Chilean miners upbeat as they await salvation

Chilean rescuers prepared yesterday to start drilling an escape shaft down to 33 trapped miners who showed the world through a video they were upbeat as they waited for salvation that will take months to arrive.

Officials were to position a 29-ton hydraulic bore, an Australian-made Strata 950, over the spot where it will dig down to the miners, who are holed up in a refuge annexed to a tunnel 700 metres below ground.

The machine was due to begin its work on the weekend, after an extensive topographical survey to prevent a repeat of the August 5 collapse that trapped the miners, Chilean engineers said.

Its maximum drill rate of 20 metres a day, and the need to then go back and double the diameter of the initial hole it bores so a man could fit through it, meant the shaft could take up to four months to complete, they estimate.

As it was being prepared, the miners sent video footage showing them in good spirits despite already spending three weeks in the hot and dank underground shelter.

“We’ve organised everything really well down here,” one of the miners, sporting a scraggly beard and pointing to a corner reserved for medical supplies, said in excerpts of the 45-minute video aired on Chilean TV on Thursday.

“This is where we entertain ourselves, where we have a meeting every day, where we make plans. This is where we pray,” he added.

About a dozen other miners waved at the mini-camera, which was delivered via one of the metal capsules that have been ferrying supplies to them since a probe drill discovered them on Sunday.

“Here, ladies and gentlemen, there are professionals. We have electricians, we have mechanics, there is our leader who is a very good artist, we have special machine operators,” one of the miners said in the video.

Amid concerns that the men could start experiencing psychological problems from their captivity, officials have gone to lengths to provide assistance.

Four officials from the US space agency Nasa were due to arrive tomorrow or Monday in Chile to provide expertise on extended isolation in hopes of easing the miners’ months-long ordeal.

Submarine commanders in Chile’s navy have also been giving advice.

At least five people from a group of 16 who survived 72 days in the Andes after a 1972 airplane crash by cannabilising dead passengers were also to head from Uruguay to the scene of the mine rescue drama next week.

“They know they’re going to get out. We were sure we were going to die out there,” one of the crash survivors, Josè Luis Inciarte, 62, told AFP.

“When they get out and they hug one another above ground, they’ll see how little two or three months is in a lifetime,” he said.

As rescue operations and morale support ramped up, so did legal actions against the owners of the mine where the men are trapped.

San Esteban Mining, the company responsible for the gold and copper mine in northern Chile, was ordered Thursday by a local judge to freeze $1.8 million in revenue so that it can pay future compensation to 26 of the families of those trapped.

One family has also lodged a lawsuit over the accident, accusing the mine company and government inspectors of criminal negligence by allowing the facility to reopen in 2008 after a worker accident led to its closure in 2007.