Buried alive: How 33 men survived being trapped underground for 69 days

The terrified group men spent 15 days underground with no contact from the outside world. For more than two weeks, they had no idea if anyone was coming to get them, or whether they would be left to die following a catastrophic mine collapse in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

Some believed they were ‘trapped underground with the devil’ following the San Jose copper mine disaster, 15 years ago on 5 August 2010. And just as the miners were terrified they wouldn’t make it out alive, above them, their families had no idea whether they had survived the collapse.

The San Jose mine, a large shaft which zig-zags down into the earth, had been destroyed when a boulder the size of the Empire State Building collapsed, sealing 33 miners half a mile underground. 

Their lives had only been saved from the cave-in by the fact that they were waiting in a large cavern for the transport to arrive to take them up for lunch. Had they been within the tunnels of the 120-year-old colliery, the workers would certainly have died. 

‘All the mines in the Atacama Desert at that time were pretty unregulated, so it was a lot more dangerous than you would expect. It had been allowed to work with effectively a single entry, which means if there is a disaster, there was only one way in and out,’ Brian Robinson of UK Mines Rescue tells Metro.

Fighting for survival

Trapped underground, the men survived on basic rations and dirty water. They had what little light they could use from their head lamps, although they used it sparingly, and it was exceptionally hot and dusty. 

‘It would have been horrendous. They didn’t know if they were safe, or if they would get out. They drained vehicle radiators for water and had to drink any coming into the mine, literally seeping through the layers of rock,’ Brian says. 

Former miner and now a safety expert and trainer, Brian has had more than a few ‘near misses’ during his time underground. Miners, he says, accept it is a difficult and perilous job. ‘It has to be done; it’s how you provide for your family’, he says – but San Jose was particularly dangerous.

Eight miners had died underground there in 2000, and the works had been shut down after an accident in 2007, but reopened a year later. The miner’s families, concerned that their men would be left to die underground, formed an encampment at the mine entrance, ‘Camp Hope’ gave media statements and lobbied the Government to help.

For days, rescue teams found no way through, and many assumed the miners were dead, leaving families in torment. 

Life underground

One of the men caught by the collapse was Ariel Ticona, a 29-year-old miner, who had heard rumbling and seen large cracks in the mine’s ramp in the weeks before the collapse, but with two children at home and his wife Elizabeth expecting a daughter, he had no choice but to take the work. 

He lived on cookies, crackers and juice while trapped, drinking sour milk to sustain him. Ariel later told a CNN documentary: ‘I felt helpless that I could leave this world without meeting my daughter…We would pray at noon every day, on the day my wife was due, I asked for a prayer so that everything would be okay”.

Fellow survivor 56-year-old Jorge Galleguillos said: ‘We lived with death, we slept with death.’ 

The men took it in turns to sleep, working in shifts to maintain the mine, look for escape routes, and – vitally – keep up morale. They washed with water collected from dripping rocks in a cup. 

‘We knew that if society broke down, we would all be doomed. Each day a different person took a bad turn. Every time that happened, we worked as a team to try to keep the morale up,’ miner Mario Sepulveda said. 

‘The air was so bad our eyes were burning the whole time. We were all coughing. It was like being in a filthy sauna where the air is full of dirt. We made beds by putting cardboard on the floor’, he told the Daily Mail. 

Rations dwindled – on one day a tin of tuna had to be split 33 ways – and the men fell ill with sores and fungal infections. One miner, 31-year-old Alex Vega, lost 33lb and went temporarily blind.

For 15 days, the workers heard nothing until a drill started to echo through the rocks. Two days later the probe broke through.

A glimmer of hope

The trapped men screamed: “We are found!” They tied a plastic bag onto the equipment and painted a red cross onto the drill bit, along with a note stating ‘”Estamos bien en el refugio los 33″ – All 33 of us are well inside the shelter.’ 

Up at ground level, Camp Hope erupted. Lilly Ramírez, the partner of miner Mario Gómez, was so overwhelmed that she fainted.

However, there was a long way to go before the men could be brought home; no-one had ever recovered so many people from such a depth and probe footage revealed the scale of the problem ahead. 

The rescue was predicted to take months, and the workers would have to remain mentally strong while they waited. They found strength in daily prayer, and the miners decided that Ariel was to name his baby, due in September, ‘Esperanza’, meaning ‘Hope’. 

Meanwhile, on land, three different rescue plans were being developed as engineers grappled with the challenging geology. The men were buried under andesite, a rock almost twice as hard as granite, company maps of the mine were inaccurate and drillers faced many obstacles and broken equipment. 

A rescue capsule – just 55cm wide – was to be sent down to haul the miners up, but it wasn’t until October 9 – more than two months after the initial disaster – that the main rescue shaft was completed. 

In the early hours of October 13, from a tiny hole in the ground, miner Florencio Avalos emerged. He was fixed with a bio-harness to monitor his vital signs and sunglasses to protect his eyes. His seven-year-old son Bairon wailed at his arrival. 

A heroic welcome

As Florencio stumbled out of the capsule, he was embraced by his family, rescuers and Chilean President Pinera, and watched by millions of TV viewers around the world. Over the next few hours, all the miners were rescued, with foreman Luis Urzua the last to come up. 

It was a miraculous rescue and the miners were celebrated as heroes. After checks in hospital and time with their family, they were sent to Disneyland with their families, to Old Trafford to watch the football, to Greece for beach holidays and to the Holy Land for spiritual pilgrimage. 

After the rescue, Brian pored through hours of footage to see what could be learned from the disaster. Having recovered too many bodies from underground – he wants no-one to experience the trauma lived by ‘Los 33’.

Just last week, five miners tragically lost their lives after a shaft collapsed deep inside Chile’s El Teniente mine – the world’s biggest underground copper mine – following a 4.2 magnitude earthquake. 

‘When disasters like this happen, many don’t survive,’ explains Brian. ‘It was big that everyone survived the Chile rescue. It spurred us on to think about how we manage future rescues and assist people. Just two weeks ago there was a disaster where workers were trapped [in a Canadian mine] and they were got out safely.

‘The Chilean disaster has helped people think about how things happened, what went well, what went wrong, how can we change outcomes, how can we make things better,’ he adds. 

Of course, living in the dark with the constant fear of death for 69 days, left it’s mark on the men. 

They struggled with sleep and nightmares after being ’swallowed into the bowels of hell’ in Mario’s words. Alex suffered memory and concentration problems and Ariel left his house one day, returning a few days later unable to explain why he had gone.

Carlos Barrios, the thirteenth miner to be rescued, ended up unable to work and was prescribed drugs to which he became addicted. While a Hollywood movie was made about the disaster, the men were left with deep psychological scars.

Jorge told CNN at the time: ‘I am alive, thanks to God, that’s the important thing, but I should be doing better. I should be doing better.’For Mario, it was a lucky escape: ‘I have been with God and I’ve been with the devil. I seized the hand of God.’