The last of 33 miners trapped underground in the San Jose mine in northern Chile was lifted to the surface on the night of October 13, 2010, after 69 days below ground. A rock collapse on August 5 had cut the men off more than half a kilometre down, and for seventeen days nobody knew whether any of them were alive. Then a narrow probe, sent down on a drilling string, came back up with a note taped to it, in the handwriting of one of the miners, saying all 33 were alive.
The note changed everything. Until then the effort had been a search. After it, the problem was how to pull men out of a mine through 600 metres of rock. The engineers drilled a shaft wide enough for a man and lowered a capsule on a cable. The capsule was called the Fenix, the phoenix, and it was built to order, three and a half metres of steel with a door that sealed, and it carried one man at a time through the hour-long climb.
The rescue itself was watched around the world. The first man came up just after midnight. The last, the shift foreman Luis Urzua, followed 22 hours later, and each ascent was broadcast live to a crowd that had camped at the minehead for days and to millions more on television. The miners came up in sunglasses, to protect eyes that had lived for two months in dim light, and were taken to hospital for a check that found them, against the odds, in reasonable shape.
It cost a great deal. It became a national story. The mine's owners had a record of safety problems and went bankrupt, and the government, which had mounted the rescue, treated the men as national figures afterwards. The last man out, Urzua, told the president who was waiting at the top that the mine had handed the men back, and the capsule and the shaft and the seventeen-day search are now part of how the country tells the story of its worst mining accident turned into its best-known rescue.