Of Note:


In early August, 33 miners descended deep below the dusty surface of Chile’s Atacama Desert and did not come back out.

Never before have so many men survived being trapped underground for so long — nor has the world ever witnessed a
rescue operation of such complexity and depth — one that has had a Canadian presence from the start.

Industry insiders say the disaster at the Mina San Jose will change the mining industry in Chile forever.

Since the collapse, top officials with the country’s mining regulating body have been sacked and dozens of small mines
have been shut down.


___________________________________________________________________________________________




From collapse to rescue: Inside the Chile mine disaster

Relatives of the trapped miners celebrate after one of the drills working to rescue the 33 finally reached their shelter in the San Jose mine, near Copiapo, Chile on October 9, 2010.

ARIEL MARINKOVIC/AFP/Getty Images



Jennifer Yang Staff Reporter

TheStar. Com


SAN JOSE MINE, CHILE—In early August, 33 miners descended deep below the dusty surface of Chile’s Atacama Desert and did not come back out.

From the depths of a century-old gold and copper mine, the men — 32 Chileans and one Bolivian — have since celebrated birthdays, welcomed new babies into their lives, proposed to their lovers.

But on Saturday, more than two months after a rock collapse sealed the Mina San Jose, or San Jose Mine, a rescue hole was finally completed for the miners.

Their escape is now imminent, arriving weeks earlier than expected, and within days, the miners will once again breathe fresh air and feel the desert sun on their faces. They will be able to eat birthday cake, hold their children, kiss their women on the lips.

But these miners will not return to the lives they remember. When they descended down that hole, they were anonymous men, 33 out of thousands of miners trying to eke out a living chipping away at rock. This week, they will return to the world as celebrities.

Never before have so many men survived being trapped underground for so long — nor has the world ever witnessed a rescue operation of such complexity and depth — one that has had a Canadian presence from the start.

Half a century ago, trapped miners were considered lost causes. A caved-in mine would simply be sealed off and crosses would be hammered into the ground.

Shortly after the Mina San Jose collapse on Thursday, Aug. 5, miners in the area were already placing wooden crosses outside its entrance, some hung with helmets and miners’ lamps.

But for the rescue team, leaving those men to die in that hole was never an option.

In today’s Chile — an economic superpower in South America with a multi-billion-dollar mining industry — there is no shortage of technology or resources available, and experts from around the world have united in the rescue effort.

It has been a giant task, getting to the men trapped under 700 metres of granite. Hundreds have contributed, but one of the first to go after the miners was Raul Villegas.


Villegas, a grizzled 57-year-old truck driver with a missing finger, was the last miner to escape the Mina San Jose collapse. He was also nearly the only one killed.

About 2 p.m. on that fateful day, Villegas had just finished filling his truck with rock when he heard a loud crack. He was 600 metres below the surface and dust was filling the cavern but in that moment, Villegas was only faintly concerned — he was used to the sounds of crumbling rock and moaning earth. The mine, owned by a company called San Esteban, is notoriously dangerous in the mineral-rich region and, according to an official with the Chilean Safety Association, eight workers have died at the mine in 12 years.

As Villegas ascended the spiralling ramps of the mine, he passed Frank Lobos, an ex-soccer player who was heading down the mine to fetch some men for lunch, and Mario Gomez, one of his oldest friends. Villegas joked with Lobos and mentioned the strange disturbances to Gomez but both men continued down the mine, disappearing into the darkness.

Closer to the surface, a cloud of dust suddenly overtook Villegas’s truck, enveloping him in dirt and darkness. Just as he began to see the light at the surface, there was a massive collapse.

“I felt an expansive wave, like when there is a dynamite explosion,” Villegas recalled. “The truck’s engine almost went off.”

Villegas burst from the mine and into the glaring desert sun. Looking back, he saw a huge cloud of dust streaming from the mine’s opening. It looked as though a volcano had erupted.

