Trapped deep beneath the earth, their fate uncertain, the 33 men awaiting rescue at a caved-in Chilean mine have rallied around leaders, including their eldest colleague, 63-year-old Mario Gomez, now a symbol of their resilience.
Gomez became an instant hero here after penning the all-capitals, red ink note that gave Chile its first sign that the miners were still alive.
“All 33 of us are well inside the shelter,” said the note, which was carried to the surface by a drill bit on Sunday, after two weeks of silence, and was greeted with screams of joy and tears of relief from desperate relatives.
Deep in the collapsed mine, where the men are thought to have taken refuge inside a living room-sized shelter, Gomez is believed to be acting as a mentor and leader to a group that ranges in age from 63 to just 19.
Gino Erazo, a miner who worked with Gomez and knows him well, said morale inside the San Jose mine, which caved in on Aug. 2, would depend on his old colleague.
“He is like a father taking care of his children,” he said.
Gomez’s wife Liliana described her husband as a “workaholic” and a life-long miner, who began learning the trade at the age of 12 by his father’s side.
Her husband had sent her an uncharacteristically emotional letter alongside the note he dispatched to the surface announcing the well-being of the miners, she said.
“It said that he loves me. I’ve never received words from him like that, even when we were engaged, he has never been a romantic,” she said.
As a leader, Gomez was likely to be supported by Luis Urzua, the shift manager at the time of the cave-in, colleagues and experts said.
The pair will have to work to maintain morale and peace among a diverse group of men that spans generations. Most of the men are between 40 and 63, but eight are in their 20s, and 19-year-old Jimmy Sandez has not even graduated from high school.
The men are Chileans, with the exception of Carlos Mamani, a 24-year-old Bolivian who had worked in the copper and gold mine for just five days before the accident.
The Ministry of Health said on Tuesday that two of miners have some medical expertise and would be sent thermometers and blood pressure machines.
“This is obviously an immense asset in this situation,” Health Minister Jaime Manalich told reporters.
But the roles of calming influences like Gomez and Urzua will also be crucial, according to experts on confinement in extreme conditions.
Chile has asked the US space agency NASA for assistance in keeping the miners supplied with food.
“The situation is very similar the one experienced by the astronauts, who spend months on end in the space station,” Manalich said.
He said officials were looking for ways to provide condensed, high-protein, calorie-rich nutrition to the men.
Food supplies were being sent through a narrow hole of about 8cm, which engineers are working to widen. But they were not expected to create a passage wide enough to extract the men until Christmas.
The engineer in charge of the rescue effort, Andres Sougarret, has made the decision not to tell the men how long the rescue will take.
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