FRESH KILLS, NY – I’ve been up at the site for five hours, and can momentarily take a break from helping to give an update. They estimate there is perhaps 30 feet to the trapped miners, and they have some very definite signs of life now. they say they are close enough to make out some words through the air vent. There is a cautiously celebratory mood from the camp. There’s still a ways to go, and another collapse could happen at any time.

They continue to work on the main shaft, the vertical shaft has been abandoned. They had several other issues with instability and collapse of the shaft and with the apparent success of the main lateral tunnel, all efforts are being focused on that effort.

There seems to be twice as many people up here helping out than when I arrived, making perhaps a hundred people in the tunnel alone. All of the garbage is removed by hand, with all of the cross-bracing in the tunnel, you can’t get a wheelbarrow or anything down there, but they do have a fireman’s line sort of thing going with about 30 feet between people. Dozens more haul the slag away for later sorting.

With such good news, the camp is bubbling with a sort of nascent euphoria, and I have to admit, it is contagious. I continue to man the pumps, we have to supply clean air to many more people now, so it is even more important to pump quick and strong. Looks like tomorrow we’ll have a celebration.

Outside Fresh Kills, NY – They say they’ll let me back up to the site tomorrow, my symptoms of toxicity are almost out of my system. I feel fine, but their project doctors have more experience on this than I do. The housing we are in used to be a suburb of moderate affluence, and every worker at least has a house for themselves. There is no shortage of housing these days. I’m living with one of the camp doctors, in a spare bedroom.

His brother is up at the site every day, and he is preparing for the return of the miners. After this long without food, their systems will need to be brought back up to a normal metabolic rate slowly using specialized easily digested foods. He’s prepared a good deal of these foods, finely ground grains that essentially look like mush. He says it is almost how you’d bring a newborn infant up to adult foods, but it can be done more quickly than the year it would take for an infant.

This community feels like a place of deja vu of life before. There are so many people here, it actually feels like a community, like there should be a park district and a little league, ice cream parlors and pizza joints. There aren’t many places like this left in the world. Most people moved into the cities for the companionship, or, if they were up to the survival challenges, stayed in the countryside, living off the land by hunting and farming.  A group of people actually living and working together.

The community is right now a restless place to stay. The comings and going from the site are round the clock, and all members of the community are contributing. There are a small number of female miners, but all the wives and women of the community are capable of the physical demands of subsistence living. They have gone into a high activity mode since the collapse, pushing to produce more support resources. They pump and carry more fresh water from the groundwater wells, carry it to the site, gather and harvest more food, haul more waste away from the excavations, their backs are as broken as the men who have been down in the shaft for over a week now.

For the most part, they ignore the thought that hangs over everybody’s heads, that the men trapped in the mine will never make it out again. The several that I’ve talked to all deny the possibility, say they will not allow the thought into their heads.

“We’ll get them out,” is what they say to themselves, between themselves, and they believe it.

It is frustrating to me to be trapped here. Still, I’ve heard some strange rumblings at night near my room, but cannot place them. There’s a lot of unknown  people coming through. Most of the people in the community think they are a blessing, some think they are only here to find a place where survival is provided. I understand the need to belong to something these days, and they say they will attempt to provide if the new comers stay, but that contingency is after they find the trapped miners. I hope all of these people have good intentions. Found more graffiti today in three places, all saying the same thing, “1,000 years to rain.” Don’t know what it means, and neither does anybody else. People who would leave graffiti in a time like this are bad news, if you ask me.

Fresh Kills, NY – The pains I have been feeling have been getting worse. I’m off site about a mile away, in the worker’s living spaces. I’m not as used to the toxic environment as they are, and their doctor said the toxins in the air were building up in my system. It will take a few days, and I’ll get back to normal, relatively. I’ve never had such wretched vomiting in my life. My abdomen is pulled from it, my throat is scratchy, and my skin is pale. I can only guess at how many pounds I’ve lost. They call it newbie syndrome with a chuckle. But I can keep food down now.

