23 August, 2010
Seventeen days after 33 miners were buried alive 700 metres deep in a copper and gold mine owned by Campañia Minera San Esteban Primera in northern Chile, a note attached to a drill bit reached the surface yesterday, 22 August, revealing that all 33 were still alive.
The note, in red letters, simply stated, “All 33 of us are fine and in the shelter,” referring to a shelter containing food, water, and oxygen for 72 hours and thought to be too small to hold all 33 miners. Later on Sunday, a small camera lowered down the drill bit probe of the San Jose mine showed miners bare-chested and gleeful that they had been discovered.
The miners became trapped on 5 August when a shaft collapsed. The ICEM report on that catastrophe, from the InBrief No. 162 newsletter, can be found here.
Rescue of the miners is far from assured, however. Rescue leaders on the surface, using state-of-the-art probing equipment imported from Australia and the US, say it could take four months before the miners are brought to the surface. Rescuers say a tunnel 68 centimeters in diameter must now be drilled in order to hoist the miners to the surface.
In the meantime, the drill hole used to make the initial contact with the miners will be utilized to drop plastic tubes called “doves” that contain food, water, glucose, and a communications device to them.
If the rescue proves successful, it will exceed both the eight days that 115 Chinese coal miners survived underground in a Shanxi province mine in April 2010, as well as the 25 days that three Chinese miners survived in a colliery in the south of the country last year.
ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda highlighted the accident in an interview today on BBC World Service Radio.