Marco Rincón heard the tragedy in the form of three explosions: "It sounded like three dynamite detonations, but then I found out it was something much worse."
What he heard on a dark Tuesday night, shortly after
eight at night, occurred within the Andean mountains of the mining municipality of Sutatausa, just two hours from Bogotá.
Rincón, a 62-year-old man, lives in a small white house located near several coal mines, in the village of Peñas de Cajón, and what he heard came from underground.
“Those mines go down a little more than a kilometer deep and they said that the combination of methane and coal dust could explode there at any second,” says Rincón, who was a miner for more than 40 years.
The chemical combination never exploded when he was underground.
It did happen to more than 30 miners on Tuesday night.
"I've never seen anything like it, I swear," he says.
The explosion occurred when the 30 were just beginning their night shift, which runs from six or seven at night to two or three in the morning.
Some of them had only been working there for a year, others more than 10, most had seen their parents and siblings dedicate their lives to the extraction of coal.
An explosion at seven interconnected mines claimed the lives of 11 people, nine made it out alive.
And nearly 24 hours after the explosion, the location or whether 10 other miners are still alive is unknown.
A man who was near the Los Chocos mine is taken to an ambulance for first aid.Vannessa Jiménez
“According to the initial hypotheses, what happened was an agglomeration of gases: methane gas, carbon monoxide, and coal dust.
Together they are highly explosive,” says Captain Álvaro Farfán, departmental fire department delegate.
Since Tuesday night, a huge group of rescuers has arrived in the area, but several characteristics have made it very difficult to enter in large groups to search for the missing: the long kilometer of depth to go down, the more than 500 underground hectares to review and the toxic air that stays underground.
Farfán, who tries to hide the dark circles that have left him more than 20 hours awake, does not anticipate the future.
But his tone doesn't sound optimistic.
A colleague of his, a few meters later, says it explicitly: "If they are alive, it would be a miracle."
Since the sun came up on Wednesday morning, dozens of miners, men and women, dressed in swamp boots and ruanas to defend themselves from the Andean cold, watched the rescue operations from afar.
In Sutatausa there is informal and formal coal mining, but the mines where the explosion occurred are formal and in principle comply with the accident prevention regulation.
"There are more than 100 people who work here and I don't like to say this, but luckily the accident happened at night and not during the day, because many more could have died," says a miner who prefers not to give his name.
Jhon Chiquizá, one of the miners working in the rescue work.Vannessa Jiménez
He explains that the mines should have very good fans, so that the air circulates underground.
"That doesn't always happen, you feel it when you lack oxygen, due to the heat, and the best thing you can do at that moment is to get out," he adds.
A friend, also a miner, told him: "God willing they are alive, but can you imagine their despair?"
Authorities have not said whether the mines failed to comply with the protocols, but several relatives of the deceased and missing are upset that it was not the companies that called them to tell them about the accident.
They found out through social media.
"What you want is for our families to die underground so as not to pay for their healthcare," an older man yells at a soldier, before his family hugs him and pulls him away from the confrontation.
The Red Cross is also present in Peñas de Cajón, providing psychosocial support to the relatives of the disappeared or deceased, and protecting them from the pack of international and national journalists who have arrived.
Several of the 11 corpses are still underground and their relatives look from afar at the holes through which their brothers or children went down to work.
They look with the sad hope of recognizing a body, but seeing it lifeless.
Near them there is a mural with a drawing of a miner and a child.
In it, the father tells his son that in the hands of God is the possibility that "we, the miners of heart, come out from the bowels of the earth to see our loved ones."
Relatives of the trapped miners await information around a Red Cross tent.Vannessa Jiménez
Some relatives want to approach the press.
Nidia Sofía Monroy, for example, is a 20-year-old woman who carries a one-year-old baby in her arms and says that her brother is one of the disappeared.
“I haven't been able to tell my mom what happened.
We already lost another brother a few months ago in a traffic accident, and one side of her body is paralyzed by stress,” she says after a sleepless night.
Another is Angela Cristina Pineda whose son, Cristian Eduardo, 31, is also among the disappeared.
“He told me a month ago that he found out about a gas leak in the mine, but the truth is that he thought that this had already been controlled,” she says.
As she speaks, another older woman bursts into tears into the arms of Red Cross officials.
A man, a distant relative, explains that he has just learned that one of his sons died in the mine;
His other son was also on the night shift, and is one of the missing.
It is five in the afternoon, heavy rain falls on Peñas de Cajón.
Almost 21 hours have passed since the explosion.
An official from the Protection Unit, Angélica Herrera, appears before the media to give an update on the rescue work.
After two in the afternoon, they managed to recover the bodies of four of the 11 deceased, she explains, and the groups of rescuers go down to the mines in shifts, every two hours, to find the rest.
But they have not confirmed whether the 10 missing are alive, and rescuers are concerned about new underground explosions and landslides that have occurred.
“Can those 10 miners show up alive?” a reporter asks Herrera.
"We have faith in God," he replies.
Like his family and fellow miners, despite the hardships of the underworld, Sutatausa still hopes for a miracle to happen.
A man carries two empty stretchers as the miners remain trapped underground.Vannessa Jiménez
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