We’re north west of the land fill in what had been New Jersey. I saw the old state sing on the roads. Most of the time, the winds blow the gases away from here. The air really couldn’t get cleaner. Used to be in a city like this, there would be pollution, the environment would be horrible, now, no cars, no people. I know Jersey has a rep for, you know, smells, but that has largely gone away. No chemicals production, no cars, no new pollution. That’s what happens.

I’ve been helping prepare food for the men who are still at work on the landfill. No survivors have been pulled out, but they are optimistic. They have taken to pouring water through the air ducts to keep them hydrated, and they still report sounds they think are voices coming back up.

Yesterday, I was able to speak with Randy Cahill, the man leading the drill straight down faction of the workers. He says his work is proceeding. He has his equipment in place and has been drilling for two days. The work is slower going than he had anticipated. He said his shaft is 30 feet deep, and has had problems of the equipment falling out of level after issues of sinking. The structural integrity of the landfill was solid when it was closed, but the mining has upset the underlying integrity.

When the equipment moves out of level, it has to be re-set. He’s on his third attempt at a hole, and he feels he has now worked out the technical issues he has had. They also must turn the drill by hand, as there isn’t enough fuel to run it. They have rigged levers and the thing he describes sounds like a medieval mill, or torture device.

I asked him about what he thinks of the tunnel strategy. He laughed a little.

“What happens if the tunnel collapses? Those guy’s air supply is gone. All of that work is only going to unsettle more layers above them. No, we make a shaft, reinforce it on the way down. Nothing to interfere with their lifeline. And how far do they have to dig? Much further than us.”

I also asked him about their environment. He thinks with the constant fresh air being delivered to them, they should be in good shape. He has to believe they are.

He thanked me for helping them pump air, and then left.

There are people coming from the area to help with the efforts. Some won’t go close to the mine, but they bring food, provide whatever support they can. Others go up to the mine, spend an afternoon clearing in the tunnel, turning the drill, or pumping air. There’s been maybe 50-60 more people who came to help out already, and others trickle in. Word is traveling.

Something I’ve never seen before has popped up in at least three places in the community, graffiti carved saying “1,000 years to Rain”. Nobody seems to know what it means, but the people that I know from the mine say they’ve never seen it before this situation and new people started turning up.

FRESH KILLS, NY – My body is done with pumping the air supply for today. They have granted me a reprieve from my shifts, as it has helped them to dig their way closer to the trapped miners faster. There are some locals who are also coming in to help, but they are supporting topside, not in the mine itself.

The head of the follow the main tunnel faction is named Adam Powell. He opened up to me in a brief moment between shifts. I’ve had my eyes on him as a leader of the site, and I don’t think I’ve seen him down and not working for more than an hour at a time for anything including sleep. I don’t know how he’s coping with the stress, it can only be the task at hand that is keeping him straight.

he has assured me he believes the men trapped are alive, he says he has heard their voices coming along the ductwork, but adds they can’t make out what is being said due to the effect of the reverb coming up the ducts.

I found out a bit more about their operation. They all work on this as a communal effort. They sell or trade what they dig up for food and the usual life support needs with locals who are attempting to rebuild some of the technology that made late 20th century life so comfortable. There are a number of factories near here that are being retooled, and some big people are looking for raw materials, working microchips, anything they can get their hands on. They need copper and aluminum for wires. The copper is for local wiring and the aluminum gets used for high tensile lines.

High tensile! these guys aren’t messing around. They want to get the power plants running again. and supplying power to the area. They want to be back to the 20th century in the next year.

Copper can be found in near pure form in the ground, but this environment is very corrosive, and much of what they find has the usual green patina. Aluminum was convenient last century, but is not found in nature pure. Adam was a metallurgist and is one of the founders of this project, the one who realized that mining the trash would be easier than mining nature. I had no idea about some of this. The cap of the Washington Monument was the largest piece of pure aluminum in the world at the time. He has a mind on the future.

Problem is, you need electricity to refine aluminum, so if you want the pure stuff at this point, you need to find it where you can.

