SAN JOSE MINE, Chile – Rescuers yesterday finished reinforcing the hole drilled to bring 33 trapped miners to safety and sent a rescue capsule nearly all the way to where the men are trapped, proving the escape route works.
That means that if all goes well, everything will be in place at midnight tonight to begin pulling the men out of their subterranean purgatory.
Andre Sougarett, the rescue leader, said the empty capsule descended 2 000 feet (610 metres), just 40 feet (12 metres) short of the shaft system where the miners have been trapped since an August 5 collapse.
Lowering fears
“We didn’t send it [all the way] down because we could risk that someone will jump in,” Mining Minister Laurence Golborne told reporters, grinning.
He called the 6 a.m. test “very promising, very positive” and said the capsule, the biggest of three built by Chilean Navy engineers, “performed very well in the duct”.
“It didn’t even raise any dust,” he said.
The steel capsule, named Phoenix I, was lowered by winch into the hole after its top 180 feet (55 metres) were encased in tubing, said Sougarett.
His deputy, Rene Aguilar, told The Associated Press it was lowered at least four times.
Engineers had originally planned to extend the 28-inch (71-centimetre) section of pipe nearly twice as far, but decided to stop for fear that a longer tube forced into the slightly angled hole risked damaging its smooth walls.
A torrent of emotions awaits the miners when they finally rejoin the outside world.
As trying as it has been for them to survive underground for more than two months, their gold and copper mine is familiar territory. Once out of the shaft, they’ll face challenges so bewildering, no amount of coaching can fully prepare them.
Tough time
They’ll be celebrated at first, embraced by their families and pursued by more than 750 journalists who have converged on the mine, competing for interviews and images to feed to a world intensely curious to hear their survival story.
They’ve been invited to visit presidential palaces, take all-expense paid vacations and appear on countless TV shows.
Contracts for book and movie deals are pending, along with job offers. More money than they could dream of is already awaiting their signature.
But eventually, a new reality will set in – and for most, it won’t be anything like the life they knew before the mine collapsed above their heads.
“Before being heroes, they are victims,” University of Santiago psychologist Sergio Gonzalez told The Associated Press. “These people who are coming out of the bottom of the mine are different people . . . and their families are too.”
(AP)