Giant Drill Arrives at Chile mine

A truck carrying pieces of the third

drill that will be used in the... 

((AP Photo/Aliosha Marquez))

 The officials are busy drilling down some rescue shafts through the solid rock to their location. A huge oil drilling machine has just arrived at the site to start a third rescue shaft. It's still going to take a long time to reach them. In the meantime, the men are now allowed cigaretes and they are regularly speaking to their families.
   . . . June



-------------------------

Giant drill at Chile mine greeted with cheers
Yahoo! News:

COPIAPO, Chile (AFP) – Scores of flatbed trucks began unloading a huge oil drilling machine Friday to dig a third rescue tunnel to 33 trapped miners, as one drill was nearly one-third of the way down and another lay idle for repairs.

The families of the trapped miners cheered and waved flags as they welcomed the first of 42 trucks that rolled in around 8:30 am (1230 GMT).

'These trucks are enormous,' marveled Maria, sister of trapped miner Dario Segovia. 'We were up all night here in the camp waiting for them.'

Several of the six-axle trucks limped in with flat tires, a result of driving to the mine on a steep hillside dirt road filled with potholes and sharp rocks.

Their arrival was delayed as excavators and bulldozers had to broaden the entrance to the San Jose mine near Copiapo, a city some 800 kilometers north of Santiago, to accommodate the giant trucks.

The trapped miners have become national heroes since they were found alive on August 22, 17 days after a mine cave-in in the remote Atacama desert. The miners are trapped some 700 meters (2,300 feet)
below the surface.

However euphoria over their discovery was dampened by news it could take months, possibly until Christmas, to drill a shaft to rescue the miners.

Rescuers are dropping food and water down narrow shafts to the miners to keep them alive, along with medicines and games to keep them healthy and occupied.

One of the delivery shafts Friday was fitted with a multi-use conduit reaching all the way down to the miners' shelter, providing them with permanent supplies of oxygen, water, and a telephone line.

"Now they can speak by telephone via the conduct," the lead engineer in the rescue effort, Andres Sougarret, told reporters Friday.

The trucks bringing the new equipment, designed to drill oil wells and operated by Canada's Precision Drilling, arrived from Iquique in waves because the camp work zone is too small to park them all together.

The giant drill "RIG-422" they were bringing can tunnel up to 2,000 meters below the surface at a speed -- depending on the density of the ground -- of between 20 and 40 meters a day, according to Chilean officials.
Officials have dubbed the effort "Plan C," and if all goes according to schedule workers will drill down just 597 meters (1,958 feet), shortening the rescue time to perhaps two months.

Read on . . .

Trapped Chilean Miners Face a Very Tough Ordeal

Being a miner has to be a hard enough job - going down into a mine, but when something like this happens, they're faced with a prolonged stay underground. Miners train for a lot of things, but it's hard to prepare for something like this. The article below tells more about their plight
    . . June


Trapped Chilean Miners Face a Tough Psychological Ordeal - Yahoo! News:

There's almost nothing about the plight of the Chilean miners trapped beneath nearly half a mile of rock in the Atacama Desert that doesn't horrify us. There's the crowding - 33 men confined in a 600-sq.-ft. safety chamber smaller than a one-bedroom apartment. There's the heat - a stagnant 90 degrees F relieved only by a thin trickle of fresh air that makes it down through a narrow ventilation pipe. There's the gloom - a near total blackness relieved only by the flashlights on the men's helmets. Worst of all, there's the calendar: the miners face up to four more months of such confinement before a rescue tunnel can be drilled and they can be pulled to safety. That kind of ordeal, we say, would drive any of us nuts - and we're right; it probably would.

Live entombment holds a particular terror for all human beings, and miners are no exception. They may habituate themselves to darkness and heat and very tight spaces, but when the system breaks down - when there's no prospect of re-emerging into the light after a 10-hour shift - their minds can break too. And the longer they're below, the worse the damage may be. (See how the miners survived the first 17 days of their ordeal.)

"Miners train for a lot of things, but it's hard to prepare for something like this," says Dennis O'Dell, director of occupational safety and health for the United Mine Workers of America and a veteran of 20 years in the mines himself. "They're taught first to have a route of escape. It's only when that fails that you have to think of taking shelter."

Chilean officials are being roundly criticized for the shabby state of the mine and the poor safety record that led to the Aug. 5 collapse - but they're also getting a lot of kudos for the way they've responded since, particularly the attention they've paid to the emotional welfare of the imprisoned men and their families. Ever since the miners were located after a 17-day search of the maze of subterranean shafts, officials have been reaching out to psychologists, family counselors and even NASA doctors, who know better than most about how people endure long periods of confinement far away from loved ones.

Read More