His idea of reaching the miners is to do extra reinforcement on the way in, pull them out and then take off the top from here on out. The landfill proved to be less stable than he’d thought it would be, and this experience is destroying him. He estimated the distance to the miners as about 500 ft down, maybe 1,000 linear feet. The problem is, shoring up the loose garbage is slow, and the materials to do it are scarce. Sometimes they pull something out of the tunnel, and it goes right back in to hold up the ceiling or the walls. They took me about twenty feet into the tunnel, but won’t let me go further in. it is a maze of irregular cross braces. I can’t imagine working further deep in. The air is toxic, the danger of tripping is high.

I’m going to find an opportunity with the leader of the drill straight down faction. It isn’t like they hold press conferences.

Fresh Kills, NY There is little to report. People weren’t talking to me much until I started to pitch in. Mostly I have worked on the breathing apparatus. These are fairly crude devices, like bellows that is about the size of a person. They have ten of these running normally for a crew, about one per person, and there were several mine entrances going at any time. With this situation, all mining operations have been suspended, and the apparatus has been transferred to this site. It was only yesterday that all of them became fully operational in the rescue.

There is an old landfill air system, part of the design, but it isn’t designed to support humans. The ducts are more designed to drive waste gases out. These gases are used as fuel on site as they can, but it isn’t useful as a primary energy source.

The camp is breaking into factions. Some say to clear starting from the mine entrance. Some think they should dig directly down, starting with a narrow air shaft they can lower food down, then widen it to aid in the rescue. The problem is, there is no modern equipment for pinpointing exactly where to dig. It could be a shot in the dark.

Another faction wants to clear the tunnel leading to the trapped miners, but the issue becomes the fear of another collapse.

They say they think they have heard voices coming back up the air tube, and so their hopes of rescuing their trapped brethren remain high despite the long odds of success.

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Fresh Kills, NY – The men continue to pump air into the chamber. There have been several strategies employed in the rescue, but each has met with unforeseen issues. They tried to clear waste from the top, but the time this would consume is too great to hope for any of the men trapped to survive. They have also tried clearing the shaft leading in, but cave-ins continue to happen. After the garbage hit the landfill, the plastic bags tended to rupture, making the piles essentially fluid. It’s like quicksand, the more you move out, the more falls in. Tunneling underneath the surface leads to collapses, and so they are going to try to drill a shaft down. The machinery they have might have been capable of this were a mine, but its weight makes it unsteady on the landfill base. They also have limited diesel fuel to run it. I was thinking about calling Blankenship Towers for a donation, but I guess that bridge is burned. Can anybody supply a recipe for biodiesel? It would seem like we’d have enough raw materials to cook some up. I’d do anything to help if it could get me away from the smell.

There doesn’t seem to be any one person in charge, but several leaders are emerging from the men here. The situation looks more and more dire, but the men and their families refuse to give up hope.

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I’m nearing Fresh Kills, NY, and I can smell it. The pollution and run-off from the rivers in the area make the sea a septic mess. Add to that the garbage mine’s stench and I may never smell again. Soren, I’ll get you back for this assignment if I have to build a boat to get across the ocean to do it.

The strange thing about an event like this is I can just walk up to it. There’s no media circus, no press area like there would have been ten years ago. I just walked into camp and started talking. Thing is, I can only talk to the people who are on break. It took me four hours to find somebody in charge who would take a moment to speak with me. Facts are these: there’s nine men trapped. They suspect that the collapse is down the tunnel from where they were, so they suspect there is enough air to last for a while down there. The toxicity of the environment however means they have to act fast, or the air they have will be unbreathable.

They spent nearly a day discussing strategies, about 36 hours ago. It needs to be said, I guess that there aren’t any professional miners in the area, and the material is not like mining into bedrock. They were making up safety guidelines as they went. The garbage is certainly not stable, and collapses are not uncommon here. The difference this time is that the collapse is deeper. This particular tunnel was a new experiment to go under the newer trash to get at material that is older, pre-recycling, richer in the materials they wanted.

I should give you a little lay of the land. Any tunnel must be constantly pumped. They have made air canals leading from the entrances of the shafts using pipes and metal of whatever they came up with from the landfill. These pumps were manned by hand to create a constant flow of waste gas out and air in. This is something of the trapped men’s saving grace. They are well reinforced, and the air is being constantly cycled, even more aggressively than when in normal operating mode.