Villegas reported the accident to his manager but it would be hours before they notified authorities. Villegas was sent down the mine along with some of the other mine workers but after descending about 400 metres, he realized the ramp was gone. Villegas could hear the hill groaning and he was frightened.

About 700,000 tonnes of rock — more than six times the volume of all the concrete in Toronto’s CN Tower — had collapsed in the mine, cutting off ramps and destroying the mine’s ventilation shaft. It was later revealed that a ladder was missing from this shaft, which might have allowed the miners to escape.

The Atacama region’s six-person special operations emergency squad was called in and entered the mine at 9 p.m., seven hours after the collapse. They would not emerge until 6 a.m. the next day — shaken, drenched in sweat and empty-handed.

By the next morning, relatives and reporters had begun arriving on the site, demanding answers. A handful of pirquineros, or independent miners, later showed up with shovels and machines, pledging to sacrifice their own lives to dig out the trapped men.

After the special operations squad failed a second time to enter the mine, the Chilean government began to assemble its own rescue team. It recruited the help of Codelco, the state-owned mining company and the largest copper producer in the world. One of Codelco’s operations, El Teniente, is the world’s biggest underground mining operation and has experts trained for such emergencies. Two of El Teniente’s best men — engineer Andre Sougarret and Rene Aguilar, a risk management expert — were lent to the rescue operation full-time. The miners’ lives were now in their hands.

The Codelco-led team would spend nearly a week trying to secure the mine for a final attempt at rescuing the men through the main opening. But rocks continued collapsing, at one point sending rescuers running from the tunnels, and geotechnical instruments confirmed the earth was not finished moving.

That rescue strategy was abandoned. At the base of the mine, anguished relatives were distraught to see the fire trucks and ambulances on scene suddenly driving away.

But Codelco had a second plan hatching — there was another way to get the men out without using the mine’s main tunnel. Chile is a mining country and they would do what they always did when it came to extricating precious objects from deep inside the ground.

They would drill.


While few Chileans dared say it out loud, most of the country felt the miners were probably dead. But Fidel Báez believed in his heart they were alive.

Days after the collapse, Báez was reading emails in his office at Codelco’s headquarters in Santiago, about 800 kilometres south of the Mina San Jose. When news of the accident broke, mining and drilling companies from around the world began contacting the Chilean government with offers of help or ideas on how the rescue could be conducted. Báez, Codelco’s corporate manager for underground mines, was asked to sift through the emails and find the one that held the answer.

Báez estimates he received proposals from more than 25 companies in at least seven different countries. It was soon determined that there were nine drills available near the Mina San Jose that could be quickly mobilized and delivered to the site. They would punch 14-centimetre holes in the ground until one made contact with the miners.

Rescuers had topography plans for the mine but Báez says much of the information was inaccurate. The Mina San Jose, first exploited in 1889, is about 800 metres deep, the first 400 metres of it dug in the early 20th century. Much information has been lost along the way.

It was predicted the miners had probably made their way to a refuge chamber 700 metres below the surface — comparatively, the CN Tower is about 550 metres tall. The nine drill rigs were set up in an arc formation, most pointing their drill bits toward that target.

There was no real plan behind the drilling and 15 holes were ultimately pierced through the ground in a frantic, haphazard effort to reach the miners. Some drills encountered problems along the way; two were unable to dig deeper than 500 metres and another hit an unexpected cavern in the mine.

Kelvin Brown, an Australian drilling expert who flew to Chile to assist, recalls the chaos of having nine drills pounding into the rocky terrain in such close proximity.

“Everyone was trying very hard and very fast but it was a little bit hopeless in the early days,” Brown says. “It was just a real lot of people, too many people . . . they just drilled very fast.”

By that point, relatives of the miners had begun moving into a makeshift tent village at the entrance of the mine, dubbed Campamento Esperanza, or Camp Hope. As time wore on and despair deepened, the families had a standoff with the local police, or carabineros, frustrated by the slow pace of the rescue and demanding to be allowed on the site.

