ANATOMY OF A RESCUE
Once a plan was in place, it took a 41 metric tonne drill more than a month to complete the nearly 800m rescue shaft. On October 12, 2010, Florencio Ávalos was the first miner to reach the surface in the capsule – painted white, blue, and red, the colours of the Chilean flag.
lowers and rises and lowers again.
One miner begins pounding with a wrench on the pipe protruding from the ceiling. He strikes it against the pipe with joy and desperation. We’re here! We’re here!
Soon all 33 miners gather around the pipe and the drill bit, embracing and weeping. José Henríquez, who, after 17 days underground, has been transformed into a shirtless and starving prophet, looks at the drill bit and pronounces to everyone:
“Dios existe,” he says. God exists.
Up above, the drill operator feels the pulse in the steel and puts his ear to the shaft. He hears a frantic tapping. “It’s them!” he calls out.
The other drills on the mountain stop. Calls go out to Chilean officials. The drill team raises up the bit and removes the steel tubing from the shaft. The miners have painted the bottom of the tube. A note announces: “We are well in the Refuge. The 33.”
A camera and a microphone are lowered into the borehole, and soon the sound of the miners cheering and yelling comes over the speakerphone on the surface. The next tube lowered down contains small bottles of a glucose mixture. A note warns the miners not to drink it too quickly, but of course the men swallow it in one gulp, and several feel their stomachs cramp up painfully.
More glucose is sent down, along with medicines and eventually real food. Then the miners receive the first letters from their families.
On August 30, 25 days after the miners were trapped, the rescue team begins drilling a rescue hole. The plan is to excavate a 38cm pilot hole, then widen it to 71cm – room enough for a small capsule to bring the miners up one at a time. Because of the group’s location and the danger of another collapse in the 100-year-old mine, the rescue could take months. “God willing,” Chilean president Sebastián Piñera tells the men, “we’ll have you out before Christmas.”
The Nightmare Ends
Sixty-nine days after the miners were buried, on the night of October 12, rescuer Manuel González descends in a capsule to
THE DRILL OPERATOR FEELS THE PULSE IN THE STEEL
AND HEARS A FRANTIC TAPPING. “IT’S THEM!” HE YELLS
coordinate the evacuation. Florencio Ávalos is the first to go up. “We’ll see each other up on top,” he tells the other miners as he enters the cage. Ávalos rises through the shaft. It takes 30 minutes to get to the surface.
By the end of the next day, all 33 buried miners are brought to the surface. Rescuer González is the last man out. None of the men sustains serious injury, though most of them suffer lingering psychological and emotional issues – nightmares, depression and alcohol abuse.
Today, most of those problems have begun to heal. The men received pensions from the Chilean government, enough that the older men could retire. Most of the younger miners are back to work, though, s everal in aboveground jobs with the national mining company; one is a truck driver, and another has a fruit business.
None of the miners got rich from their adventure or the publicity surrounding it. But they are all still alive.
Even while still buried, the miners all agreed that if by some miracle any of them escaped alive, they would share their story only collectively – so that none of the 33 could individually profit from the experiences of the others. They chose Héctor Tobar, a Spanishspeaking, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer at the Los Angeles Times, to hear and tell that story. In October 2014, he published an official account, Deep Down Dark: the Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), from which this extract is drawn.
NONE OF THE MEN SUSTAINS SERIOUS INJURY, THOUGH MOST OF THEM SUFFER PSYCHOLOGICAL AND EMOTIONAL ISSUES