The following extract is taken from a journalist's account of the Chilean mining disaster of 2010. When the mine collapsed, thirty-nine miners were trapped underground for sixty-nine days. The account is based on interviews with the miners following their rescue. The sound and the blast wave interrupt thirty-four men labouring inside stone corridors. Men using hydraulic machines to lift stone, men listening to stone crash against the metal beds of dump trucks, men waiting for the lunch truck in a room carved from stone, men drilling into stone, men driving diesel-fed machines down a stone highway, and men wearing eroded stone on their clothes and their faces. 5 The truck driver Raúl Villegas is the only one of the thirty-four miners underground at the moment of the collapse who manages to escape. He watches in horror as a dust cloud gathers in his rearview mirror and quickly overtakes his truck. He speeds through the cloud toward the exit and when he reaches the mouth at which the Ramp opens to the surface, the dust follows him outside. A gritty brown 10 cloud will continue flowing out of that malformed opening for hours to come. Inside the personnel truck at Level 190, Lobos and Galleguillos are the two men closest to the collapse, which hits them as a roar of sound as if a massive skyscraper were crashing down behind them, Lobos said. The metaphor is more than apt. The vast and haphazard architecture of the mine, improvised over the 15 course of a century of entrepreneurial ambition for profit, is finally giving way. A single block of diorite¹, as tall as a forty-five-story building, has broken off from the rest of the mountain and is falling through the layers of the mine, knocking out entire sections of the Ramp and causing a chain reaction as the mountain above it collapses, too. Granitelike stone and ore are knocked loose, pulled downward 20 to crash against other rocks, causing the surviving sections of the mine to shake as if in an earthquake. The dust created and propelled by the explosions shoots sideways, upward, and downward, ejected from one passageway and gallery in the mine’s maze of corridors to the next. In an office about one hundred feet above the mine opening, Carlos Pinilla, the 25 hard-driving general manager, hears the thunder crack and his first thought is: But they’re not supposed to be blasting today. He concludes that it’s probably another collapse of rock inside the Pit, which is nothing to be worried about. But the sound of rolling thunder doesn’t stop. His phone rings, and the voice on the line says, “Step out your door and look at the mine entrance.” Pinilla walks into the midday 30 sun and sees a billowing cloud of dust bigger than any he’s seen before. ¹ diorite: a type of rock