“It was getting extremely tense outside the gates where the families were,” Brown says. “It became very heated and emotional and it was like a powder keg.”

But the next morning, between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., the rescue operation had its first breakthrough. Seventeen days after the collapse, one of the drills — a Schramm T685 operated by the Chilean company Terraservice — hit a cavernous space deep inside the mine.

They knew the drill had hit an opening because the air pressure disappeared. The drill was turned off and lowered into the hole.

Then, a distant tapping was felt on the end of the drill. As it was pulled back to the surface, rescuers were stunned to discover two notes tied to the probe.

They were both written by Mario Gomez, the oldest of the miners. One was addressed to his wife, Lilianett Ramirez; the other was a now infamous message that has been reproduced on T-shirts and billboards, written in red letters. It said: “Estamos bien en el refugio los 33,” or “we are fine in the refuge, all 33 of us.”



The entire country erupted in jubilant celebration at the stunning discovery and Chile’s president, Sebastián Piñera, was flown to the Mina San Jose, where he brandished the note before media and elated family members. The miners became instant national heroes and in the nearby town of Copiapó, where many of the miners live, the sound of honking horns filled the narrow streets.

The miners were alive, having survived on meagre rations of tuna and milk. But the question now was how they would be kept that way — and how they would get out. The initial drill holes — three of which ultimately reached the miners — were only 14 centimetres wide, just large enough to fit a grapefruit. Rescuers would need a hole of about 71 centimetres to hoist the men out.

Báez had been doing research and learned of past rescue operations that used drills to reach trapped miners, who were then lifted out in rescue cages.

This became the plan for the Mina San Jose miners, and rescuers decided they would need three drills working 24 hours a day. The drills were dubbed Plans A, B and C — if one failed, there would be two more keeping the rescue on track. The miners had access to about two kilometres of galleries inside the mine and three targets were chosen for the drilling — the refuge chamber, a workshop in the mine and a ramp about 600 metres below ground.

Each drill uses a different method. The Plan A drill, mainly used for creating ventilation shafts in underground mines, is known as a raise borer, meaning it drills a pilot hole first before using a reamer to widen the opening from the far end. The drill in Plan B is used for everything from mining to geothermal energy exploration and has a rotopercussion drilling system — one used in past rescue efforts. Plan C uses a massive drill rig from Alberta, designed primarily for oil and gas exploration.

Never before have three such different drills worked side-by-side toward the same purpose.

Ideally, once the rescue hole is drilled, the shaft will be encased with steel pipe, thus ensuring the safest possible journey back to the surface.

Three metal rescue capsules were also manufactured by the Chilean navy to lift out the miners. Painted in the blue, white and red colours of the Chilean flag, the 419-kilogram capsules were dubbed “Phoenix.”

It was an ambitious undertaking and there was plenty of room for mistakes. The real challenge, rescuers knew, was only just beginning.


Plan A

Perched on the side of a mountain at the Mina San Jose is a white drill rig flying a Chilean flag. On the front, there is a brass plaque, the words “Strata 950” stamped across in red lettering. This is the drill for Plan A. Although set against the seemingly Martian landscape of the Atacama Desert, it resembles a small spaceship.

The Strata 950 was the first drill recruited to assist with the rescue efforts. Shortly after the miners were discovered alive, a company called Terracem — a joint-venture between the Chilean-based drilling company Terraservice and an international engineering group named Cementation — presented rescuers with an idea. They had a powerful little machine capable of drilling in a perfectly straight line, reaming holes up to 1,000 metres deep and six metres wide.

There are only five Strata 950s in the world, and this one happened to be in Chile already. It is owned by a Canadian company, Cementation Canada Inc., but at the time of the mine collapse, it was working for a Codelco-owned copper mine called Andina, located some 80 kilometres northeast of Santiago.

