THE FIRST of Chile’s rescued miners left hospital yesterday ahead of schedule with the medical team looking after the 33 men saying they are all remarkably well considering their 10-week ordeal underground.
Earlier the group was visited by Chile’s president Sebastián Piñera who invited the men to the La Moneda presidential palace in Santiago in 11 days’ time and proposed a game of football between them and the presidential staff. “Who wins the game stays in La Moneda and the one who loses goes back to the mine,” joked Mr Piñera, still clearly euphoric after Wednesday’s flawless rescue.
On a more serious note he promised a major overhaul of safety in the country’s mining industry and promised a “new deal” for workers to ensure safety and labour legislation was implemented across the country.
“Nobody can guarantee that there will never be another accident in our country. But what we can guarantee is that we will never again permit working in conditions as insecure and inhuman such as in the San José mine and in many other places in our country,” he said at the hospital.
The presidential commitment comes after Luis Urzúa, the group’s foreman, told a waiting Mr Piñera on his emergence from the mine late on Wednesday: “I hope this never happens again.”
As the last to be rescued, the men’s 54-year-old leader set a record for the longest period of time a miner has remained trapped underground. He told how it took three hours after the cave-in on August 5th before he could assess the gravity of the situation because of the amount of dust the accident threw up.
He said the men made various doomed efforts to escape. “Many tried to do things that were not the best. But luckily we knew to remain sane and thank God there were no accidents,” he said.
After the father of two gathered the other 32 trapped men in a refuge over 600m below the surface, the group’s main preoccupation was other miners on the same shift who had headed back to the surface shortly before the accident. “We prayed because we had three or four people who were leaving. We were always asking if they made it or not,” he said.
One of the first questions the trapped men had for rescuers on the surface when they finally made contact 17 days after the cave-in was about these colleagues.
Recordings of their wild cheering on hearing they had all made it to the surface quickly became emblematic across Chile for the group’s unity and generosity of spirit, despite their own ordeal.
Mr Urzúa, known at the mine as Don Lucho, has become a hero in Chile for organising the men underground to survive their long ordeal and then insisting on being the last man to leave the sweltering cavern that had been home for 70 days. He also told how he rationed the few supplies the men had underground.
By the time rescue crews finally made contact through a narrow bore hole the men were down to one spoonful of tuna every two days, along with dwindling supplies of biscuits and water.
As miners, Mr Urzúa said, they knew any rescue would take time: “We saw how the machines drill. The first five days we were sure that they were working from the mine, but we saw it would be difficult. We knew what the situation was.”
When finally, on August 22nd, a drill-bit made in Co Clare punched through the ceiling of their subterranean refuge, Mr Urzúa said, the men were ecstatic.
“We had a protocol all worked out for when the first probe would arrive. But we forgot everything. Everyone just wanted to embrace the drill.”