Essay on the 2010 Chilean Mining Rescue

After being trapped hundreds of meters below the ground, with thousands of tons of hard rock separating them from the outside world, the miners knew that they had to employ and design ways of ensuring their survival until such a time when they would be rescued. They demonstrated excellent leadership qualities and teamwork that saw them survive long enough to be saved from the ordeal that had befallen them. They unanimously selected a leader, Urzua, who was to guide them on what they were supposed to do as they worked to find a way out of that situation. Urzua put in place measures that would see them through the 17 days that they were trapped in the mines. He made sure that the food and drinks that they had at their disposal would be enough to sustain them if the rescue operations happened to take longer than they anticipated. Food and drinks were to be taken in portions for them to be enough to help the miners carry on while awaiting help. Jose Henriquez also assumed a spiritual leadership role by ensuring that they always engaged in prayers at the beginning of every day before they embarked on their routine duties of trying to figure their way out of the caves. The prayers helped the miners face their fears with hope enabling them to maintain psychological stability. The miners also got to work as a team by being assigned duties based on their mental stability, skills, and experience that would be carried out to ensure their physical and psychological wellbeing.

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Above ground, engineers and geologists were facing constant frustrations and a myriad of challenges that would make the whole rescue operation appear hopeless and unfruitful. The probability of missing the refuge was very high given the type of drilling machines that were available. The machines' precision was very low, about 5%, reducing the accuracy of hitting the refuge 700 meters below the ground. The tunnels inside the mines were poorly mapped, and during drilling, it was later revealed that sediments and water were trapped in the fallen rocks further increasing the deviations and decreasing the precision of the drills complicating the whole process even further. Sougarret was to offer later solutions tailored towards solving the challenge that these engineers and geologists faced previously. He came with a thirty-two man team that was tasked with helping him deliver a successful rescue mission. To increase the precision of the drill, Sougarret established a drilling perimeter that would only allow people with the necessary technical expertise to be within it. He would later assign different roles and duties to members of his rescue team and order machines that would ensure a greater precision during the drilling process.

President Pinera and minister of mining, Lawrence Golborne faced an immediate problem of dealing with the families of the trapped miners. The families had no trust in the government and the mining company and were sad and furious that nobody was willing to help them. They felt like the government was lying to them concerning the real situation and demanded to be communicated to regarding the progress of the operations. The president, Pinera, also faced a greater political risk by going to San Jose. Despite being advised by Golborne not to go, he still decided to proceed to San Jose and even met with a small group of the miners family members. In an attempt to restore the trust of the families that were there, the mining minister tried to establish a trust-based relationship with them while the president, Pinera, promised the families that the government was fully committed to ensuring that all the efforts geared towards the rescue mission bore fruits. The president would later turn to Codelco to source for a technical leader tasked with ensuring that the search-and-rescue operation was successful.