Copiapó: thirty-three men, sixty-nine days

ATACAMA DESERT, Chile — On August 5, 2010, the San José copper-gold mine collapsed above a crew of 33 men. Seventeen days later a drill bit came back up the borehole with a note tied to it. All 33 were alive, in a shelter the size of an office, with two days of food rationed to last weeks.

What followed was the most careful underground rescue anyone had ever attempted. Three separate drilling plans ran in parallel to cut a shaft down to the refuge. A Chilean navy engineer designed a steel capsule, painted the colors of the national flag and named for the bird of myth, that would carry one man at a time through 2,000 feet of rock.

The men were not idle underground. A shift boss organized them into work teams, assigned tasks, kept a written log, exercised to hold their strength up and rationed what they had with a discipline that doctors later credited for how well they came out.

On October 13, 2010, the first rescuer went down and the first miner came up. Over roughly twenty-two hours, all 33 came out, one after another, to families, a national vigil and the largest audience any mine rescue has ever had.

Mining people took the story personally, and not entirely for the happy ending it was. The San José mine had a record of fatal accidents and had been operating in circumstances that a careful operator would have shut down. The rescue was extraordinary. The men should never have needed it.

The capsule is in a museum now. The argument it settled is still in use: a trapped crew that is organized, trained in something, and kept informed lives longer than one that is not.