The safety regs they had were never written down, but were an ad hoc combination of experience and guesswork. As they dug tunnels, they would reinforce as best they could. This is what led to this situation. They severely underestimated the weight of the trash above the tunnel. I have yet to get names, other than nicknames, but I will continue reporting from here as I collect the pieces of the puzzle.

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Just got the call. On the move towards Staten Island. I’m to get there as soon as possible.

Filed June 11th 2012

Graduation day. It isn’t what it used to be. Remember when you’d have a big thing in an auditorium that had no air conditioning? The bleachers would be pulled out and our parents would sit sweating in their finest clothes. Now we stand in a line and wait for a downloaded digital copy of the credentials, paper copies may be bought, but most of us can’t afford it. Not like I dreamed it would be. My parents aren’t alive anymore to see it. This is supposed to be one of those days, one of those all time most important days in your life, but for me, it’s a formality, a period at the end of the last sentence in a book, probably the most trivial event of my college experience.

Of course, the journalism degree course of study isn’t what it used to be either. Three years of survival training, and a little English. I can build a fire in a monsoon, find my way out of the deepest jungles or forests, survive a blizzard alone, and get out of a hard scuffle, but the actual journalism part of the degree was handled in a few classes in one term. I suppose I’ll get the rest of the education on the job. I’m one of the lucky ones. I have a job lined up. It isn’t a job like my parents had, I’m not paid, per se, I’m supported and backed by somebody I’ve never met, but who went to the Profs for a recommendation. I made sure he would pay for the paper diploma before I accepted.

After the ceremony, I went to get my things from my room. A pack had been left for me, as expected. I don’t know who dropped it off, the Resident Advisor, maybe? Inside was my communicator, basically a satellite phone with data capability, a computer in decent shape, some cash of several currencies (not as much as promised. Whoever delivered it had lined his pockets a bit) and some bargaining chips. I powered up the computer and communicator, just to see that they in fact were working, then put them back.

This and a couple other packs of my personal things were all I had as I went out in the world. I loaded them into the sidecar on my Puc and headed off. I’d like to say that I was chosen based on my winning personality or my grades, but no. Mostly it was the bike. Having transport in this job is important, and the rest of my class was setting out on foot.

Once out of the university’s grounds, I powered up the communicator again, and sent a message to retrieve my assignment. Boston. I could handle Boston, a few days of traveling, I hoped, but I had a stop to make that was only a little out of the way. I hoped the editor wouldn’t mind a little personal business. Is the GPS system still up? Does my communicator have a GPS?

I started out on 95. It’s decent still near the city, and you don’t have to worry about traffic, but once you get out of town you run into issues. You have to pick your way around potholes, then sections where the road is nearly gone. A lot of places, I only got 5 mph. When I left the highway, going got even harder.

When I made Lake Galliard, the moon was full and the sky clear, and I couldn’t have felt more miserable. The house was mostly packed up, and would stay that way as far as I could see. I didn’t want to stay there now. The memory of having a family was too close. I wanted to know the house was still standing, drop something off, and come back, I don’t know. Years from now. When it’s better.

When you grow up by the lake, Yale is a religion. My family wanted me to get into the school more than anyone ever, but we were nouveau riche. We didn’t fit in. We didn’t belong. My father designed computer chips, high end architecture stuff, made enough money to give to the school heavily. I had the grades, and I was accepted, but the early stages of the catastrophes were already underway. Both my parents died in my first year.

They were buried in a Catholic Cemetery about a mile from the house. I walked there by moonlight with my diploma, a tin, and a small folding shovel. I buried it with them. They wanted it more than me.

I couldn’t deal with sleeping in that house. It didn’t feel like mine. I made a bonfire in the backyard, and slept under the stars.

150 miles in an undisclosed direction from Blankenship’s patrols. Bastard won’t follow me here. Camping in the middle of what was probably a state park. Took a deer. field dressed it, and cooked a prime cut, hung some more out to smoke. We’ll see if it’s ready before I have to move out for the next assignment. Took the rest of the carcass a good distance from the site. Smell should attract away any bears that might be lurking in the area.

It was a bad turn to have my first assignment work out this way. Is journalistic integrity worth my life? Especially in this world?