The drill was quickly mobilized and moved to the Mina San Jose. The team needed a site supervisor, someone familiar with this particular type of directional drill, and the man they wanted was Glen Fallon, a Cementation driller from North Bay, Ont.

Fallon, a giant of a man who wears size 15 construction boots, was sitting in an underground mine in Timmins when he received the call from his boss.

“Get your  a$$  back to North Bay. You’re flying to Chile tomorrow,” he was told.

Fallon arrived in Chile about a week after the miners were discovered alive. His crew, consisting of some South Africans and local Chileans, hit the ground running and hustled to set up the 28.5-tonne machine as quickly as possible.

“It was very hectic when we first got here,” Fallon recalls. “It was, ‘Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.’ ”

Fallon found himself grappling with several challenges unique to this particular operation. For one, the rig requires about 105 cubic metres of water to operate, both to lubricate the drilling process and to flush the rock cuttings back up to the surface. And water is not exactly easy to come by in the middle of a desert.

Among the Strata’s biggest virtues is its ability to drill a perfectly straight hole. Because of this, the Plan A rig was placed directly over the miners’ refuge chamber — a spot that also happens to be on the side of a mountain.

As the drill bores downwards, data is fed up to Fallon’s laptop every two minutes. He watches his screen intently and looks for zeroes — that means the drill is staying on track. Every so often the numbers deviate to 0.05 or 0.07, which indicates the drill has begun to wander off track. When this happens, a special apparatus behind the drill bit — called a rotary vertical drilling system — senses the deviation and pushes the drill bit back on track. The numbers always return to zero.

The Strata is a raise borer, which means it must drill twice — three drill bits are used create an initial pilot hole, about 38 centimetres in diameter, then that hole is widened to 72 centimetres by reaming from the bottom up.

But of the three drill rigs, Plan A has had the farthest distance to dig, just under 702 metres. It has also been the slowest. When Plan B began the final widening of its 628-metre hole, Plan A was only at 320 metres of its initial pilot hole.

“It works in a constant process, every day it’s going well,” said Rene Aguilar, the second-in-command of the rescue operation.

“But the disadvantage is the time,” he adds. “We call it the turtle plan.”

Another complication with the Strata is that it typically reams from the bottom to the top — after the pilot is drilled, the reaming head is brought to the bottom and attached to the end of a drill string so the loose rock falls down as the drill works its way up.

But of course, it is impossible to get a full-sized reaming head down to the bottom of the Mina San Jose. To solve this problem, a special reaming head was manufactured for the operation by Mining Technologies International in Sudbury, Ont. The custom tool’s components can be lowered down the pilot hole and assembled by the trapped miners below.

Fallon has not been overly concerned by the pace of his drill. Slow and steady is the only way to go — his target, the refuge chamber, is not very large, about two metres by two and a half metres. Missing was not an option.

“We will hit the target,” he said confidently a few weeks ago, lifting up a finger and moving it downwards in one swift, straight line. “Guaranteed we will hit the target. We will.”

The self-professed control freak — nicknamed the Crazy Canuck at the Mina San Jose — runs a tight ship, and when he hears a strange rattling in one of the water pumps, he stops talking mid-sentence and briskly walks over, running a hand along one of the pipes like a concerned rancher checking a horse’s leg. When a cameraman from one of the many documentary crews covering the rescue operation stuck his head inside a piece of machinery, Fallon had him kicked out and restricted future access to media.

“I’ve been told I’m a bit intimidating,” he says with a wry grin.

Fallon insists there has been no competition between Plan A and the other two drills. At the end of the day, there are 33 beating hearts at the bottom of his hole.

“The first people to get these people out, I’ll be the first to shake their hand,” he said. “It’s very humbling to be involved in this.”


