35 miles the hell away from Fresh Kills NY – I don’t know where I am, but I’ve lost Blankenship’s thugs. Yeah, Blankenship again. Ran into them this morning, just before the explosion. Yeah, it’s been a great day.

Where do I start? We were very close to the miners. The line of people carrying garbage out looked like ants digging an anthill. They were so close. I left to take a break, have a piss off to the side when I was jumped by three men. I recognized one of the attackers as one of Blankenship’s top security guys, right away, his introduction wasn’t necessary. Can I just say it isn’t nice to jump a girl who’s pissing? I had my pants almost up when they grabbed me, so my hands were down, and my pants slid down as they dragged me. I made noise, but I didn’t think anybody had heard me. They knew their area, dragged me away from the paths most people take back to the community.

He had me in a bear hug, and was dragging me, kicking and struggling, away. The guy holding me was good. He kept out of the range of my head’s movement, so a head butt wasn’t going to work. Kicking was mostly out, everything I did with my legs dropped my pants lower. Only way to go was to break the grip. I feigned a few moves, then slipped myself a few inches lower through the grip, dug my nails into a pressure point in his hands and pulled as hard as I could.

He dropped me, and I managed to get a hand down to pull up my pants. it isn’t decent of them to attack me in such a state, but I knew I wasn’t going to a moment to buckle. I held them with my hand and made a break for it through the widest gap I could get through. As I ran, one took a step in with his leg. Big mistake. Left himself open. Gave a good sharp kick to his knee, and I’m pretty sure I broke it. Steel toes. Can’t beat them when you need to take out a knee.

That gave me a step away, and while that was nice, two or three were much nicer. I put on all the speed I could before I felt an arm grab my elbow. I rolled my shoulder and mostly broke free. I pulled hard, released his last grip on my sleeve, and ran hard, buttoning my pants as I went.

And then I was practically back to the dig site. I heard gunfire behind me. Fuckers were shooting. I can’t dodge bullets, but it isn’t going to stop me from trying. I made my run much more erratic, hoping I’d be able to get away. Good thing about guns is they’re usually effective. Bad thing about guns is their report is unmistakable and loud. The sound attracted attention from above, and when Adam Powell saw it was me running from a few men, he started running for me.

It probably saved his life.

There was a series of explosions up at the site. A fireball shot into the air which knocked down Adam and the few others who were coming my way. I could feel the blast of heat from where I was. The funny thing about being chased by a guy with a gun is explosions don’t necessarily scare you off. I ran for Adam, safety in numbers, and I saw others who had been up top running away, any way they could to reach safety.

Garbage was flying through the air, flaming papers and melting plastics raining down. And now that I’m writing this, I remember the graffiti “1,000 Years to Rain”. had to be connected, but I’m not going back there to investigate.

When Blankenship’s people saw the explosion, they turned and ran. We found shelter until the debris landed and then rushed up to the site. The place was obliterated. You could see the explosion started from deep in the mine, as the whole main tunnel had collapsed. There had been a secondary round of explosions near the mouth of the tunnel. this was the source of the debris. We rushed to help the injured, me constantly keeping an eye over my shoulder. There were burns, open wounds, it was a war zone.

I did what I could for hours, but my safety was still questionable. I stuck close to Adam, pulling people away from the site, treating them. There wasn’t nearly the first aid supplies we needed to treat everyone. People from the neighborhood began pouring in with what supplies they could, and the reinforcements began treating the wounds.

I worked into the evening last night, and there were several turns at guarding me over the night.

I can only give you a little bit of what this means. The men in the mine are dead, as are a lot of people in the tunnel. I don’t have a death toll of any accuracy, but I’ve heard estimates from 50 to 120. There are near as many wounded. Adam wasn’t sure if they would be able to continue the mining, if the project would go on there. Much of their equipment was destroyed. For a while he thought he was going to travel with me, and I would have welcomed him. In the end, he escorted me ten miles away before he stopped me, got off the back of my cycle and began walking back. He couldn’t leave his community like that, but he felt I was safely far away.

So that’s it. I don’t know what all of this means, who caused the explosion, or why, but I have to get away from there right now for my own safety.

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.

This is my formal declaration of an S.O.S. that I doubt many people will be able to do anything about, but at least it’s out there. There are eighteen of us at Entriquillo near the lake. The new camp location we’ve chosen seems secure enough, so I’ve decided to set up a rather permanent base here while we try to figure out what the hell is going on. Where was I? Ah, yes….we took off.

After we were airborne, it was hard to take stock in the situation. If it were only up to me, I would have went straight to Puerto Rico like we were supposed to…but somewhere in the flight, we heard about the flooding on the West Coast, so we decided to make for higher ground. I really wish our military was still making noise on the other end of our radio…it’s too quiet here now. We decided we’d head for Pico Duarte…it’s the highest point on the island, and we figured it was the best chance we had of not getting annihilated by seawater. There was a decent stretch of paved road that we landed on that was near the peak.

