in an underground mine in Timmins when he received the call from his boss.
“Get your ass back to North Bay. You’re flying to Chile tomorrow,” he was told.
Fallon arrived in Chile about a week after the miners were discovered alive. His crew, consisting of some South Africans and local Chileans, hit the ground running and hustled to set up the 28.5-tonne machine as quickly as possible.
“It was very hectic when we first got here,” Fallon recalls. “It was, ‘Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.’ ”
Fallon found himself grappling with several challenges unique to this particular operation. For one, the rig requires about 105 cubic metres of water to operate, both to lubricate the drilling process and to flush the rock cuttings back up to the surface. And water is not exactly easy to come by in the middle of a desert.
Among the Strata’s biggest virtues is its ability to drill a perfectly straight hole. Because of this, the Plan A rig was placed directly over the miners’ refuge chamber — a spot that also happens to be on the side of a mountain.
As the drill bores downwards, data is fed up to Fallon’s laptop every two minutes. He watches his screen intently and looks for zeroes — that means the drill is staying on track. Every so often the numbers deviate to 0.05 or 0.07, which indicates the drill has begun to wander off track. When this happens, a special apparatus behind the drill bit — called a rotary vertical drilling system — senses the deviation and pushes the drill bit back on track. The numbers always return to zero.
The Strata is a raise borer, which means it must drill twice — three drill bits are used create an initial pilot hole, about 38 centimetres in diameter, then that hole is widened to 72 centimetres by reaming from the bottom up.
But of the three drill rigs, Plan A has had the farthest distance to dig, just under 702 metres. It has also been the slowest. When Plan B began the final widening of its 628-metre hole, Plan A was only at 320 metres of its initial pilot hole.
“It works in a constant process, every day it’s going well,” said Rene Aguilar, the second-in-command of the rescue operation.
“But the disadvantage is the time,” he adds. “We call it the turtle plan.”
Another complication with the Strata is that it typically reams from the bottom to the top — after the pilot is drilled, the reaming head is brought to the bottom and attached to the end of a drill string so the loose rock falls down as the drill works its way up.
But of course, it is impossible to get a full-sized reaming head down to the bottom of the Mina San Jose. To solve this problem, a special reaming head was manufactured for the operation by Mining Technologies International in Sudbury, Ont. The custom tool’s components can be lowered down the pilot hole and assembled by the trapped miners below.
Fallon has not been overly concerned by the pace of his drill. Slow and steady is the only way to go — his target, the refuge chamber, is not very large, about two metres by two and a half metres. Missing was not an option.
“We will hit the target,” he said confidently a few weeks ago, lifting up a finger and moving it downwards in one swift, straight line. “Guaranteed we will hit the target. We will.”
The self-professed control freak — nicknamed the Crazy Canuck at the Mina San Jose — runs a tight ship, and when he hears a strange rattling in one of the water pumps, he stops talking mid-sentence and briskly walks over, running a hand along one of the pipes like a concerned rancher checking a horse’s leg. When a cameraman from one of the many documentary crews covering the rescue operation stuck his head inside a piece of machinery, Fallon had him kicked out and restricted future access to media.
“I’ve been told I’m a bit intimidating,” he says with a wry grin.
Fallon insists there has been no competition between Plan A and the other two drills. At the end of the day, there are 33 beating hearts at the bottom of his hole.
“The first people to get these people out, I’ll be the first to shake their hand,” he said. “It’s very humbling to be involved in this.”
PLAN B
After initial contact was made with the miners in August, two of the three small drill holes were converted into lifelines for the trapped men. For the past two months, two of these those holes have been used to send materials and food down to the miners in plastic tubes nicknamed palomas, or doves. Everything the miners need to survive has had to fit through those 14-centimetre openings.
One of the palomas is used for piping water and oxygen into the mine; it has also been threaded with telephone lines and a fibre-optic cable for video conferencing. According to the lead psychologist, Alberto Iturra, some 250 psychiatric experts have contributed to keeping the miners sane, and a doctor from the Chilean army has also been training the men for their final rescue, playing them exercise videos that demonstrate squats and lunges. The miners are also building their pulmonary resistance, singing as they exercise, so doctors will know when they are running short on breath.
