ALL BEING WELL, the last of Chile’s 33 trapped miners will this morning be brought safely up from 625 metres below ground. Last to emerge, ending the longest mining shift in history, is expected to be Luis Urzua (54), the shift leader who organised their lives for 69 days down the San José copper and gold mine. It is a heart-warming story of triumph plucked from what, for 17 agonising days after the August 5th tunnel collapse, seemed certain tragedy.
Miners’ families and a whole country have shared in a justifiable pride in both the personal stories of endurance and survival and a sense of national achievement in the deepest and most technically challenging of rescue operations. It involved millions of dollars, specialists from Nasa and drilling experts from a dozen countries. Carefully managing expectations, Chile’s heavily engaged president Sebastian Pinera warned that it might take four months. In the end it took 69 days.
Emerging blinking into the light of the Atacama desert, one of the driest in the world, they will be finding themselves at the centre of the most extraordinary media circus, a glare of publicity and scrutiny that some will relish and profit from – and good luck to them. But others will struggle to deal with such attention. Some are certain to develop the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in the months ahead. They will need the help they have been promised.
But there must also be a reckoning and a calling to account. The safety record of the mine run by the San Esteban Company was abysmal. Wooden planks were used to prop walls instead of steel in the 100-year-old pit. Over the last six years the firm has been fined 42 times for safety violations. There have been at least three deaths and the owners were charged with involuntary manslaughter over one in 2006, eventually settling for a $170,000 payout to his family. Now they face questioning by prosecutors and writs from 27 of the 33.
Although the number of mining deaths has fallen in recent years, 43 died in the pits in 2008 and unions complain of a dire shortage of safety inspectors (in the Antofagasta region alone there are only three for 1,635 mines). Responding to public anger in the immediate aftermath of August 5th, President Pinera belatedly fired the chief mine regulator and several of the senior mine safety officials and closed down dozens of tiny mines across the country. The small and medium sized mines like the San José have the worst record.
There are no reliable global statistics for deaths in one of the world’s most dangerous jobs, but a Geneva-based miners’ federation estimates there are 12,000 fatalities every year down the mines. Major accidents claiming dozens of lives each have occurred this year in China, Colombia, Russia and West Virginia, while at least 200 died in Sierra Leone. Only 24 countries have ratified the International Labour Organisation Safety and Health in Mines Convention. Chile, the world’s top copper producer, is among those who have as yet to agree to sign the 1995 pact, as well as Australia, Canada, the DRC, India, Russia and Ukraine. To its shame.