Buried alive: How 33 men survived being trapped underground for 69 days | News World

The terrified group men spent 15 days underground with no contact from the surface world. For greater than two weeks, that they had no idea if anyone was coming to get them, or whether or not they can be left to die following a catastrophic mine collapse in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

Some believed they were ‘trapped underground with the devil’ following the San Jose copper mine disaster, 15 years ago on 5 August 2010. And just because the miners were terrified they wouldn’t make it out alive, above them, their families had no idea whether or not they had survived the collapse.

The San Jose mine, a big shaft which zig-zags down into the earth, had been destroyed when a boulder the dimensions of the Empire State Constructing collapsed, sealing 33 miners half a mile underground. 

Their lives had only been saved from the cave-in by the undeniable fact that they were waiting in a big cavern for the transport to reach to take them up for lunch. Had they been throughout the tunnels of the 120-year-old colliery, the employees will surely have died. 

‘All of the mines within the Atacama Desert at the moment were pretty unregulated, so it was so much more dangerous than you’ll expect. It had been allowed to work with effectively a single entry, which suggests if there’s a disaster, there was only a technique out and in,’ Brian Robinson of UK Mines Rescue tells Metro.

Fighting for survival

Trapped underground, the boys survived on basic rations and dirty water. They’d what little light they might use from their head lamps, although they used it sparingly, and it was exceptionally hot and dusty. 

‘It will have been horrendous. They didn’t know in the event that they were protected, or in the event that they would get out. They drained vehicle radiators for water and needed to drink any coming into the mine, literally seeping through the layers of rock,’ Brian says. 

Former miner and now a security expert and trainer, Brian has had greater than a couple of ‘near misses’ during his time underground. Miners, he says, accept it’s a difficult and dangerous job. ‘It needs to be done; it’s the way you provide on your family’, he says – but San Jose was particularly dangerous.

Eight miners had died underground there in 2000, and the works had been shut down after an accident in 2007, but reopened a yr later. The miner’s families, concerned that their men can be left to die underground, formed an encampment on the mine entrance, ‘Camp Hope’ gave media statements and lobbied the Government to assist.

For days, rescue teams found no way through, and plenty of assumed the miners were dead, leaving families in torment. 

Life underground

One in all the boys caught by the collapse was Ariel Ticona, a 29-year-old miner, who had heard rumbling and seen large cracks within the mine’s ramp within the weeks before the collapse, but with two children at home and his wife Elizabeth expecting a daughter, he had no selection but to take the work. 

He lived on cookies, crackers and juice while trapped, drinking sour milk to sustain him. Ariel later told a CNN documentary: ‘I felt helpless that I could leave this world without meeting my daughter…We’d pray at noon day by day, on the day my wife was due, I asked for a prayer in order that every thing can be okay”.

Fellow survivor 56-year-old Jorge Galleguillos said: ‘We lived with death, we slept with death.’ 

The boys took it in turns to sleep, working in shifts to keep up the mine, search for escape routes, and – vitally – sustain morale. They washed with water collected from dripping rocks in a cup. 

‘We knew that if society broke down, we’d all be doomed. Every day a special person took a nasty turn. Each time that happened, we worked as a team to try to maintain the morale up,’ miner Mario Sepulveda said. 

‘The air was so bad our eyes were burning the entire time. We were all coughing. It was like being in a dirty sauna where the air is filled with dirt. We made beds by putting cardboard on the ground’, he told the Every day Mail. 

Rations dwindled – on someday a tin of tuna needed to be split 33 ways – and the boys fell ailing with sores and fungal infections. One miner, 31-year-old Alex Vega, lost 33lb and went temporarily blind.

For 15 days, the employees heard nothing until a drill began to echo through the rocks. Two days later the probe broke through.

A glimmer of hope

The trapped men screamed: “We’re found!” They tied a plastic bag onto the equipment and painted a red cross onto the drill bit, together with a note stating ‘”Estamos bien en el refugio los 33″ – All 33 of us are well contained in the shelter.’ 

Up at ground level, Camp Hope erupted. Lilly Ramírez, the partner of miner Mario Gómez, was so overwhelmed that she fainted.

Nevertheless, there was an extended solution to go before the boys may very well be brought home; no-one had ever recovered so many individuals from such a depth and probe footage revealed the dimensions of the issue ahead. 

The rescue was predicted to take months, and the employees would need to remain mentally strong while they waited. They found strength in each day prayer, and the miners decided that Ariel was to call his baby, due in September, ‘Esperanza’, meaning ‘Hope’. 

Meanwhile, on land, three different rescue plans were being developed as engineers grappled with the difficult geology. The boys were buried under andesite, a rock almost twice as hard as granite, company maps of the mine were inaccurate and drillers faced many obstacles and broken equipment. 

A rescue capsule – just 55cm wide – was to be sent all the way down to haul the miners up, but it surely wasn’t until October 9 – greater than two months after the initial disaster – that the principal rescue shaft was accomplished. 

Within the early hours of October 13, from a tiny hole in the bottom, miner Florencio Avalos emerged. He was fixed with a bio-harness to observe his vital signs and sunglasses to guard his eyes. His seven-year-old son Bairon wailed at his arrival. 

A heroic welcome

As Florencio stumbled out of the capsule, he was embraced by his family, rescuers and Chilean President Pinera, and watched by thousands and thousands of TV viewers around the globe. Over the following few hours, all of the miners were rescued, with foreman Luis Urzua the last to come back up. 

It was a miraculous rescue and the miners were celebrated as heroes. After checks in hospital and time with their family, they were sent to Disneyland with their families, to Old Trafford to look at the football, to Greece for beach holidays and to the Holy Land for spiritual pilgrimage. 

After the rescue, Brian pored through hours of footage to see what may very well be learned from the disaster. Having recovered too many bodies from underground – he wants no-one to experience the trauma lived by ‘Los 33’.

Just last week, five miners tragically lost their lives after a shaft collapsed deep inside Chile’s El Teniente mine – the world’s biggest underground copper mine – following a 4.2 magnitude earthquake. 

‘When disasters like this occur, many don’t survive,’ explains Brian. ‘It was big that everybody survived the Chile rescue. It spurred us on to take into consideration how we manage future rescues and assist people. Just two weeks ago there was a disaster where employees were trapped [in a Canadian mine] they usually were got out safely.

‘The Chilean disaster has helped people take into consideration how things happened, what went well, what went fallacious, how can we alter outcomes, how can we make things higher,’ he adds. 

In fact, living in the dead of night with the constant fear of death for 69 days, left it’s mark on the boys. 

They struggled with sleep and nightmares after being ’swallowed into the bowels of hell’ in Mario’s words. Alex suffered memory and concentration problems and Ariel left his house someday, returning a couple of days later unable to clarify why he had gone.

Carlos Barrios, the thirteenth miner to be rescued, ended up unable to work and was pharmaceuticals to which he became addicted. While a Hollywood movie was made concerning the disaster, the boys were left with deep psychological scars.

Jorge told CNN on the time: ‘I’m alive, due to God, that’s the vital thing, but I needs to be doing higher. I needs to be doing higher.’For Mario, it was a lucky escape: ‘I actually have been with God and I’ve been with the devil. I seized the hand of God.’ 

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