The second paloma hole is being used to send down food. The meals have been carefully planned by a nutritionist with the Chilean health ministry in Santiago and the miners are maintaining a diet of about 2,500 calories per day to keep them trim enough for the final rescue.
The third hole that reached the miners in August has become the basis for the Plan B drill, a Schramm T-130.
This drill, owned by the Chilean mining company GeoTech, has been typically used for drilling deep-water wells. It arrived at the Mina San Jose from Collahuasi, one of the biggest copper mines in Chile.
If Plan A has been the turtle, Plan B has been the hare. A special drill system has been brought in for the Schramm T-130, one that uses a cluster of five pistons and bits in a single drill head, all working together to pulverize the ground at 1,500 blows per minute.
The drill is like a “glorified jackhammer,” according to Brandon Fisher, founder and president of Pennsylvania-based Center Rock Inc., which manufactures the system.
This is not the first rescue mission Fisher has been involved with. When he first heard that the Chilean rescue operation might take until Christmas, Fisher got on the Internet and began researching — what were the depths, the rock type, the geological conditions of the Mina San Jose?
Fisher was convinced his company could help the rescue move quicker. In 2002, Centre Rock was involved in a mission to rescue nine miners who were trapped underground for more than 77 hours at the Quecreek mine in Pennsylvania.
In some ways, the Quecreek mission was similar to the Mina San Jose operation — drills were used to create rescue holes for the trapped miners, who were ultimately pulled from the ground in rescue cages.
But at Quecreek, the trapped miners were only about 60 metres below the surface. At the Mina San Jose, Plan B is aiming for a workshop in the mine that is 628 metres below ground.
Still, Fisher felt he could pull the rescue off and cobbled together a PowerPoint presentation explaining his drilling system. Rescue organizers were sold and Fisher arrived in Chile on Sept. 4.
Plan B had an automatic advantage because its pilot hole was already in place by the time it started work. But because the final diameter must be so large, the hole had to be widened in two steps; first to 30 centimetres and then again to 71.
When Plan B finished its initial widening on Sept. 17, the miners — who have organized themselves into three work shifts — began contributing to the operation by using a front-end loader underground to remove the rock cuttings that drop to the bottom.
For all its speed, however, Plan B has also encountered the most problems of the three drills. It has the curviest trajectory — the hole is shaped like a rainbow near the top and becomes progressively more vertical as it deepens.
Because of the angles, the first 300 metres of drilling were riddled with problems. In the second week of September, Plan B’s drill also hit a reinforcement beam in the mine and shattered its bit. The chunk had to be fished out before drilling could continue — a process that involved estimating the angle of the drill bit and then designing the necessary tools to grab it out.
In the United States, fishing out that broken piece would have taken one or two days, Fisher says. In Chile, it required five, mainly because equipment had to be sent in from the States.
Fisher has been working around the clock at the Plan B site, sometimes going three days without returning to his hotel for a shower.
He says the Chilean government is paying for his time and equipment — “that’s the plan anyway.” But he is not at the Mina San Jose for the money. He is there for the miners.
“I don’t know that there’s 10 minutes that you’re out here that you don’t look down there and think, ‘There’s 33 guys 600 feet below our feet,’ ” he said. “Whenever you’re tired, it’s real easy to think, ‘Hey, I’m out here seeing sunlight and breathing fresh air. It’s time to suck it up and get these guys out of here.’ ”
PLAN C
In the mining town of Copiapó, about 45 minutes from the Mina San Jose, is a hotel called Las Pircas. For the past several weeks, its dining room has been transformed into something that resembles a northern Alberta pub.
Every day, for breakfast and supper, a few dozen men trickle into the dining room wearing Oilers caps or Calgary Flames sweatshirts. They smoke and drink coffee and talk with distinctly Canadian accents.
