Sixty-nine days after a rockfall trapped 33 men nearly half a mile underground, rescuers completed a painstaking extraction using a narrow capsule threaded through a borehole. Urzúa, the crew's shift supervisor who had organized survival efforts below, emerged last to applause from Chile's president and a global television audience of over a billion people.
The San José mine collapsed on August 5, 2010, trapping 33 miners in a chamber roughly 2,300 feet underground with no confirmed contact with the surface for 17 agonizing days. When a narrow probe finally broke through and rescuers heard tapping and found a note reading 'Estamos bien en el refugio, los 33' (We are well in the shelter, the 33), the story became a worldwide sensation.
Engineers devised an audacious rescue plan: drilling a shaft just 26 inches wide and lowering a specially designed capsule, nicknamed the Phoenix, to haul the men up one by one. The extraction, beginning October 12, proceeded through the night, each miner emerging to embraces from family and Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, who personally attended almost every ascent.
At 9:55 p.m. local time on October 13, foreman Luis Urzúa, who had kept order and morale among the trapped men through the darkest weeks, became the last to reach daylight, greeted by cheers and the national anthem. The miners had survived on rationed tuna and sips of milk before supply tubes reached them, losing an average of 20 pounds each. The rescue, watched live by roughly a billion people, became a rare instance of a slow-motion disaster ending in near-total triumph.
Key people: Luis Urzúa, Sebastián Piñera