13 October 2010
Coming Up for Air
(“33 of us are well in the Refuge,” the text of the note taped to the initial relief probe at the San Jose Mine.)
I am riveted to the account of the mine rescue this morning, along with everyone else even vaguely connected to the rest of the world.
The journey for the 33 miners in takes about fifteen minutes for each of them; there were briefly 36 men down there, as three rescue workers descended into the abyss. Now, one by one, they are coming up to the air.
It has been the sort of mirror image of the other drilling saga of the summer; the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf. On that long strange adventure, the drilling art was proven supreme. The cut-off well had to intersect a target the size of a dinner plate at a depth of 18,000 feet.
They did it.
In Chile, the men have been cut off for sixty-nine days down there.
The miners had a fifty square yard shelter with two long benches and more than a mile some of galleries in which to move around. They used backhoes to dig for trapped water, and drank some from the radiators while they listened to the drilling probes above. Although the emergency supplies pre-staged in the refuge were intended for only two or three days, the miners rationed them to last for 17 days until contact with the surface.
They consumed "two little spoonfuls of tuna, a sip of milk and a biscuit every 48 hours" and a morsel of peach. They used the batteries of a truck to power their helmet lamps.
The media outlets have had to fill the hours waiting this stage of the rescue. It is the nature of the beast, the impatience. There has been endless analysis of the effect of the enforced imprisonment on the men, the impact of the re-integration with their families; the sunglasses they will wear when they emerge from the rescue capsule to preserve their optic nerves.
Of course, the first of them came up in darkness, but even still, I imagine they put on the glasses against the glare of the stars.
NASA contributed a crucial bit, the Phoenix capsule that penetrates inner space. It is a cylinder that is winched up and down the narrow tunnel drilled through the volcanic rock to the chamber six hundred meters below.
It is very organized. The miners will be triaged in the chamber and evacuated based on their physical condition below. Upon arrival on the surface, they will again be examined at the field hospital, and meet up to three “close relatives.” Then they will be medevaced to the regional hospital in Copiapo, about twenty miles away where a wing of 33 fresh beds is set up. They will be monitored for at least 48-hours before they are released to their families.
Good news, and there is so little of it these days. The question was asked this morning, vacuous, time-filling the seconds: “Do you think some of them will stop mining, based on this experience?”
What do you think? Chilean miners are among the best paid in Latin America. Of course they will.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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