A horn blast yesterday announced the completion of a shaft that would serve to rescue 33 miners trapped for two months deep inside a collapsed mine.
Rescue crew workers operating the drill immediately began jumping and embracing once their task was complete. They were quickly joined by the hundreds of relatives of the miners staying next to the mine at Camp Hope, who exchanged embraces and cheered.
The miners could be out as early as Tuesday, officials said, depending on an engineering assessment on the stability of the shaft.
“This is overwhelming — I can only imagine what my brother must be feeling down there,” Gaston Henriquez, the brother of one of the miners, said as he choked on tears.
“We are very happy, because for the past two months we have suffered enormously. We’ll now wait for them to emerge so we can hug them and bring them home,” said Wilson Avalos, who has two brothers in the mine.
Several enthusiastic people in Camp Hope at the site ran up a hill near the mine and raised 32 Chilean flags and a Bolivian flag, representing the nationality of the trapped miners.
The miners have been trapped more than 700m underground in the northern Chile copper and gold mine since Aug. 5, surviving longer than any similarly trapped before.
Engineers said they drilled through the last 4m of rock with special care to avoid tunnel collapses.
Engineers must now decide if they need to reinforce all or part of the shaft walls by inserting giant tubes. The miners will then be brought up individually in a custom built cage.
One top government official suggested the first miners could be pulled up to the surface early next week.
“Tuesday, Tuesday,” Chilean Health Minister Jaime Manalich told reporters outside the San Jose Mine when asked when the operation could begin ahead of the shaft reaching the miners.
“God be willing, in a few days the whole country will be weeping with joy ... when we see these miners emerge from the depths of the mountain to embrace their wives, children, mothers and fathers,” Chilean President Sebastian Pinera said.
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