PLAN B

After initial contact was made with the miners in August, two of the three small drill holes were converted into lifelines for the trapped men. For the past two months, two of these those holes have been used to send materials and food down to the miners in plastic tubes nicknamed palomas, or doves. Everything the miners need to survive has had to fit through those 14-centimetre openings.

One of the palomas is used for piping water and oxygen into the mine; it has also been threaded with telephone lines and a fibre-optic cable for video conferencing. According to the lead psychologist, Alberto Iturra, some 250 psychiatric experts have contributed to keeping the miners sane, and a doctor from the Chilean army has also been training the men for their final rescue, playing them exercise videos that demonstrate squats and lunges. The miners are also building their pulmonary resistance, singing as they exercise, so doctors will know when they are running short on breath.

The second paloma hole is being used to send down food. The meals have been carefully planned by a nutritionist with the Chilean health ministry in Santiago and the miners are maintaining a diet of about 2,500 calories per day to keep them trim enough for the final rescue.

The third hole that reached the miners in August has become the basis for the Plan B drill, a Schramm T-130.

This drill, owned by the Chilean mining company GeoTech, has been typically used for drilling deep-water wells. It arrived at the Mina San Jose from Collahuasi, one of the biggest copper mines in Chile.

If Plan A has been the turtle, Plan B has been the hare. A special drill system has been brought in for the Schramm T-130, one that uses a cluster of five pistons and bits in a single drill head, all working together to pulverize the ground at 1,500 blows per minute.

The drill is like a “glorified jackhammer,” according to Brandon Fisher, founder and president of Pennsylvania-based Center Rock Inc., which manufactures the system.

This is not the first rescue mission Fisher has been involved with. When he first heard that the Chilean rescue operation might take until Christmas, Fisher got on the Internet and began researching — what were the depths, the rock type, the geological conditions of the Mina San Jose?

Fisher was convinced his company could help the rescue move quicker. In 2002, Centre Rock was involved in a mission to rescue nine miners who were trapped underground for more than 77 hours at the Quecreek mine in Pennsylvania.

In some ways, the Quecreek mission was similar to the Mina San Jose operation — drills were used to create rescue holes for the trapped miners, who were ultimately pulled from the ground in rescue cages.

But at Quecreek, the trapped miners were only about 60 metres below the surface. At the Mina San Jose, Plan B is aiming for a workshop in the mine that is 628 metres below ground.

Still, Fisher felt he could pull the rescue off and cobbled together a PowerPoint presentation explaining his drilling system. Rescue organizers were sold and Fisher arrived in Chile on Sept. 4.

Plan B had an automatic advantage because its pilot hole was already in place by the time it started work. But because the final diameter must be so large, the hole had to be widened in two steps; first to 30 centimetres and then again to 71.

When Plan B finished its initial widening on Sept. 17, the miners — who have organized themselves into three work shifts — began contributing to the operation by using a front-end loader underground to remove the rock cuttings that drop to the bottom.

For all its speed, however, Plan B has also encountered the most problems of the three drills. It has the curviest trajectory — the hole is shaped like a rainbow near the top and becomes progressively more vertical as it deepens.

Because of the angles, the first 300 metres of drilling were riddled with problems. In the second week of September, Plan B’s drill also hit a reinforcement beam in the mine and shattered its bit. The chunk had to be fished out before drilling could continue — a process that involved estimating the angle of the drill bit and then designing the necessary tools to grab it out.

In the United States, fishing out that broken piece would have taken one or two days, Fisher says. In Chile, it required five, mainly because equipment had to be sent in from the States.

Fisher has been working around the clock at the Plan B site, sometimes going three days without returning to his hotel for a shower.

He says the Chilean government is paying for his time and equipment — “that’s the plan anyway.” But he is not at the Mina San Jose for the money. He is there for the miners.

