27 miners free: Chile rescue picks up speed
Twenty-seven miners have been pulled from the depths of the Chilean mine, as the landmark rescue operation watched around the world continues.
Franklin Lobos stepped out of the rescue capsule at about 9.15am AEDT today, less than half an hour after Claudio Acuna emerged.
Six miners remain underground in the San Jose mine, in northern Chile.
Chilean miner Pablo Rojas gives his thumb up after being brought to the surface.Photo: AFP
But it was the emergence of the 21st miner - and the women who waited for him - that enthralled the world overnight.
Yonni Barrios, 50, stepped out of the rescue capsule to be embraced by his mistress, Susana Valenzuela.
His wife of 28 years, Marta Salinas, was not at the mine.
She and Valenzuela came to blows weeks ago when both claimed to be the woman Barrios was pining for as he sat trapped in the mine.
In the end, Salinas declined Barrios's invitation to be present alongside Valenzuela when the miner was winched to the surface, Chilean media reported.
Carlos Bugueno was also rescued this morning.
The miners who spent 69 agonising days deep under the Chilean earth were hoisted one by one to freedom, their rescue moving with remarkable speed while their countrymen erupted in cheers and the world watched transfixed.
In a meticulously planned operation, they were monitored by video on the way up for any sign of panic. They had oxygen masks, dark glasses to protect their eyes from unfamiliar daylight and sweaters for the jarring climate change, subterranean swelter to the chillier air above.
They emerged looking healthier than many had expected and even clean-shaven, and at least one, Mario Sepulveda, the second to taste freedom, bounded out and thrust a fist upward like a prizefighter.
"I think I had extraordinary luck. I was with God and with the devil. And I reached out for God," he said as he awaited the air force helicopter ride to a nearby hospital where all the miners were to spend 48 hours under medical observation.
The operation moved past the halfway point with the rescue of the 17th miner, a 56-year-old electrician named Omar Reygadas who helped organized life underground. His fourth great-grandchild was born a month after the men were sealed into the mine's lower reaches by an August 5 collapse of 700,000 tons of rock.
As it traveled down and up, down and up, the rescue capsule was not rotating as much inside the 2,041-foot escape shaft as officials expected, allowing for faster trips.
The anxiety that had accompanied the careful final days of preparation broke with the first rescue — Florencio Avalos, who emerged from the missile-like chamber and smiled broadly after his half-mile journey. He hugged his sobbing 7-year-old son and wife and then President Sebastian Pinera, who has been deeply involved in an effort that had become a matter of national pride.
Avalos was followed an hour later by the most ebullient of the group, Sepulveda, whose shouts were heard even before the capsule peeked above the surface. He hugged his wife and handed out souvenir rocks from the mine to laughing rescuers.
No one in recorded history has survived as long trapped underground as the 33 men. For the first 17 days, no one even knew whether they were alive. In the weeks that followed, the world was captivated by their endurance and unity.
Health Minister Jaime Manalich told a news conference after eight miners were rescued that all of them were in good health, and none has required any special medication, not even the diabetic among them.
Chile exploded in joy and relief at the first, breakthrough rescue just after midnight in the coastal Atacama desert.
In the capital, Santiago, a cacophony of car horns sounded. In the nearby regional capital of Copiapo, from which 24 of the miners hail, the mayor canceled school so parents and children could "watch the rescue in the warmth of the home."
News channels from North America to Europe and the Middle East carried live coverage. Pope Benedict XVI said in Spanish that he "continues with hope to entrust to God's goodness" the fate of the men. Iran's state English-language Press TV followed events live until President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad touched down in Lebanon on his first state visit there.
The images beamed worldwide were extraordinary: Grainy footage from beneath the earth showed each miner climbing into the 13-foot-tall capsule, then disappearing upward through an opening. Then a camera showed the pod steadily rising through the dark, smooth-walled tunnel.
After the fifth miner made his ascent 19-year-old Jimmy Sanchez, the youngest and the father of a months-old baby, the rescuers paused to lubricate the spring-loaded wheels that gave the capsule a smooth ride through the shaft, then resumed the rescues.
The ninth, Mario Gomez, who at 63 is the oldest miner, dropped to his knees after he emerged, bowed his head in prayer and clutched the Chilean flag. His wife, Liliane Ramirez, pulled him up from the ground and embraced him.
Gomez is most experienced of the group, first entering a mine shaft to labor at age 12, and suffers from silicosis, a lung disease common to miners. He has been on antibiotics and bronchial inflammation medicine. Manalich said Gomez came up with a special oxygen mask.
The lone foreigner among the miners, Carlos Mamani of Bolivia, was visited at a nearby clinic by Pinera and Bolivian President Evo Morales. The miner could be heard telling the Chilean president how nice it was to breathe fresh air and see the stars.
Most of the men emerged clean-shaven. Crews had lowered packages dubbed "palomas," Spanish for carrier pigeons, to get food and medicine to the men during their weeks underground, and in the days before rescue they were sent razors and shaving cream.
The entire rescue operation was meticulously choreographed, with no expense spared in bringing in topflight drillers and equipment — and boring three separate holes into the copper and gold mine.
Mining is Chile's lifeblood, providing 40 percent of state earnings, and Pinera put his mining minister and the operations chief of state-owned Codelco, the country's biggest company, in charge of the rescue.
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