Through a skinny borehole from the surface, the 33 miners trapped more than 2,000 feet below the parched earth here have gotten a gel-like substance to keep them alive, tiny lights to illuminate the darkness and encouraging notes from their families waiting above.
What they have not gotten is the difficult news: that it could take more than three months to pull them to the surface. No one has told them, for fear of breaking their spirit.
“Psychologically, we have to try to keep them on the right track,” said Laurence Golborne, Chile’s mining minister. “They are miners, so they understand the situation they are living. They understand that we have to go through 700 meters of solid rock to rescue them.” But even so, he added, “we don’t want them to suffer ups and downs.”
For many of the families now camping in a makeshift tent city outside the mine, a place bursting with Chilean flags and religious artifacts, it was nothing short of a miracle when President Sebastián Piñera presented a handwritten note from the miners on national television on Sunday, assuring Chile that all of the miners had somehow survived their feared entombment after a cave-in on Aug. 5.
- Hazards of long confinement, The New York Times, 24/08/2010
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