Tough road ahead for trapped Chile miners

Euphoria at finding 33 Chilean miners alive after an amazing 17 days trapped underground mixed yesterday with the inevitable anguish that it could take till Christmas to rescue them.

When notes miraculously emer­ged Sunday, tied by survivors to a narrow drill probe that pierced their refuge some 688 metres underground, rescuers and family danced for joy.

But one day on, it was sinking in that a long, hard rescue process lies ahead that will test the very sanity of the miners as well as the abilities of rescuers to keep the trapped workers from losing hope.

“We are going to re-establish contact with them and begin sending down, first thing, water with glucose and other minerals that will help keep them alive,” Mines Minister Laurence Golborne said.

The supplies will be sent down in blue plastic tubes through the narrow drill hole that finally located the miners. Mr Golborne said they were working to try and open other lines of communication.

The plan is now to make a tunnel big enough to extract the men one-by-one, but that could take “at least 120 days,” warned Andres Sougarret, the engineer in charge of the mission.

For now, there is a limit to what can be sent down to the miners as their lifeline is a narrow shaft just eight centimetres in diameter.

Chilean President Sebastian Pinera stunned his nation and the world on Sunday, when he announced that a note sent up from the San Jose gold and copper mine showed the missing workers were alive.

“All 33 of us are well inside the shelter,” said the note, handwritten in bold red capital letters.

Mr Pinera read the message aloud and waved it in the air, as friends and relatives wept with joy outside the mine whose entrance collapsed on August 5, trapping the workers inside.

Johnny Quispe, whose son-in-law is one of the trapped miners and who himself exited the mine just half-an-hour before disaster struck, said he had faith the men were still alive days before Pinera confirmed the news.

“Friday, I called my cousin (in Bolivia) and asked him to read the coca leaves,” he said. “He did and he told me: all 33 are alive and they are going to come out alive. The coca leaves know.”

A camera lowered down the bore hole on Sunday showed the miners sweaty and shirtless in the hot (32-36°C) shelter, but in apparently good condition and high spirits.

“Many of them approached the camera and put their faces right up against it, like children, and we could see happiness and hope in their eyes,” Mr Pinera said, adding that the images “gave me a lot of happiness and faith that this is going to end well.”

The miners are believed to have used a bulldozer to make a canal of water and used electricity from a truck engine to rig up some kind of makeshift lighting system to illuminate their strange cavernous world.

Top Chilean disaster official Carlos Garcia said supplies would have to be carefully rationed.

He said relatives would soon be allowed to speak with loved ones through a cable dropped down the shaft.

As word spread that the miners were alive, the nation erupted in joy with drivers honking their horns in the capital Santiago and thousands congregating in other cities to celebrate and wave national flags.

Until Sunday, there had been no sign that the miners had survived their ordeal.

But then came two notes in a plastic bag attached to a line that had been lowered through the narrow shaft drilled into the shelter.

Mr Golborne said the first note was a letter from Mario Gomez, one of the trapped miners, to his wife Liliana.

“We celebrated without knowing anything more than that,” Mr Golborne said. “But then came the message that said the 33 were alive.”