The 33 - Tapa dura

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Jonathan Franklin is an award-winning journalist who reported from the front line of the Chilean mine disaster for the Guardian, the Washington Post and the Sydney Morning Herald. As the only print journalist with front row access to the rescue efforts, he was allowed to attend planning meetings, private conversations with the miners, and to have practically unlimited time with the lead doctor and the lead psychologist. He was also the first journalist to secure an interview with the leader of the miners, foreman Luis Urzua. He has lived in Chile for 16 years.

De la solapa interior

On 12 October 2010 the world's attention was fixed on a remote copper mine in the Atacama desert in Chile. Final preparations were underway for a daring rescue to bring to an end the longest underground entrapment in human history.

Sixty-nine days earlier, 33 miners were midway through a routine shift, deep in the San Jose mine. They stopped for lunch at the tiny safety shelter 688 metres below the surface. Ten minutes later they heard an almighty crack and a deep rumbling sound. Clouds of dust and debris poured down on the choking men. The bombardment lasted for five hours. When it finally cleared the men discovered they were trapped under tonnes of collapsed rock.

Seventeen days after the collapse, a drill finally reached them. They sent a note back to the surface: 'We are all right in the shelter, the 33 of us.'

Building on the exclusive access he was given by the rescue team, and dozens of hours of interviews with the miners themselves, Jonathan Franklin takes us deep into the collapsed mine with the men, and behind the scenes of the rescue effort to bring them back to the surface.

For seventeen days, hope slowly turned to desperation and then resignation as the miners prepared themselves for a slow agonizing death. When a drill finally got through to the men, they still had over seven weeks to wait until they were freed. What those men experienced in the claustrophobic dark of the mine, how their families kept faith, and the unprecedented scale of the rescue make this an unforgettable story of how hope overcame fear, ingenuity triumphed over adversity and how thirty-three trapped men and the rescuers dedicated to saving them created a miracle in the desert.