Nearly a month on, Chile miners face uncertain rescue date

The 33 men trapped deep below ground in a Chilean mine face a grim milestone today – a month since the cave-in that stranded them – as officials warn it could take months more to rescue them.

The men have become national heroes and symbols of survival since rescuers made contact with them. In Chile and abroad, audiences are following their progress in minute detail.

Rescuers and relatives who had held out hope steadily grew to fear the worst, with no word from the men for more than two weeks after the August 5 collapse at the San Jose mine in Chile’s remote Atacama desert.

But on August 22, a drillbit reached the underground shelter where they had managed to take refuge, surviving by rationing cans of tuna while they awaited rescue workers.

The men attached a note to the drill, which carried it to the surface, where Chilean President Sebastian Pinera read it aloud: “All 33 of us are well inside the shelter.”

Jubilation followed, with relatives of the men who had set up camp by the mine site cheering and celebrating the “miraculous” discovery.

Video images of the miners in their underground bunker – shot with a camera sent down a narrow supply shaft – were quickly broadcast around the world, further lifting hopes of their rescue.

But the euphoria was dampened by the news that rescuing the miners – 32 Chileans and one Bolivian – could take up to four months, leaving them to survive some 700 metres below ground potentially until Christmas.

A 30-tonne drill that can excavate up to 20 metres per day began work last Monday, with pauses to allow the borehole walls to be cemented. The painstaking process is the primary rescue route for now, but engineers are also exploring two back-up options.

The first involves a faster drill that arrived at the mine site last Friday. It will initially be used to widen the supply shaft so that larger items can be sent down, but engineers are considering whether the shaft could be widened further to provide a quicker exit route for the miners.

The second option involves a football-pitch-size oil drilling platform, which Pinera said was expected to begin work on a third shaft by September 18 – Chile’s Independence Day.

The ambitious rescue task, codenamed ‘Operation San Lorenzo’ after a martyred Christian saint, is going on in parallel with a programme of careful medical and psychological care for the miners.

“A mission without precedent in the history of medicine,” Health Minister Jaime Manalich said of the undertaking.

Chile has even requested help from the US space agency Nasa, citing the organisation’s experience with keeping astronauts healthy and sane during long periods in small spaceships.

The only other miners to have spent almost as long trapped underground were three Chinese men rescued in July last year after spending 25 days in a flooded shaft, chewing on coal andsurrounded by their 13 dead colleagues.