This is the Plan C crew, a team of about a dozen Canadians working on an oil and gas exploration rig owned by Calgary-based Precision Drilling Corp. The machine, called a Rig 421, was the third and final drill to arrive for the rescue dig.
A Chilean company, ENAP, is spearheading the Plan C operation and Schlumberger, the world’s largest oilfield services provider, was contracted to design the well.
But Precision has supplied the equipment and the men, all of whom were hand-selected by Shaun Robstad, a Precision field superintendent from Okotoks, Alta., just outside of Calgary.
Robstad first caught wind of the fact that Precision might be assisting with the Chilean rescue three days before the miners were discovered alive. A week later, he was en route to South America.
This is not Robstad’s first trip to Chile. In 2007, Precision shipped a 39-metre-high rig from Sundre, Alta., to Iquique, a port city in northern Chile. Robstad accompanied the drill rig, which was brought down to explore for gas. After two unsuccessful attempts, the rig was packed up and placed in storage.
“That’s where it sat until I got the call to come here,” Robstad says.
But when Robstad arrived in northern Chile to retrieve the rig, he discovered several parts had been stolen. All of the electrical cables were missing, as well as some beams. Most of the copper — Chile’s most precious commodity — had been stripped.
In any case, Robstad and his men packed up the massive rig and drove it 1,102 kilometres to the Mina San Jose. The journey required two days and 46 trucks.
To get on the work site, the caravan of trucks first had to pass through Camp Hope, the tent village that has sprung up at the base of the mine. The makeshift camp has amassed a startling amount of infrastructure, complete with a cafeteria, a school and even free Wi-Fi Internet service. It is a bizarre little universe where local mining families commingle with international journalists from as far away as Germany and Japan.
Every time a new piece of rescue equipment is delivered to the Mina San Jose, it is received with great fanfare. But the Precision Drill was perhaps the most anticipated addition to the ongoing rescue efforts, and when it arrived on site, people rushed from their tents and greeted the rig with applause and cheers. The Chilean president also attended the unveiling of the Precision drill, shaking Robstad’s hand and asking, “Who’s going to get there first?”
“It received a lot of hype, that’s for sure,” Robstad says. “The locals had a nickname for it, the Transformer. It comes here in pieces and then you put it together and the next thing you know, you see the giant mast going up in the air.”
The machine is indeed the largest of the three drills, requiring an area the size of a soccer field, about 70 metres by 110 metres — though even that is far too small a workspace, Robstad says.
The diesel-electric drill rig is powered by three generators and referred to as a “triple,” both because of its mast height and the drill’s ability to lift three joints of nine-metre-long pipe onto the drilling floor at a time. The drill is spun by a 95-centimetre rotary table and can hit depths of about 3,200 metres — though usually it doesn’t drill holes as wide as those required for this rescue.
Nonetheless, Plan C had a speed advantage because it didn’t need a pilot hole — it could drill the final diameter in just one go. The Precision drill’s challenge, however, has been to manoeuvre around an underground gallery before heading toward its target, a ramp 598 metres below the ground. This means Plan C had to drill vertically for the first 40 metres, after which it began boring at a seven degree angle.
Like the other drills, Plan C is staffed by two full crews 24 hours a day. An electrician and mechanic are always on site, standing by in case something goes wrong.
Like the other two drills, Plan C has had its good and bad moments. Some days, it can drill 50 metres; on others, it only clears 12.
“We’re getting lots of criticism saying we’re slow . . . but you have to remember it’s a big hole,” Robstad said. “You’re trying to steer it, you’re trying to get it the right way. People thought we were going to come in here and drill 100 metres, 1,000 metres a day.”
Robstad is mindful of the fact that the entire country — and much of the world — has been scrutinizing his work on the drill. Every so often, his men take a break and go out in Copiapó but Robstad has imposed a strict no-drinking rule. “I don’t want my guys showing up on the front page of the paper,” he said.
Robstad insists the only pressure he feels is from himself. And when he calls home to his 11-year-old girl, McKenzie, she always asks: “When are you going to get them out?”
Every morning, the Plan C crew meets inside its office on site to discuss the progress overnight and the plan for the new day. Inevitably, someone will mention the miners.