“I don’t know that there’s 10 minutes that you’re out here that you don’t look down there and think, ‘There’s 33 guys 600 feet below our feet,’ ” he said. “Whenever you’re tired, it’s real easy to think, ‘Hey, I’m out here seeing sunlight and breathing fresh air. It’s time to suck it up and get these guys out of here.’ ”

PLAN C

In the mining town of Copiapó, about 45 minutes from the Mina San Jose, is a hotel called Las Pircas. For the past several weeks, its dining room has been transformed into something that resembles a northern Alberta pub.

Every day, for breakfast and supper, a few dozen men trickle into the dining room wearing Oilers caps or Calgary Flames sweatshirts. They smoke and drink coffee and talk with distinctly Canadian accents.

This is the Plan C crew, a team of about a dozen Canadians working on an oil and gas exploration rig owned by Calgary-based Precision Drilling Corp. The machine, called a Rig 421, was the third and final drill to arrive for the rescue dig.

A Chilean company, ENAP, is spearheading the Plan C operation and Schlumberger, the world’s largest oilfield services provider, was contracted to design the well.

But Precision has supplied the equipment and the men, all of whom were hand-selected by Shaun Robstad, a Precision field superintendent from Okotoks, Alta., just outside of Calgary.

Robstad first caught wind of the fact that Precision might be assisting with the Chilean rescue three days before the miners were discovered alive. A week later, he was en route to South America.

This is not Robstad’s first trip to Chile. In 2007, Precision shipped a 39-metre-high rig from Sundre, Alta., to Iquique, a port city in northern Chile. Robstad accompanied the drill rig, which was brought down to explore for gas. After two unsuccessful attempts, the rig was packed up and placed in storage.

“That’s where it sat until I got the call to come here,” Robstad says.

But when Robstad arrived in northern Chile to retrieve the rig, he discovered several parts had been stolen. All of the electrical cables were missing, as well as some beams. Most of the copper — Chile’s most precious commodity — had been stripped.

In any case, Robstad and his men packed up the massive rig and drove it 1,102 kilometres to the Mina San Jose. The journey required two days and 46 trucks.

To get on the work site, the caravan of trucks first had to pass through Camp Hope, the tent village that has sprung up at the base of the mine. The makeshift camp has amassed a startling amount of infrastructure, complete with a cafeteria, a school and even free Wi-Fi Internet service. It is a bizarre little universe where local mining families commingle with international journalists from as far away as Germany and Japan.

Every time a new piece of rescue equipment is delivered to the Mina San Jose, it is received with great fanfare. But the Precision Drill was perhaps the most anticipated addition to the ongoing rescue efforts, and when it arrived on site, people rushed from their tents and greeted the rig with applause and cheers. The Chilean president also attended the unveiling of the Precision drill, shaking Robstad’s hand and asking, “Who’s going to get there first?”

“It received a lot of hype, that’s for sure,” Robstad says. “The locals had a nickname for it, the Transformer. It comes here in pieces and then you put it together and the next thing you know, you see the giant mast going up in the air.”

The machine is indeed the largest of the three drills, requiring an area the size of a soccer field, about 70 metres by 110 metres — though even that is far too small a workspace, Robstad says.

The diesel-electric drill rig is powered by three generators and referred to as a “triple,” both because of its mast height and the drill’s ability to lift three joints of nine-metre-long pipe onto the drilling floor at a time. The drill is spun by a 95-centimetre rotary table and can hit depths of about 3,200 metres — though usually it doesn’t drill holes as wide as those required for this rescue.

Nonetheless, Plan C had a speed advantage because it didn’t need a pilot hole — it could drill the final diameter in just one go. The Precision drill’s challenge, however, has been to manoeuvre around an underground gallery before heading toward its target, a ramp 598 metres below the ground. This means Plan C had to drill vertically for the first 40 metres, after which it began boring at a seven degree angle.

Like the other drills, Plan C is staffed by two full crews 24 hours a day. An electrician and mechanic are always on site, standing by in case something goes wrong.

Like the other two drills, Plan C has had its good and bad moments. Some days, it can drill 50 metres; on others, it only clears 12.