When we landed, we attracted a lot of attention to ourselves. There was a crowd near the peak that had flagged us down. Interesting lot of about a hundred or so. The quicker ones got to us first, explaining that they wanted to leave, something I assumed had to do with the flooding we’d heard about mid-flight. Amanda took this time to point out that in the middle of the ‘crowd’, there was a batch of locals with sticks, bats, and farming tools. I thought they were going to try to take the plane by force, but they were facing the other direction…they were fending off a bunch of their sick/dead/re-living peers. It seemed like they had things under control until I realized that there were only ten of them down the hill fighting off the . And only five of them were up with us. Hundred…fifteen…uh oh. Some quick mental math and I suddenly found myself back in the cockpit firing the engines back up. Two of the locals were overwhelmed by them when one of their sticks got stuck jabbed in an eye. I would’ve just dropped it and ran, but then again, I was already in the plane.

I remember hearing them scream “No en las sombras”…which means “not into…” something. I can’t remember what sombras means, but at the time I thought they were screaming ‘zombies’. It was really eerie hearing them scream like that. Despite the distraction of taking the plane off and the mental translation (and being on a tropical island), their cries for help still gave me the chills. By the time I got the bird off the ground, we had only lost three of the crowd. The silence from the cargo hold was their own homage to their fallen saviors. Not sure if that’s completely true, because I was busy flying a plane off of a mountain highway, but it’s better than the alternative of them being silent because they were dead and getting ready to eat me or something. Luckily this was not the case.

One of the survivors, Miguel Soto, decided to make a trip up to the cockpit. He sat in Robert’s old seat…It still hadn’t hit me that Robert was one of them now. Soto suggested we head North to the airport in Santiago. We cordially shot down his idea and Jack got out the charts to find someplace else with some decent altitude.

We decided to head South to the Baoruco Mountain Range. I didn’t want to land. Who knew the amount of damage that was going to be caused by this supposed flooding. So, I spent five hours practicing the four basics of fixed wing flight. Ascent, Descent, Turns, and Straight & Level Flight. God, I was bored. I always find flying boring when there’s a lack of destination, lack of somewhere to land, or a lack of ability to do power dives.

The Radio wasn’t much help when it came to decision making, so we decided to land on the range near the Haitian border before we were entirely out of fuel. Practical enough for me. 3,000ft is a lot of distance for the ocean to suddenly swoop up and consume us. I felt safe, and that’s all that mattered to me….because I was driving.

We waited on that range for weeks. When we did get a radio transmission, it usually involved something going wrong somewhere  in the rest of the world. I think the worst part about it was the slightly clueless feeling anyone had when they spoke over the radio…almost as if they weren’t sure it was really happening. The weather was quite nice, and the view spectacular. To the south was more of the Caribbean, and on our North side were the mountains we just flew from about 40 miles away. Halfway between us and those mountains, a beautiful lake that shimmered in the sun like nothing else. Even in disaster, I could still find beauty in the world.

The weeks were spent finding new sources of food (couldn’t go eating all of the government issued emergency food for the Puerto Rican Flu survivors…so we only had half) and fighting off the occasional cluster of “Las Sombras” as the locals like to call them. It literally means “the Shadows”, but every time I swear I hear ‘Zombies’. Maybe I’m just paranoid. We stuck close to the plane…emergency situations were inevitable, we just weren’t sure when. It turned out to be last week.

I was tinkering with some of our emergency broadcast technology. I wanted to try and get the internet working and see if there really was any flooding. I could see to the ocean and wasn’t seeing any changes. It was then that I read about the disaster in Washington, the  washing over of LA, and that we actually survived six hurricanes. I found it ironic that the first one this season was named AJ.

It’s time to start my building shift. Between the eighteen of us, we’ve been doing quite well for ourselves. The camp is centered around the plane. We taxied it closer to the lake to get a better view across it. We have one tower up right next to the plane that we use as the camp sentry, and we’re in the process of building more permanent housing, a stock room, and another tower at the edge of the lake. The tents from the plane are great and all, but I’m not a fan of mosquitoes. Or bugs in general.

Most of the locals can speak English, and most of us can speak Spanish, so I suppose that’s good. Soto’s been a big help here. He was an English teacher, so I sort of declared him the go-to guy when anyone really needs anything. And by anyone, I mean me, because I can’t remember a damn thing from the 3 years of high school Spanish I slept through. I can understand a lot more than I thought I remembered, but my head is so messed up with Polish, French, and German that I can’t remember my Spanish anymore. Odd to think that was ten years ago.

Can you tell I’m procrastinating? I really don’t want to go build, but I suppose being late to my own shift  in a system I came up with would be  a bad thing.

More from Camp Calloway when I can find time. I scheduled us to be busy to keep from getting bored.

Semper Paratus

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.

I finally got this damn thing working. My name is Lt. Commander AJ Green. We performed an emergency landing in the Dominican Republic twelve weeks ago in response to a distress call that sounded like a medical outbreak. I was very wrong.

