Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Found, Not Yet Saved

This is torment. This represents uncertainty balanced against hope at its most elemental level. A group of 33 miners trapped deep below the earth's surface in a gold and copper mine north of Santiago, Chile. Delirious with joy and disbelief that after seventeen days underground after a mining collapse, they had survived, the country celebrates and family members, while yet distraught at the separation from their loved ones, look to the future.

But this mine is very deep underground. The men found to have survived, their partial photos taken by a tiny camera suspended underground, must await rescue. Which is to say a wait-time of impossible duration, given the circumstances. The circumstances being that they are deeply underground, and would far prefer not to be where they are imprisoned by misfortune in the deep embrace of rock and soil. They managed to survive by taking advantage of what little and sparse opportunities were given them to prolong life.

Physically they are in good shape. But the tedious, fearfully long wait for rescue may result in another kind of trauma that may result from emotional stress, and the anguish of their trapped plight, in desolation of spirit. A new shaft must be drilled deep underground. And the shaft will only be built once it is established where the most safe place is to do that, avoiding rock fissures or other potentially destabilizing conditions of the situation that surrounds them.

When drilling is enabled once engineers are satisfied that the rescue mission can proceed, the industrial hydraulic bore must drill a shaft wide enough to extract the miners without causing a further collapse, grinding through 700 metres of earth and rock. The trapped men were able to rig up a lighting system using a truck engine, and to use a bulldozer to construct a water canal. Plastic tubes were sent down a bore hole to provide the men with glucose, hydration gells and liquid nutrients and medications.

Experts write of the mental degradation and emotional balance-affliction suffered by human beings entombed in the earth after an earthquake, depending on how long those people remained in their position before rescue. Three to four months is a long time to miss feeling the sun warm your back, to be prevented from throwing arms around loved ones. The group will be able to encourage one another to persist.

Faith in rescue must be maintained and the courage to face long months of incarceration deep in the belly of the earth. Injuries that may be sustained, illnesses that may occur, emotional disturbances and disagreements between tensely emotional people existing in confined quarters in a severely dysfunctional environment must all be endured.

There is no one who would want to share the privations and the fears and the existential challenges of these thirty-three trapped miners. Long may they persevere, to greet their families when they finally emerge, saved from their very personal tragedy.

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