“We’re getting lots of criticism saying we’re slow . . . but you have to remember it’s a big hole,” Robstad said. “You’re trying to steer it, you’re trying to get it the right way. People thought we were going to come in here and drill 100 metres, 1,000 metres a day.”

Robstad is mindful of the fact that the entire country — and much of the world — has been scrutinizing his work on the drill. Every so often, his men take a break and go out in Copiapó but Robstad has imposed a strict no-drinking rule. “I don’t want my guys showing up on the front page of the paper,” he said.

Robstad insists the only pressure he feels is from himself. And when he calls home to his 11-year-old girl, McKenzie, she always asks: “When are you going to get them out?”

Every morning, the Plan C crew meets inside its office on site to discuss the progress overnight and the plan for the new day. Inevitably, someone will mention the miners.

“It comes up every day: ‘I wonder what it’s like down there,’ ” Robstad said. “I don’t think they went to work that day thinking they wouldn’t be getting out.”

On Saturday morning, the sound of bells and truck horns suddenly filled the air at the Mina San Jose. It was a message of triumph — Plan B had completed drilling its rescue hole.

In Camp Hope, family members cheered, cried and waved Chilean flags. On the drill site, Champagne was sprayed and hard hats tumbled off as rescue workers hugged each other and shouted for joy.

It will still be days before the miners can be lifted out, however, and rescue planners are now determining whether the hole will be cased with steel pipe.

Plan B was always going to be the most difficult hole to encase, thanks to its winding trajectory. Seventy-two sections of steel pipe have been shipped to the Mina San Jose but according to a source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, GeoTech will likely bring in its own steel piping, which is manufactured slightly thinner and is easier to bend. The tentative plan is to encase the top 70 metres of the hole only, the source said.

When it comes time to hoist the 33 men up, a medic will descend into the hole to assess their condition. It has not been revealed yet in what order they will be rescued, but the likely scenario is that the strongest miner will go first, followed by the weakest, and then the rest will follow. The shift leader at the time of the collapse, foreman Luis Urzua, is expected to come up last.

The men will be hoisted up wearing Oakley sunglasses to protect their eyes from the blazing sunlight. After stepping foot on the surface, they will be treated initially in a field hospital, reuniting briefly with up to three relatives, and then flying by helicopter to a hospital in Copiapó, where they will remain for at least 48 hours.

Industry insiders say the disaster at the Mina San Jose will change the mining industry in Chile forever. Since the collapse, top officials with the country’s mining regulating body have been sacked and dozens of small mines have been shut down.

The sensational rescue operation has also captured Chile’s imagination and united the country behind a common cause. The country’s president and its mining minister, Laurence Golborne, have both seen their approval ratings skyrocket since the disaster.

Ongoing investigations continue to examine what caused the collapse at the Mina San Jose but early reports suggest support structures were weakened by overzealous mining. Families have already launched lawsuits against the company, as well as the government.

Nobody knows what will become of the mine after everything is over, but rescue planner Rene Aguilar thinks it should be shut down permanently. The gigantic piece of rock that caused the collapse is still perched in the mine at a precarious angle and could fall again.

“It could happen in the next five minutes or the next two years, nobody knows,” he said.

Like the hundreds of others who have been involved in the rescue on this dusty stretch of desert, Aguilar has put his life on hold for these 33 men. He has not left the mine area since he arrived after the collapse and Aguilar has had little time to tend to his full-time work at El Teniente or to his wife, who is pregnant with their fourth child.

But the significance of what they are on the cusp of accomplishing is not lost on him.

“We feel we’re doing the job for those miners, their families, our country,” Aguilar says quietly. “I think we are making history here.”

With files from Associated Press




___________________________________________________________________________________________



Thanks for checking out my page. Red Mars





Video was disabled. However you can see it by this link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0huJMkgY8A

Countdown to Chile Miner Rescue