At 11:11 p.m. on October 13, 2010, Florencio Ávalos emerged from a 21-inch capsule at the San José copper mine in Chile’s Atacama Desert — the first of 33 miners rescued after 69 days trapped 700 meters underground. More than a billion people watched live on television and online as, one by one, the last men walked out of the earth.
The Collapse
On August 5, 2010, a slab of rock the size of a skyscraper sheared away and sealed the main shaft of the century-old San José mine. The 33 men on shift retreated to an emergency refuge barely larger than a garage — its emergency rations intended for two days. Above ground, no one knew if they were alive. It took 17 days before a drill probe broke into the refuge and came back up with a note taped to it: “Estamos bien en el refugio, los 33” — We are fine in the shelter, all 33. Chile erupted; the world leaned in.
Plan B
The rescue became an international engineering race. Three drilling plans competed; the only one with a working drill bit — “Plan B,” operated by a small American company — reached the refuge on October 9. The hole had to be widened to 66 centimeters, the diameter of a man’s shoulders. For four days, drills chewed through 700 meters of rock as engineers assembled the Phoenix rescue capsule and NASA doctors advised on the men’s condition after ten weeks without sunlight, some having lost 10 kilograms each. On October 12 — the eve of the rescue — drillers broke through to the refuge for the last time.
22 Hours, 33 Miracles
The lifting began at midnight. Each man rode the Phoenix capsule up through a half-mile of rock, one at a time, 52 minutes round trip. Luis Urzúa, the shift foreman who had organized the men’s survival, insisted on being last; he surfaced at 9:56 p.m. on October 13 to the chant of “Chi! Chi! Chi! Le! Le! Le!” President Sebastián Piñera held the note the world had waited for: “Mission accomplished.” The rescued men — later immortalized as “Los 33,” subjects of films, books and a Chilean presidential medal — had survived the longest underground entrapment in recorded history. Sixteen years on, October 13 stands as the day the whole planet watched the earth give back its sons.
Leave a Reply