“It comes up every day: ‘I wonder what it’s like down there,’ ” Robstad said. “I don’t think they went to work that day thinking they wouldn’t be getting out.”
On Saturday morning, the sound of bells and truck horns suddenly filled the air at the Mina San Jose. It was a message of triumph — Plan B had completed drilling its rescue hole.
In Camp Hope, family members cheered, cried and waved Chilean flags. On the drill site, Champagne was sprayed and hard hats tumbled off as rescue workers hugged each other and shouted for joy.
It will still be days before the miners can be lifted out, however, and rescue planners are now determining whether the hole will be cased with steel pipe.
Plan B was always going to be the most difficult hole to encase, thanks to its winding trajectory. Seventy-two sections of steel pipe have been shipped to the Mina San Jose but according to a source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, GeoTech will likely bring in its own steel piping, which is manufactured slightly thinner and is easier to bend. The tentative plan is to encase the top 70 metres of the hole only, the source said.
When it comes time to hoist the 33 men up, a medic will descend into the hole to assess their condition. It has not been revealed yet in what order they will be rescued, but the likely scenario is that the strongest miner will go first, followed by the weakest, and then the rest will follow. The shift leader at the time of the collapse, foreman Luis Urzua, is expected to come up last.
The men will be hoisted up wearing Oakley sunglasses to protect their eyes from the blazing sunlight. After stepping foot on the surface, they will be treated initially in a field hospital, reuniting briefly with up to three relatives, and then flying by helicopter to a hospital in Copiapó, where they will remain for at least 48 hours.
Industry insiders say the disaster at the Mina San Jose will change the mining industry in Chile forever. Since the collapse, top officials with the country’s mining regulating body have been sacked and dozens of small mines have been shut down.
The sensational rescue operation has also captured Chile’s imagination and united the country behind a common cause. The country’s president and its mining minister, Laurence Golborne, have both seen their approval ratings skyrocket since the disaster.
Ongoing investigations continue to examine what caused the collapse at the Mina San Jose but early reports suggest support structures were weakened by overzealous mining. Families have already launched lawsuits against the company, as well as the government.
Nobody knows what will become of the mine after everything is over, but rescue planner Rene Aguilar thinks it should be shut down permanently. The gigantic piece of rock that caused the collapse is still perched in the mine at a precarious angle and could fall again.
“It could happen in the next five minutes or the next two years, nobody knows,” he said.
Like the hundreds of others who have been involved in the rescue on this dusty stretch of desert, Aguilar has put his life on hold for these 33 men. He has not left the mine area since he arrived after the collapse and Aguilar has had little time to tend to his full-time work at El Teniente or to his wife, who is pregnant with their fourth child.
But the significance of what they are on the cusp of accomplishing is not lost on him.
“We feel we’re doing the job for those miners, their families, our country,” Aguilar says quietly. “I think we are making history here.”
With files from Associated Press
© Copyright Toronto Star 1996-2010
Sunday, October 03, 2010
Tornado, Part 8 - Chess won't wait
Every day, a group of chess players, most of them speaking Russian, descend on the 4 stone chess boards in McDonald Park's center and play chess all day, an outer cousin of the chessery at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. The day after the tornado, in the midst of all the fallen trees,
Tornado, Part 8 - Chess won't wait
Every day, a group of chess players, most of them speaking Russian, descend on the 4 stone chess boards in McDonald Park's center and play chess all day, an outer cousin of the chessery at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. The day after the tornado, in the midst of all the fallen trees, they simply came in and moved fallen trunks and branches out of the way and sat down to play as if nothing had changed. Chess won't wait, biyatches!!!
Tornado, Part 7 - More McDonald Park
Half of this park's trees were wiped out by the tornado that swept through Brooklyn and Queens in September 2010. I just wanted to post a few random images of the day after.
Tornado, Part 7 - More McDonald Park
Half of this park's trees were wiped out by the tornado that swept through Brooklyn and Queens in September 2010. I just wanted to post a few random images of the day after.
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