Days of Hope and Fear: Chile's Trapped Miners Face Up to Ordeal

Summary

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THE San Jose copper mine near Copiapo, where 33 men have been trapped for 25 days, lies in Chile's Atacama desert, the driest place on earth. There are only four trees on the site where relatives have built a makeshift camp and where it is hoped the men will be raised to the surface around Christmas time. By then it will be the Chilean summer when, even though the earth looks scorched, the thermometer rarely rises above 30[degrees]C - about as hot as it was yesterday 700 metres underground where the miners remained trapped in a large but precarious shelter.

Rescue workers this weekend began drilling a vertical shaft around two feet in diameter to evacuate the miners one by one by means of a pulley, but the task, when it finally gets under way in about four months' time, will be a slow and dangerous one. The Chilean health minister, Jaime Manalich, has acknowledged that it is a race against time in more ways than one: after the initial euphoria of being found alive, a period of depression and anguish has set in among the miners, with five men appearing detached and showing a lack of appetite. "It would be naive to think they can keep their spirits up," he said.

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Extract

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Days of Hope and Fear: Chile's Trapped Miners Face Up to Ordeal

The miners became trapped when two levels of the mine above them collapsed on August 5. They took refuge in a shelter but were unable to get out when they found that there were no escape ladders in an adjoining tunnel.

As the days passed, Chileans grew sceptical that they would be found alive; to nearly everyone's astonishment, they were, last Sunday, 17 days after the cave-in.

It is already one of the longest periods of human survival i...

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