San Jose Milne, Chile: They have laundry service, TV, three hot meals a day and ice cream for dessert. Everyday life for the 33 miners trapped a half-mile underground now includes some of the comforts of home, at least those that can be lowered through narrow holes.
The miners are sleeping on beds that were sent down in pieces and reassembled in the mine. They speak to their families using a phone that also was taken apart and put back together down below. They also have brief video chats on Friday and Saturdays, for a maximum of eight minutes each, thanks to a fiber optic cable.
Settling in for the long wait, they have established a disciplined routine, designed not only to keep them mentally and physically fit, but working well together.
The plan, according to the rescue effort's lead psychiatrist, Alberto Iturra Benavides, is to leave them with no possible alternative but to survive until the drillers finish making rescue holes, which the government has estimated will be finished by early November.
"Surviving means discipline and keeping to a routine," Iturra said.
So when they do get moments to relax, the miners watch television -13 hours a day, mostly news programmes and action movies or comedies, whatever is available on cable that the support team decides won't be depressing.
They've already seen the movies Troy, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Mask. But no intense dramas. “That would be mental cruelty," said Iturra. Though some miners have requested them, personal music players with headphones and handheld videogames have been ruled out because they tend to lead to people being isolated. "With earphones, if they're listening to music and someone calls them, asking for help or to warn them about something, they're not available," Iturra said. "What they need is to be together."
Togetherness is what initially saved the miners when an estimated 700,000 tonnes of rock collapsed on August 5 and sealed off the central section of the mine shaft above them, plunging them into darkness and kicking up thick clouds of dust that made it impossible to see, even with their headlamps.
The collapse happened just as the men were gathered for lunch in the refuge, a space about 12 feet by 12 feet (four metres by four metres) with a fortified ceiling nearly 15 feet (4.5 metres) high that normally doubles as a dining room in the lower reaches of the mine. Any sooner or later and some of the miners probably would have been crushed.
When the dust finally settled about five days later, they could see they were trapped in a large open space, about 1,200 feet (360 metres) long, that ran up the corkscrew-shaped shaft to another workshop about 2,000 feet (600 metres) underground. The space had several mining vehicles with batteries and engine power, a chemical toilet and industrial water, which together with their meagre emergency food supplies, enabled them to survive with no help from the outside world.
"They were 17 days in the darkness -17 days during which in the first five, they could barely breathe from the dust," Iturra said. "And then they had to say, 'I didn't die'. That in itself stops you from being frightened."
Since August 22, when a bore hole reached the miners, their rescue and support team has grown to more than 300. It includes communications experts, doctors, psychologists, launderers and cooks, in addition to drilling engineers, in what has become something akin to a small village in the middle of an Atacama desert. The crew work in teams and shifts to provide everything necessary for the miners' survival until they can be rescued.
Iturra explained that the miners have taken it upon themselves to solve their problems as miners usually do - through hard work.
Divided into three groups of 11, they sleep on beds in three separate parts of the mine, work in three shifts and share lunch at noon each day to maintain unity.
Their routine starts with breakfast - hot coffee or tea with milk and a ham-and-cheese sandwich. Then they start working: removing the loose rock that drops through the bore holes as they are being widened into escape tunnels, cleaning up their rubbish and emptying toilets, attending to the capsules known as ‘palomas’, (Spanish for carrier pigeons), that are lowered down to them with supplies.
The miners must quickly remove the contents - food, clean clothes, medicine, family letters and other supplies, and send back up material such as dirty clothes, rolled up like sausages to fit. Each trip down takes 12 to 15 minutes, then four minutes for unloading and five minutes to pull them back up. At least three miners are constantly stationed at the bore hole for this work.
"They know that the paloma never stops, they're watching for it," said Alejandro Pino, the rescue operations chief for Chile's workplace insurance association, which is responsible for preparing the food and supporting the mental and physical health of the miners.
Another bore hole is used for communication and to transport electricity, air and water.
Tubes pump at least 100 litres of water a day and about 114 cubic metres of fresh air an hour into the mine, said Erik Araya, a geologist for Codelco, Chile's state-owned copper company. That enables the men to take showers and slightly reduces the sweltering heat down below.
Thanks to the pumped-in air, some lower sections of the mine have dropped to a temperature of about 82 degrees Fahrenheit (28 degrees Celsius), while the upper part of their chamber remains above 90 degrees (32 degrees Celsius).
There’s little they can do about the humidity which remains at 90 per cent, Pino said, and many of the miners can still be seen shirtless in images recorded by a video camera the rescue team sent down.
In general, they wear T-shirts and shorts, socks and heavy work boots. The rescue team is thinking of sending down running shoes so the men can exercise for at least an hour a day, but soon they'll be moving rocks in the oppressive heat which will be a form of exercise in itself.
Although there are no microwave ovens down below, the mine is so warm that the plastic-wrapped meals they eat retain their heat well. They dine with plates and cutlery that were already in the refuge, as well as flexible plastic plates, also sent from above.
Each miner gets about 2,200 calories a day, the average necessary for an adult to maintain their weight, says Dr Jose Diaz. His team sent down a scale, similar to that used in a fish market, to weigh the men, using a harness they added down below. The results suggest they have regained the correct body mass after a near-starvation diet over the first 17 days. The rescue team have also reluctantly agreed to the requests from some men for cigarettes, but alcohol has been ruled out, part of an overall routine designed to keep the men focussed.
While Iturra's team of psychologists talk with the miners at least twice a day, the men know their survival ultimately depends on each other.
So in addition to twice-daily prayer sessions, they under go a kind of group therapy, which the miners call ‘showing their cards’, in which they meet to discuss disagreements, plans and achievements.Just what those disagreements have been, if any, has not been made public.