We were flying in an HC-144A from Clearwater, FL to the old Coast Guard Station in Borinquen, Puerto Rico. This was during the brief period of time when the governments were still trying to gain control over the situation. Vaccines were being shipped to combat a virus that was mutating out of control, supplies were being shipped away like candy. We were to transport aid, vaccines, and supplies that were needed to continue the treatment of influenza victims in the Caribbean for the next month.

Lt. Jack Solomon and I were assigned two additional crewmen to manage the handling of  medical personnel and supplies.

Ensigns Amanda Briggs and Robert Calloway joined us in the cockpit after strapping in the fourteen relief personnel into the cargo hold with the hummer, the vaccines, all of the electrical equipment that needed replacing on base, and enough emergency rations for a small village to live happily for a few months.

About 30 minutes from our destination, we heard a very unique call for help. Someone on one of the islands we were passing had locked himself in the control room of a military outpost in Haiti. He was screaming (in broken English throughout broken static). The strangest thing I recall hearing was that his father was trying to kill him. Somewhere in there he mentioned his father’s funeral being several weeks ago.

We radioed back and decided that this could have been some new strain of disease in the outbreak that the doctors needed to attend to before it got out of control. We changed course and decided we were going to try to land at the old Cibao Airport in Santiago.

We landed at what was the start of the first of at least three hurricanes that plowed over the airbase. We taxied into the only roofed service hangar and did the only thing we could do in a hurricane. We waited.

A week went by of solid storms. We did our best to keep the hangar doors closed at all times, but mostly we stayed in the plane. The occasional bashing on the outside of the hangar was easier to ignore in the cockpit. The hangar had a bathroom, and the eighteen of us waited out the storms. Apparently the rest of the island wasn’t so lucky.

When we emerged from the hangar, piles of debris were everywhere. Over the course of the next two weeks, half of the island came down with some strange strain of the disease. One of the doctors on board tried to explain it to me, but all I got from the conversation was that it wasn’t swine flu, and it was blown here from another island thanks to the hurricane. Mosquitoes, maybe?

Five of our medical personnel died that week from it. Another eight (including Lt. Soloman and Ensign Calloway) were on death’s doorstep for about a week before a few of them died. Calloway, Jack, and another one of the doctors eventually pulled through, but the other five didn’t make it.  Ensign Briggs and I, with the help of Dr. Gerald Samuel (the only other person in good health), buried the dead outside the airport limits behind the hangar. We really wanted to get out of there, but Calloway and Jack weren’t exactly making a speedy recovery and the doctor didn’t want them to be moved at all. During his copious amounts of free time, Samuel was able to determine that all of the victims had mosquito bites. Very peculiar.

I took one of the luggage go-carts out of the hangar with Amanda, and we drove through the airport looking for a fuel pump or a tanker truck. I didn’t know where we were going next, but I sure as hell wanted a full tank of gas when we left.

That’s when I first saw them. Coming in from the other side of the airport, a small mob of about a dozen locals was shuffling their way towards us. Briggs wanted to speak with them, but I couldn’t help but feel like something was off about them. There was nothing wrong with how they looked, aside from being locals. It’s just that they didn’t move like they were supposed to. It seemed…inhuman…the way they swayed and staggered about while they approached us. It was almost as if they’d forgotten how to walk. I saw a tanker truck and decided we’d make for that instead. Briggs and I ditched the cart and hopped into the truck. There was some debris in the passenger seat (someone left their windows open), but we took off across the tarmac anyways.

We ran into another problem outside the hangar. Those doctors we buried the week before…they were limping around the corner to greet us. Covered in mud, staggering the same way our pursuers were giving chase they were all converging in on us at the hangar.

That was probably not the best time for Robert to come out to investigate the strange knocking noises he was hearing on the hangar walls.  They were on him and dragged him behind the hangar before we had a chance to do anything. I couldn’t see what they were doing to Robert, but no one came out from behind the hangar for quite some time. We capitalized on this window of opportunity to open up the hangar, get the tanker in, and lock it back up before any of them had a chance to come back.

We started fueling and were trying to figure out a destination to get the hell out of there. Briggs suggested Puerto Rico, our original destination. Samuel suggested warning Haiti that there was some sort of epidemic on the island and to close the border. I really should stop listening to doctors.

We managed to get out of there without a scratch.  Apparently they aren’t too bright….didn’t think to use the door in the back of the hangar…they just kept banging on the walls until they saw we were leaving.

As I was setting the plane up for departure, that’s when I saw the rest of them. A giant mob of hundreds…possibly even a thousand or more…feebly approaching from the terminal. The odd thing was, as we were leaving the ground, I swear I saw the shape of a man on top of the control tower, beckoning them in our general direction. I had absolutely no idea what was going on at the time.  Now I know I should have shot the bastard where he stood. Or at least knocked him off the tower.

Damn it…the clouds are rolling in, and I have to get this equipment under some cover before it gets rained on.  I’ll explain more when I can, but I don’t have an awful amount of free time while we’re dealing with these border attacks. There always seem to be more of them after a storm…

Semper Paratus.

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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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