Two Australian miners who spent two weeks trapped underground said yesterday that 33 Chileans at the center of a massive rescue effort will have formed a life-long bond during their two-month ordeal.
Brant Webb and Todd Russell, whose survival story was dubbed Australia’s “Great Escape,” said the Chilean drama carried strong echoes of their 2006 experience buried 1km below ground.
The two men were trapped in a tiny space, barely able to move, after a small earthquake at Tasmania’s Beaconsfield mine in 2006, and initially survived by drinking groundwater.
PHOTO: AFP
Rescuers managed to pass supplies through a plastic tube before finally clearing a passage wide enough to free the jubilant miners, who greeted the world’s media with arms aloft.
Webb, who hardly knew Russell before the accident but now counts him as a close friend, said the Chilean miners will have formed unbreakable bonds during their experiences of the last 69 days.
“They’ve probably got bonds now that can’t be broken and they probably know more about each other than anyone else does, because they’ve had nothing else to talk about but their lives,” he told Australia’s Nine Network TV. “They can’t talk work, because there’s no work going on. They would have run out of jokes in a couple of days.”
Russell said tension would have been extreme among the miners as they waited their turn to escape the collapsed gold and copper mine through a narrow, specially dug shaft.
“There’s 33 guys trapped underground and over a 20-minute journey they’re going to take one guy at a time,” he said. “As the group gets less and less and less the excitement for the next guy is going to raise to a really big high, knowing that he’s going to be the next one to go.
“And then you’ve got the other remaining guys who’ve got to wait 20 minutes to go and go and go until such time as all 33 have been brought back to the surface,” he said. “It’s going to be really hard for the individuals as they see their mates extracted from there.”
Barry Easter, who oversaw the Australian operation as the region’s mayor, remembered that workers were on a “knife-edge” as the Tasmanian rescue reached its climax.
“It’s a time where everyone gets anxious and quite uptight,” Easter told public broadcaster ABC.
“You’re at the stage where you just don’t want anything to go wrong,” he said. “The people who are doing the actual work in Chile, they must be working on a knife-edge.”
The rescue of Webb and Russell — who celebrated his freedom in a nearby pub — after 14 days was treated as cause for national rejoicing led by then Australian prime minister John Howard.
“Overall it has been a wonderful demonstration of Australian mateship and perseverance,” Howard said. “To those two men I just want to say to them, ‘All of us [Australians] — 20 million of us — are delighted to still have them with us.’”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS