Peru's president-elect, Ollanta Humala, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are among those forced to take other modes of transport to reach Argentina. The ash cloud has also led Argentina to declare a state of emergency for farmers. ...
Showing posts with label chile. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chile. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Chile volcano erupts, spits towering ash column
Residents walk on streets covered with ash from Chile’s Puyehue volcano 160km to the west, in the Argentine resort city of Bariloche on June 4, 2011. The volcano dormant for decades erupted in south-central Chile yesterday, belching ash over 10km into the sky,
A volcano dormant for decades erupted in south-central Chile yesterday, belching ash over 10km into the sky and prompting the government to evacuate several thousand residents, authorities said.
Winds fanned the ash toward neighboring Argentina, darkening the sky in the ski resort city of San Carlos de Bariloche, a government official there said, adding the city’s airport had been closed.
The eruption in the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcanic chain, about 920km south of the capital, Santiago, also prompted Chilean authorities to shut a heavily traveled border crossing into Argentina.
It was not immediately clear which of the chain’s four volcanoes had erupted because of ash cover and weather conditions. The chain last saw a major eruption in 1960. Local media said the smell of sulfur hung in the air and there was constant seismic activity.
“The Cordon Caulle (volcanic range) has entered an eruptive process, with an explosion resulting in a 10-km-high gas column,” state emergency office ONEMI said. The government said it was evacuating 3,500 people from the surrounding area as a precaution.
It was the latest in a series of volcanic eruptions in Chile in recent years. Chile’s Chaiten volcano erupted spectacularly in 2008 for the first time in thousands of years, spewing molten rock and a vast cloud of ash that reached the stratosphere. The ash also swelled a nearby river and ravaged a nearby town of the same name.
The ash cloud from Chaiten coated towns in Argentina and was visible from space.
Chile’s Llaima volcano, one of South America’s most active, erupted in 2008 and 2009.
Chile’s chain of about 2,000 volcanoes is the world’s second largest after Indonesia. Some 50 to 60 are on record as having erupted, and 500 are potentially active.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Rescued Chile miner joyous, but also talks of devil
Trapped deep inside the earth for 69 days, Mario Sepulveda never lost his sense of humour, so when he was finally pulled to safety today, he brought a souvenir with him – a bag of rocks.
The rocks, which Sepulveda gave out to rescue workers, appeared to be wrapped in silver tinfoil. Hundreds of people watching on a TV feed giggled as he brought a touch of humour to a tense and riveting operation to free him and 32 other men from a collapsed mine here in northern Chile.
Miner Claudio Yanez kisses his wife after arriving as the eighth miner to be hoisted to the surface in Copiapo October 13, 2010.
Sepulveda is known for being a bit of a comedian, and he even tried to hand a rock from deep inside the San Jose mine to Chilean President Sebastian Pinera, who responded by laughing and giving the rescued miner a bear hug.
Pinera then appeared to shed a tear after Sepulveda was whisked on a hospital gurney into a makeshift clinic for a medical check up.
Sepulveda’s whoops of joy were audible from the escape shaft even before he surfaced from the mine, a new sign of the remarkable resilience demonstrated by the 33 men since they were trapped when the mine caved in on August 5.
But for all the humour, he also showed a darkly serious streak.
“I have been with God and I’ve been with the devil,” Sepulveda later said in an interview flanked by his family.
Throughout their ordeal, the miners appear to have held together and their spirits often seemed high, but psychologists say some will likely suffer from stress long after the rescue is complete and they are reunited with their families.
Sepulveda called for deep changes to protect workers rights and appealed to be treated like a worker and a miner rather than a celebrity: “Please don’t treat us like artists.”
He was believed to be an emotional leader of the miners underground, and television images showed him keeping it up right until the end, laughing heartily and clowning around as he climbed into the capsule and said farewell to the others.
When he reached the top, he hugged his wife before ripping open his bag full of rocks and handing them out with a big smile. He then ran over to a group of friends to hug them and lead them in yelling out a classic cheer that ended with the line: “Long live the Chilean miners!”
His mother was so moved that she had trouble speaking, and his brother, Jose Sepulveda, said simply that the homecoming was long overdue.
“We are all happy and content. We are all hugging each other and crying,” he said.
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The rocks, which Sepulveda gave out to rescue workers, appeared to be wrapped in silver tinfoil. Hundreds of people watching on a TV feed giggled as he brought a touch of humour to a tense and riveting operation to free him and 32 other men from a collapsed mine here in northern Chile.
Sepulveda is known for being a bit of a comedian, and he even tried to hand a rock from deep inside the San Jose mine to Chilean President Sebastian Pinera, who responded by laughing and giving the rescued miner a bear hug.
Pinera then appeared to shed a tear after Sepulveda was whisked on a hospital gurney into a makeshift clinic for a medical check up.
Sepulveda’s whoops of joy were audible from the escape shaft even before he surfaced from the mine, a new sign of the remarkable resilience demonstrated by the 33 men since they were trapped when the mine caved in on August 5.
But for all the humour, he also showed a darkly serious streak.
“I have been with God and I’ve been with the devil,” Sepulveda later said in an interview flanked by his family.
Throughout their ordeal, the miners appear to have held together and their spirits often seemed high, but psychologists say some will likely suffer from stress long after the rescue is complete and they are reunited with their families.
Sepulveda called for deep changes to protect workers rights and appealed to be treated like a worker and a miner rather than a celebrity: “Please don’t treat us like artists.”
He was believed to be an emotional leader of the miners underground, and television images showed him keeping it up right until the end, laughing heartily and clowning around as he climbed into the capsule and said farewell to the others.
When he reached the top, he hugged his wife before ripping open his bag full of rocks and handing them out with a big smile. He then ran over to a group of friends to hug them and lead them in yelling out a classic cheer that ended with the line: “Long live the Chilean miners!”
His mother was so moved that she had trouble speaking, and his brother, Jose Sepulveda, said simply that the homecoming was long overdue.
“We are all happy and content. We are all hugging each other and crying,” he said.
'For 14 days we were all in pitch darkness. There was no night and no day. We begged God to help us': The amazing first interview with one of the trapped Chilean miners
He is the undisputed star of the Chilean mine rescue. When Mario Sepulveda became the second miner to surface after 69 days trapped half-a-mile below ground, his cheeky gift of souvenir rocks for the Chilean president combined with his wildly enthusiastic chants of ‘Viva Chile’ alongside his rescuers led to him being dubbed Super Mario on newspaper front pages around the world.
Since his rescue, the charismatic 40-year-old heavy-equipment operator has been deluged with lucrative media offers, including the chance to host his own Chilean TV show.
But yesterday Mario, speaking from his hospital bed before being released last night – leaving only one of the 33 in the care of doctors – spoke exclusively to The Mail on Sunday and revealed how his jaunty facade was hiding a man tormented by the ‘nightmare’ of what he and the others faced for the initial 17 days after they were trapped – fearing they would starve to death in their underground tomb.
Speaking for the first time about the ordeal, Mario broke the miners’ self-imposed ‘Pact of Silence’ to say: ‘There are certain things which need to be told. I want the world to know the truth about what we went through down there. We were swallowed into the bowels of hell but we have been reborn and now I feel it is my duty to tell what went on and the lessons to be learned.’
Mario, who ‘celebrated’ his 40th birthday on October 4 below ground, said he decided to tell The Mail on Sunday his story because we had treated his family – wife Elvira, 39, known to all as Katty, daughter Scarlette, 18, and 13-year-old son Francisco – ‘with dignity and kindness’.
I first met the family shortly after the miners were located on August 22 when one of several bore holes finally made it into the 500sq ft refuge where they had been surviving in what Mario now calls ‘inhumane conditions’ since a rockfall blocked the mine on August 5.
Their discovery was revealed in images that were greeted with jubilation and disbelief around the world as president Sebastian Pinera held up a note the miners had attached to the drill head which read: ‘All 33 of us are alive inside the shelter.’ Mario now says that note was written when the men ‘had all but given up’.
‘By that stage we were not sure if anyone would ever come for us,’ he says, his voice cracking with emotion and his eyes filling with tears. ‘We heard nothing for 15 days and then for two days we heard drilling in the distance but it stopped.
‘We felt for sure that they had given up on us. Then the drilling started again and the roof of the tunnel began showering rocks and the drill came through. We started dancing around in pure joy. That was the highlight. But the 17 days before that moment were pure hell.’
As he sits on his hospital bed inside the Atacama clinic, with his black Oakley sunglasses pushed on to the top of his balding head, Mario frequently stops to cuddle his children, who are also visiting.
He cries as he tells his remarkable story of survival. He talks about being ‘on a roller coaster’ of emotions and says doctors are keeping him in hospital because they want him to rest. ‘I am finding it hard to sleep,’ he says. ‘I am so happy and yet when I think of what happened my emotions overwhelm me.’
Mario, whose mother died when he was an infant, dotes on his family. He met Katty – who is a secretary for accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers – when he took a room in her sister’s house and the pair wed in 1992, shortly after the birth of their daughter.
‘That’s a typically Chilean way of doing things,’ he grins.
An electrician by trade, he became a miner ten years ago to help support his growing family. He had worked in the San Jose gold and copper mine for three years, spending the week at the mine and weekends with his family in the Chilean capital Santiago, an hour’s flight south.
Mario says despite the mine having a poor safety record he was earning the equivalent of £1,000 a month, almost double the normal salary for a miner. ‘I didn’t like the mine but I figured I would work there to earn good money to give my kids what I didn’t have. Isn’t that what every parent wants?’
The San Jose mine is a large shaft which zig-zags down into the earth and has dozens of tunnels coming off it. The miners’ drive from the surface to the bottom took 20 minutes.
Recalling the day the nightmare began, Mario says August 5 was ‘just another regular day at the mine’. It was lunchtime and the men were gathering in a 20ft high cavern to catch the transport that would take them to the surface to eat. It was that twist of fate that saved their lives: had they been scattered throughout the mine many would certainly have perished.
Mario says: ‘I had ear plugs and headphones on because I had been driving a big excavator truck so I didn’t hear the mine roaring. But I saw the dust and debris.
‘A colleague came running through the cloud screaming, “Cave in!”
‘The dust was thick and heavy.’
I ask Mario if he was scared at that moment. ‘Scared? Not really,’ he says. ‘You have to remember the mine is my workplace. I knew the refuge was close by.’
Mario says his first instinct was to seek an escape route. ‘Some of the younger ones were in a bad way – hysterical – but I had to find a way out. The only thought that kept going through my head was that I didn’t want to die before my children had an education. It sounds like a crazy thought but that is so important to me.
‘I knew Katty would be OK. She’s a good-looking woman and could find another man. But what if that man didn’t like my kids?
‘I couldn’t face the thought of my kids being unhappy.’
He says he began walking around the subterranean tunnel system: ‘It was pitch black except for the lamp on my helmet. I kept walking and looking for a way out. I came to the rockfall and I knew there was no way through. I walked for hours. I found a ventilation shaft. It was a shaft that should have had a ladder in it. It did have a ladder so I started climbing. The walls were soft and the rocks fell back in my face.’
He points to his left incisor tooth and wiggles it with his fingers. ‘The rocks struck me in the face and loosened my teeth. I was bleeding from my mouth but still I kept climbing. I had to get out.’
The flimsy ladder was made of leather and rope – used instead of metal because it wouldn’t rust. But Mario says: ‘It was in terrible condition. It had not been checked or maintained. And it ran out halfway up the shaft.’ He says after an agonising 150ft climb up the two-foot-wide shaft, the ladder ran out.
‘The ladder should have gone the whole way. I tried to climb without the ladder but the walls crumbled. I could not make it. I could see two big rocks up ahead that were blocking the shaft. That was a moment of utter despair. I came back down and had to tell the other guys there was no way out.’
Much has been written about how the men followed the lead of shift supervisor Luis Urzua, who was the last man to come out of the mine during last week’s dramatic rescue.
Mario explains: ‘We immediately organised ourselves into working groups to look for escape routes, keep the living area clean and patrol the shaft for signs of rescue attempts.
‘Luis was the foreman and so when we worked we naturally deferred to him but when the working day finished we were Los 33. We practised democracy. Each person had a vote and if 17 men voted one way, that made the decision. We tried to stay as normal as we could under the circumstances and to watch out for each other.
‘If one was down, the others rallied. Each day a different person took a bad turn. Every time that happened, we worked as a team, to try to keep the morale up. We older ones took care of the younger ones. We knew that if society broke down we would all be doomed. It was important to keep clean, to keep busy, to keep believing we would be rescued. It was important to keep faith.’ Mario’s leading role in the miners’ survival was described by colleague Yonni Barrios, 50, who was released from hospital yesterday. He said Mario provided the true leadership in the darkest hours.
‘I can say quite frankly, the one who contributed most from the beginning was Mario Sepulveda,’ he said. ‘It was he who did everything for us, who organised the team. He encouraged us not to lose hope, that some day we were going to get out.’
The men had meagre supplies of canned tuna in the cramped refuge and limited themselves to half a bottle cap full each day. Water was taken from two industrial-sized oil drums which were full of water used to fill the radiators of the heavy equipment used down the mine – but tainted with oil.
Mario, a deeply religious man like most in this devoutly Catholic country, says: ‘That was one act of God right there. We had water. It tasted foul but it didn’t poison us, even though it was tainted. We allowed ourselves a few small sips each day.'
Mario explains how he felt it was his job to keep spirits up. ‘I am a natural joker. When the others fell into despair, I would crack a joke or gee them along. I have always been a clown. I knew it was important for me to keep joking around.
“If I stopped joking then I would be letting them down. But sometimes it was hard to joke. They talk about the tears of a clown. That was me.’
Did he cry, I ask? ‘Sure, all the time. But I would walk away from the others, down a tunnel, so they would not see me weep. I knew I had to stay strong. My reputation in the mine was as a funny guy. I had to keep that reputation going, for the sake of morale.’
Then came a major boost. ‘There was underground water which we found on about day four and we used that water to bathe. It was run-off water from a shelf in the rocks. Once we found the water coming off the rock shelf we used a cup and would stand there, two in a pair, and help each other wash. We poured water on the other.’
But this hardly made up for the ‘inhumane’ conditions in the mine, where the ground was constantly wet. Mario pulls off his hospital socks to show his feet, which are still stained a reddish brown from the mud. He says he has a case of athlete’s foot ‘from hell’.
He says: ‘The mine was swelteringly hot [around 92F, 33C]. We stripped down to our underwear. It was so humid you could not move without sweating.
‘The air was so bad our eyes were burning the whole time. We were all coughing. It was like being in a filthy sauna where the air is full of dirt. We made beds by putting cardboard on the floor.
‘The batteries in our helmet lights faded and then they went out completely on Day Three.’ The miners had a Nissan pick-up truck, a ‘scoop’ – a mechanical digger – a small cargo truck and another truck with a lift attached which is used to reach the roof. Mario says: ‘We used the vehicles for everything while we were down there. Some men slept in them, we used them to move stuff around and to explore the tunnels beneath us to look for any possible escape route going up.’
He says they spent much of the time in darkness but would use light from the headlamps to work by. They never totally ran out of light because if the battery in one vehicle went flat they could recharge it by running the engines.
They also sounded one of the vehicle’s horns every hour – just in case anyone on the other side would hear.
They conserved their light and used it as a ‘treat’. Mario says: ‘We are used to working in darkness –we are miners. We can feel our way down there in a way other men cannot. But we used the light to work by and eat and to reward ourselves and boost morale. An engineer found small low-wattage bulbs and rigged those up in the refuge and we ran those off a car battery. Mostly it was dark but that is what we are used to.’
Soon, hunger began to take its toll. Mario says: ‘I didn’t mind the hunger as much as some of the other men. I did military service. When you’ve been in the army, you know what hunger is and you are trained to ignore it. I knew we had water and could survive for two, maybe three weeks.’ But even Mario admits as the days wore on, his confidence dimmed.
‘We were in total darkness. The heat was oppressive. We all felt the Devil was down there with us. We prayed and prayed. It was a dark, black hole. We were buried alive. We were all so scared. We begged God to help us. We were worried we would starve to death or that the water would run out and we would die horribly from dehydration.’
All the time they were straining to hear signs that rescuers might be close. ‘We tried to keep quiet, to listen for anyone coming to get us. Then the mind started playing tricks and we would hear something and then another man would say, “No, you are imagining that sound.” It was cruel.
‘There was no night and day but we had our watches and we made sure we kept track of the time. We tried to keep the kids on a schedule. Anyone who has had children knows how important a sleep schedule is, and we fathers tried to implement that.’ As well as trying to survive in the grim conditions, there were some grim tasks to carry out.
‘There was a chemical toilet down there. When that got overwhelmed we dug a hole and once a day would shovel the waste out, put it in an oil drum and cover it with sand. We knew enough to keep sanitary conditions.’
I tell Mario about the rumours that had circulated around the campfires in Camp Hope – the village that sprang up at the minehead filled with family members and Press – that the miners had some ‘Brokeback Mountain’ type moments and that is why they signed the Pact of Silence. He says: ‘No, nothing like that ever went on. We were too busy trying to survive to think of sex.
‘We didn’t really even talk about sex. We spoke of our wives and we made some jokes but we never talked about sex seriously because that would have been too painful.’
He remains silent when asked if the miners came to blows but acknowledges that some of them became so depressed that they ‘cried like babies’, took to their makeshift beds and refused to get up.
Speaking about the Pact of Silence the men signed on the day the rescue drill broke through, he says: ‘By that time things had become very bad. When you are in a stressful situation like that, you do and say things in extremes. We made the Pact of Silence to protect some of the younger, less educated ones. It was a pact of brotherhood. Originally we were not going to talk at all about the 17 days.’
But, I ask, surely he is breaking that pact now? ‘No, I don’t believe I am betraying anyone,’ he answers. ‘The reason I am speaking is that people have been gossiping and saying things and I think it is important for one of us, me in this case, to tell it as it was down there, but also to answer some of the things that people are getting wrong. Saying we had sex down there with each other is just plain wrong.
‘There are some things I will never talk about. But they are things that would embarrass some of the kids. Nothing sexual, more that they acted like kids. It is important, even now, for the older ones to protect the younger, more vulnerable ones.’
Despite their continuing ordeal, Mario says the miners managed to break the monotony with moments of jollity – recalling one incident in particular that seemed to lift spirits.
‘The days went one into another. The first week was bad, but the second week, that was terrible. Some of the boys were taking it bad. They didn’t think we would be rescued. I was beginning to wonder myself.
‘On about Day Ten, I was sleeping and I heard the others moving about. The mood was sombre. So I lay very rigid and I said very weakly, “Hey guys, hey, I need to say something.
‘They gathered around and I was playing like I was dying and I said, very slowly, “My friends, say to my family that I love them. Tell them that the money is in the . . .” and then I pretended to expire. The others were quiet and I held my breath. Then I could hold it no more and burst out laughing!
‘They started yelling at me. But many of them have told me since that this is the moment when they realised God had a plan for them. Even if we were all going to die down there, we were going to do it as a group, with dignity.
‘Humour helped us. Sometimes it is easier to laugh than cry.’
I ask him if, as has been reported, the miners ever discussed or considered cannibalism. ‘Do you think about things like that? I didn’t. Maybe some men did. Maybe I would have thought about that if things had got worse.
‘I just thought about dying. I thought about my wife, my kids. I thought about what I would say to them. We all wrote letters to our families. We wrote farewell notes. We all tried to keep faith alive but, to be brutally honest, by those last few days I am not sure if any of us truly believed we would be found. But our faith made us believe that people on the surface would not forsake us.’
Katty, who arrived at Camp Hope within 24 hours of the cave-in, says even she had started to despair. ‘The first week the rescuers told us there was little chance of our husbands coming out alive.
‘At first, the wives were united but as the days went on and a rescue looked less hopeful, the fighting started. Some wives got morose, others got angry with the government, with the company, with everyone. I just stayed quiet and prayed. My husband is very different from me. He is the loud, funny one. I am the quiet one who keeps everything calm. I tried to keep the faith but I must admit that by the tenth day, I thought I was a widow.’
Mario says when the drill broke through, the men ‘danced around the tunnel like crazy things’.
‘We then all believed we would be saved. The Devil was down there and so was God. I didn’t see either but I felt both. They were in a battle for our souls. And God won.’
Katty has kept all the notes Mario wrote to her from the mine which she received in the cylindrical palomas, or ‘doves’, sent through one of three small ‘lifeline’ tunnels which were used to get food, aid and water to the men while the ‘Plan B’ drill was carving out the shaft they would escape throug
Mario has given the watch he had in the mine to his son. His daughter has his helmet – signed by the other 32 miners. Scarlette shows me a 20-minute video of his ‘official’ 40th birthday below ground, complete with balloons she sent down which her father inflated. A ‘proper’ party was being held at home for Mario last night after his discharge from hospital.
After that, Mario will have some tough decisions to make about the megabucks offers he and the other miners are receiving for their stories. He says any money will be used for the good of his family.
‘I am not a superstar, I am a miner. I will always be a miner. I will take whatever money I make from this and I will make sure my kids have a college fund. I’ll buy a house and I’d like to take my wife on holiday. Apart from that, I would like to use what we have been through to help other working men. The attitude needs to change here in Chile – and then the world.
‘This situation won’t affect someone like me, who has a wife and kids. But, for sure, some of the younger miners will have their heads turned by the offers of money and fame. We have been talking in the hospital this week about this and we have agreed to try to stick together, to carry on supporting the younger ones.’
Mario adds: ‘I see this as something that has united the world. I am a humble man and I am happy to have played a small part in an event which has made the world come together, if just for a moment.’
EACH MINER 'TO GET A MILLION'
The miners are expected to become overnight millionaires this week.
A ‘big announcement’ is expected on Tuesday at a Press conference called by Chilean businessman and philanthropist Leonardo Farkas – who wrote each man a cheque worth £6,500 while they were trapped.
Mario’s daughter Scarlette said: ‘He said when this all started that he would not rest until each of the accounts he opened for each miner with $10,000 reached a million dollars.
We know that donations have been pouring in from around the world.
‘The families are now so excited about what might be announced on Tuesday.
‘The word is that each account is holding a
million dollars. If that is true then our lives truly will never be the same again.’
Since his rescue, the charismatic 40-year-old heavy-equipment operator has been deluged with lucrative media offers, including the chance to host his own Chilean TV show.
But yesterday Mario, speaking from his hospital bed before being released last night – leaving only one of the 33 in the care of doctors – spoke exclusively to The Mail on Sunday and revealed how his jaunty facade was hiding a man tormented by the ‘nightmare’ of what he and the others faced for the initial 17 days after they were trapped – fearing they would starve to death in their underground tomb.
Speaking for the first time about the ordeal, Mario broke the miners’ self-imposed ‘Pact of Silence’ to say: ‘There are certain things which need to be told. I want the world to know the truth about what we went through down there. We were swallowed into the bowels of hell but we have been reborn and now I feel it is my duty to tell what went on and the lessons to be learned.’
Mario, who ‘celebrated’ his 40th birthday on October 4 below ground, said he decided to tell The Mail on Sunday his story because we had treated his family – wife Elvira, 39, known to all as Katty, daughter Scarlette, 18, and 13-year-old son Francisco – ‘with dignity and kindness’.
I first met the family shortly after the miners were located on August 22 when one of several bore holes finally made it into the 500sq ft refuge where they had been surviving in what Mario now calls ‘inhumane conditions’ since a rockfall blocked the mine on August 5.
Their discovery was revealed in images that were greeted with jubilation and disbelief around the world as president Sebastian Pinera held up a note the miners had attached to the drill head which read: ‘All 33 of us are alive inside the shelter.’ Mario now says that note was written when the men ‘had all but given up’.
‘By that stage we were not sure if anyone would ever come for us,’ he says, his voice cracking with emotion and his eyes filling with tears. ‘We heard nothing for 15 days and then for two days we heard drilling in the distance but it stopped.
‘We felt for sure that they had given up on us. Then the drilling started again and the roof of the tunnel began showering rocks and the drill came through. We started dancing around in pure joy. That was the highlight. But the 17 days before that moment were pure hell.’
As he sits on his hospital bed inside the Atacama clinic, with his black Oakley sunglasses pushed on to the top of his balding head, Mario frequently stops to cuddle his children, who are also visiting.
He cries as he tells his remarkable story of survival. He talks about being ‘on a roller coaster’ of emotions and says doctors are keeping him in hospital because they want him to rest. ‘I am finding it hard to sleep,’ he says. ‘I am so happy and yet when I think of what happened my emotions overwhelm me.’
Mario, whose mother died when he was an infant, dotes on his family. He met Katty – who is a secretary for accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers – when he took a room in her sister’s house and the pair wed in 1992, shortly after the birth of their daughter.
‘That’s a typically Chilean way of doing things,’ he grins.
An electrician by trade, he became a miner ten years ago to help support his growing family. He had worked in the San Jose gold and copper mine for three years, spending the week at the mine and weekends with his family in the Chilean capital Santiago, an hour’s flight south.
Mario says despite the mine having a poor safety record he was earning the equivalent of £1,000 a month, almost double the normal salary for a miner. ‘I didn’t like the mine but I figured I would work there to earn good money to give my kids what I didn’t have. Isn’t that what every parent wants?’
The San Jose mine is a large shaft which zig-zags down into the earth and has dozens of tunnels coming off it. The miners’ drive from the surface to the bottom took 20 minutes.
Recalling the day the nightmare began, Mario says August 5 was ‘just another regular day at the mine’. It was lunchtime and the men were gathering in a 20ft high cavern to catch the transport that would take them to the surface to eat. It was that twist of fate that saved their lives: had they been scattered throughout the mine many would certainly have perished.
Mario says: ‘I had ear plugs and headphones on because I had been driving a big excavator truck so I didn’t hear the mine roaring. But I saw the dust and debris.
‘A colleague came running through the cloud screaming, “Cave in!”
‘The dust was thick and heavy.’
I ask Mario if he was scared at that moment. ‘Scared? Not really,’ he says. ‘You have to remember the mine is my workplace. I knew the refuge was close by.’
Mario says his first instinct was to seek an escape route. ‘Some of the younger ones were in a bad way – hysterical – but I had to find a way out. The only thought that kept going through my head was that I didn’t want to die before my children had an education. It sounds like a crazy thought but that is so important to me.
‘I knew Katty would be OK. She’s a good-looking woman and could find another man. But what if that man didn’t like my kids?
‘I couldn’t face the thought of my kids being unhappy.’
He says he began walking around the subterranean tunnel system: ‘It was pitch black except for the lamp on my helmet. I kept walking and looking for a way out. I came to the rockfall and I knew there was no way through. I walked for hours. I found a ventilation shaft. It was a shaft that should have had a ladder in it. It did have a ladder so I started climbing. The walls were soft and the rocks fell back in my face.’
He points to his left incisor tooth and wiggles it with his fingers. ‘The rocks struck me in the face and loosened my teeth. I was bleeding from my mouth but still I kept climbing. I had to get out.’
The flimsy ladder was made of leather and rope – used instead of metal because it wouldn’t rust. But Mario says: ‘It was in terrible condition. It had not been checked or maintained. And it ran out halfway up the shaft.’ He says after an agonising 150ft climb up the two-foot-wide shaft, the ladder ran out.
‘The ladder should have gone the whole way. I tried to climb without the ladder but the walls crumbled. I could not make it. I could see two big rocks up ahead that were blocking the shaft. That was a moment of utter despair. I came back down and had to tell the other guys there was no way out.’
Much has been written about how the men followed the lead of shift supervisor Luis Urzua, who was the last man to come out of the mine during last week’s dramatic rescue.
Mario explains: ‘We immediately organised ourselves into working groups to look for escape routes, keep the living area clean and patrol the shaft for signs of rescue attempts.
‘Luis was the foreman and so when we worked we naturally deferred to him but when the working day finished we were Los 33. We practised democracy. Each person had a vote and if 17 men voted one way, that made the decision. We tried to stay as normal as we could under the circumstances and to watch out for each other.
‘If one was down, the others rallied. Each day a different person took a bad turn. Every time that happened, we worked as a team, to try to keep the morale up. We older ones took care of the younger ones. We knew that if society broke down we would all be doomed. It was important to keep clean, to keep busy, to keep believing we would be rescued. It was important to keep faith.’ Mario’s leading role in the miners’ survival was described by colleague Yonni Barrios, 50, who was released from hospital yesterday. He said Mario provided the true leadership in the darkest hours.
‘I can say quite frankly, the one who contributed most from the beginning was Mario Sepulveda,’ he said. ‘It was he who did everything for us, who organised the team. He encouraged us not to lose hope, that some day we were going to get out.’
The men had meagre supplies of canned tuna in the cramped refuge and limited themselves to half a bottle cap full each day. Water was taken from two industrial-sized oil drums which were full of water used to fill the radiators of the heavy equipment used down the mine – but tainted with oil.
Mario, a deeply religious man like most in this devoutly Catholic country, says: ‘That was one act of God right there. We had water. It tasted foul but it didn’t poison us, even though it was tainted. We allowed ourselves a few small sips each day.'
Mario explains how he felt it was his job to keep spirits up. ‘I am a natural joker. When the others fell into despair, I would crack a joke or gee them along. I have always been a clown. I knew it was important for me to keep joking around.
“If I stopped joking then I would be letting them down. But sometimes it was hard to joke. They talk about the tears of a clown. That was me.’
Did he cry, I ask? ‘Sure, all the time. But I would walk away from the others, down a tunnel, so they would not see me weep. I knew I had to stay strong. My reputation in the mine was as a funny guy. I had to keep that reputation going, for the sake of morale.’
Then came a major boost. ‘There was underground water which we found on about day four and we used that water to bathe. It was run-off water from a shelf in the rocks. Once we found the water coming off the rock shelf we used a cup and would stand there, two in a pair, and help each other wash. We poured water on the other.’
But this hardly made up for the ‘inhumane’ conditions in the mine, where the ground was constantly wet. Mario pulls off his hospital socks to show his feet, which are still stained a reddish brown from the mud. He says he has a case of athlete’s foot ‘from hell’.
He says: ‘The mine was swelteringly hot [around 92F, 33C]. We stripped down to our underwear. It was so humid you could not move without sweating.
‘The air was so bad our eyes were burning the whole time. We were all coughing. It was like being in a filthy sauna where the air is full of dirt. We made beds by putting cardboard on the floor.
‘The batteries in our helmet lights faded and then they went out completely on Day Three.’ The miners had a Nissan pick-up truck, a ‘scoop’ – a mechanical digger – a small cargo truck and another truck with a lift attached which is used to reach the roof. Mario says: ‘We used the vehicles for everything while we were down there. Some men slept in them, we used them to move stuff around and to explore the tunnels beneath us to look for any possible escape route going up.’
He says they spent much of the time in darkness but would use light from the headlamps to work by. They never totally ran out of light because if the battery in one vehicle went flat they could recharge it by running the engines.
They also sounded one of the vehicle’s horns every hour – just in case anyone on the other side would hear.
They conserved their light and used it as a ‘treat’. Mario says: ‘We are used to working in darkness –we are miners. We can feel our way down there in a way other men cannot. But we used the light to work by and eat and to reward ourselves and boost morale. An engineer found small low-wattage bulbs and rigged those up in the refuge and we ran those off a car battery. Mostly it was dark but that is what we are used to.’
Soon, hunger began to take its toll. Mario says: ‘I didn’t mind the hunger as much as some of the other men. I did military service. When you’ve been in the army, you know what hunger is and you are trained to ignore it. I knew we had water and could survive for two, maybe three weeks.’ But even Mario admits as the days wore on, his confidence dimmed.
‘We were in total darkness. The heat was oppressive. We all felt the Devil was down there with us. We prayed and prayed. It was a dark, black hole. We were buried alive. We were all so scared. We begged God to help us. We were worried we would starve to death or that the water would run out and we would die horribly from dehydration.’
All the time they were straining to hear signs that rescuers might be close. ‘We tried to keep quiet, to listen for anyone coming to get us. Then the mind started playing tricks and we would hear something and then another man would say, “No, you are imagining that sound.” It was cruel.
‘There was no night and day but we had our watches and we made sure we kept track of the time. We tried to keep the kids on a schedule. Anyone who has had children knows how important a sleep schedule is, and we fathers tried to implement that.’ As well as trying to survive in the grim conditions, there were some grim tasks to carry out.
‘There was a chemical toilet down there. When that got overwhelmed we dug a hole and once a day would shovel the waste out, put it in an oil drum and cover it with sand. We knew enough to keep sanitary conditions.’
I tell Mario about the rumours that had circulated around the campfires in Camp Hope – the village that sprang up at the minehead filled with family members and Press – that the miners had some ‘Brokeback Mountain’ type moments and that is why they signed the Pact of Silence. He says: ‘No, nothing like that ever went on. We were too busy trying to survive to think of sex.
‘We didn’t really even talk about sex. We spoke of our wives and we made some jokes but we never talked about sex seriously because that would have been too painful.’
He remains silent when asked if the miners came to blows but acknowledges that some of them became so depressed that they ‘cried like babies’, took to their makeshift beds and refused to get up.
Speaking about the Pact of Silence the men signed on the day the rescue drill broke through, he says: ‘By that time things had become very bad. When you are in a stressful situation like that, you do and say things in extremes. We made the Pact of Silence to protect some of the younger, less educated ones. It was a pact of brotherhood. Originally we were not going to talk at all about the 17 days.’
But, I ask, surely he is breaking that pact now? ‘No, I don’t believe I am betraying anyone,’ he answers. ‘The reason I am speaking is that people have been gossiping and saying things and I think it is important for one of us, me in this case, to tell it as it was down there, but also to answer some of the things that people are getting wrong. Saying we had sex down there with each other is just plain wrong.
‘There are some things I will never talk about. But they are things that would embarrass some of the kids. Nothing sexual, more that they acted like kids. It is important, even now, for the older ones to protect the younger, more vulnerable ones.’
Despite their continuing ordeal, Mario says the miners managed to break the monotony with moments of jollity – recalling one incident in particular that seemed to lift spirits.
‘The days went one into another. The first week was bad, but the second week, that was terrible. Some of the boys were taking it bad. They didn’t think we would be rescued. I was beginning to wonder myself.
‘On about Day Ten, I was sleeping and I heard the others moving about. The mood was sombre. So I lay very rigid and I said very weakly, “Hey guys, hey, I need to say something.
‘They gathered around and I was playing like I was dying and I said, very slowly, “My friends, say to my family that I love them. Tell them that the money is in the . . .” and then I pretended to expire. The others were quiet and I held my breath. Then I could hold it no more and burst out laughing!
‘They started yelling at me. But many of them have told me since that this is the moment when they realised God had a plan for them. Even if we were all going to die down there, we were going to do it as a group, with dignity.
‘Humour helped us. Sometimes it is easier to laugh than cry.’
I ask him if, as has been reported, the miners ever discussed or considered cannibalism. ‘Do you think about things like that? I didn’t. Maybe some men did. Maybe I would have thought about that if things had got worse.
‘I just thought about dying. I thought about my wife, my kids. I thought about what I would say to them. We all wrote letters to our families. We wrote farewell notes. We all tried to keep faith alive but, to be brutally honest, by those last few days I am not sure if any of us truly believed we would be found. But our faith made us believe that people on the surface would not forsake us.’
Katty, who arrived at Camp Hope within 24 hours of the cave-in, says even she had started to despair. ‘The first week the rescuers told us there was little chance of our husbands coming out alive.
‘At first, the wives were united but as the days went on and a rescue looked less hopeful, the fighting started. Some wives got morose, others got angry with the government, with the company, with everyone. I just stayed quiet and prayed. My husband is very different from me. He is the loud, funny one. I am the quiet one who keeps everything calm. I tried to keep the faith but I must admit that by the tenth day, I thought I was a widow.’
Mario says when the drill broke through, the men ‘danced around the tunnel like crazy things’.
‘We then all believed we would be saved. The Devil was down there and so was God. I didn’t see either but I felt both. They were in a battle for our souls. And God won.’
Katty has kept all the notes Mario wrote to her from the mine which she received in the cylindrical palomas, or ‘doves’, sent through one of three small ‘lifeline’ tunnels which were used to get food, aid and water to the men while the ‘Plan B’ drill was carving out the shaft they would escape throug
Mario has given the watch he had in the mine to his son. His daughter has his helmet – signed by the other 32 miners. Scarlette shows me a 20-minute video of his ‘official’ 40th birthday below ground, complete with balloons she sent down which her father inflated. A ‘proper’ party was being held at home for Mario last night after his discharge from hospital.
After that, Mario will have some tough decisions to make about the megabucks offers he and the other miners are receiving for their stories. He says any money will be used for the good of his family.
‘I am not a superstar, I am a miner. I will always be a miner. I will take whatever money I make from this and I will make sure my kids have a college fund. I’ll buy a house and I’d like to take my wife on holiday. Apart from that, I would like to use what we have been through to help other working men. The attitude needs to change here in Chile – and then the world.
‘This situation won’t affect someone like me, who has a wife and kids. But, for sure, some of the younger miners will have their heads turned by the offers of money and fame. We have been talking in the hospital this week about this and we have agreed to try to stick together, to carry on supporting the younger ones.’
Mario adds: ‘I see this as something that has united the world. I am a humble man and I am happy to have played a small part in an event which has made the world come together, if just for a moment.’
EACH MINER 'TO GET A MILLION'
The miners are expected to become overnight millionaires this week.
A ‘big announcement’ is expected on Tuesday at a Press conference called by Chilean businessman and philanthropist Leonardo Farkas – who wrote each man a cheque worth £6,500 while they were trapped.
Mario’s daughter Scarlette said: ‘He said when this all started that he would not rest until each of the accounts he opened for each miner with $10,000 reached a million dollars.
We know that donations have been pouring in from around the world.
‘The families are now so excited about what might be announced on Tuesday.
‘The word is that each account is holding a
million dollars. If that is true then our lives truly will never be the same again.’
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Wife of cheating miner refuses to visit him in hospital
The wife of Chilean miner Yonni Barrios has refused to visit him in hospital after watching his reunion with his mistress on television last night.
It emerged while the 33 miners were trapped underground that two women were holding a vigil for buried Barrios, the 'medic' of the group.
Marta Salinas, 58, married the miner 28 years ago, but she was competing for his affections with Susana Valenzuela, 50, his long-term mistress.
The pair reportedly almost came to blows and had to be separated when they came face-to-face in the mine’s dining area at Camp Hope.
When he emerged from the Phoenix rescue capsule last night, 50-year-old Barrios was met by his mistress Susana, with Marta refusing to attend.
She has subsequently refused to visit him in hospital for the same reason.
‘If he wants to see me or talk to me he can come find me,' said Marta.
'Otherwise we will talk through our lawyers.
‘I have his belongings and all these gifts people have sent him – he is welcome to have them.’
Barrios initially became known as the group’s ‘doctor’ because he used knowledge gained from looking after his diabetic mother to work with medical teams on the surface to diagnose and help the men trapped with him.
But he soon became known for something less noble.
According to Miss Salinas, Barrios had been dividing his time between the two women for the last couple of years. And it was Miss Valenzuela who broke the news to her that there had been an accident at the mine.
As his wife began to get involved in his affairs on Camp Hope, he instructed teams on the surface to deal with his lover instead.
And as the day of the rescue finally approached, he asked for both of them to wait for him as he emerged from the borehole.
‘He is either very cheeky or very idiotic,’ said a source within the rescue team. ‘He didn’t seem worried at all.’
In the end he was greeted by his mistress, his wife choosing to stay away. He emerged at 8:32pm UK time to be met by tearful Miss Valenzuela.
He looked calm as he gingerly walked towards his mistress, who gave him a long hug, crying on his shoulder and occasionally pulling back to look at him as if to make sure the reunion was really happening.
After he emerged, his wife, who has three sons from an earlier relationship, said she is over Barrios and did not feel ‘anything in particular’.
She said: ‘I watched it on television. I’m very pleased they are all coming out well.
‘I’m glad I didn’t go to the mine, it was the correct decision. It would have been wrong if the two of us were there – I have children and grandchildren. That kind of situation wouldn’t have been good for my family, and my sons come first.
He is crazy and cocky to think I would do such a thing. I have a sense of decency.’
She said she could tell Barrios was ‘holding back’ in the reunion, as his girlfriend held him tightly and cried.
‘I know she is impulsive, while he behaved properly. He knew I was going to be watching.’
She said she is not bitter but had a parting shot for her husband and the other miners.
‘This is historic but soon it will be over to the next thing. People move on – in a few years everyone will have forgotten about this.
‘They think they will all be millionaires overnight but it’s not like that. Only the skillful ones will make something from this.’
Mr Barrios is thought not to be alone in his complex domestic arrangements.
According to reports, another Barrios – Carlos – who was rescued yesterday has a five-year-old son with a woman he has not divorced and his girlfriend of seven months is pregnant.
Another miner is said to have four women claiming his affections and perhaps soon-to-be-increased income – a wife he has not divorced, his current live-in girlfriend, a third woman who claims to have had his son and another who says she is having an affair with him.
It emerged while the 33 miners were trapped underground that two women were holding a vigil for buried Barrios, the 'medic' of the group.
Marta Salinas, 58, married the miner 28 years ago, but she was competing for his affections with Susana Valenzuela, 50, his long-term mistress.
The pair reportedly almost came to blows and had to be separated when they came face-to-face in the mine’s dining area at Camp Hope.
When he emerged from the Phoenix rescue capsule last night, 50-year-old Barrios was met by his mistress Susana, with Marta refusing to attend.
She has subsequently refused to visit him in hospital for the same reason.
‘If he wants to see me or talk to me he can come find me,' said Marta.
'Otherwise we will talk through our lawyers.
‘I have his belongings and all these gifts people have sent him – he is welcome to have them.’
Barrios initially became known as the group’s ‘doctor’ because he used knowledge gained from looking after his diabetic mother to work with medical teams on the surface to diagnose and help the men trapped with him.
But he soon became known for something less noble.
According to Miss Salinas, Barrios had been dividing his time between the two women for the last couple of years. And it was Miss Valenzuela who broke the news to her that there had been an accident at the mine.
As his wife began to get involved in his affairs on Camp Hope, he instructed teams on the surface to deal with his lover instead.
And as the day of the rescue finally approached, he asked for both of them to wait for him as he emerged from the borehole.
‘He is either very cheeky or very idiotic,’ said a source within the rescue team. ‘He didn’t seem worried at all.’
In the end he was greeted by his mistress, his wife choosing to stay away. He emerged at 8:32pm UK time to be met by tearful Miss Valenzuela.
He looked calm as he gingerly walked towards his mistress, who gave him a long hug, crying on his shoulder and occasionally pulling back to look at him as if to make sure the reunion was really happening.
After he emerged, his wife, who has three sons from an earlier relationship, said she is over Barrios and did not feel ‘anything in particular’.
She said: ‘I watched it on television. I’m very pleased they are all coming out well.
‘I’m glad I didn’t go to the mine, it was the correct decision. It would have been wrong if the two of us were there – I have children and grandchildren. That kind of situation wouldn’t have been good for my family, and my sons come first.
He is crazy and cocky to think I would do such a thing. I have a sense of decency.’
She said she could tell Barrios was ‘holding back’ in the reunion, as his girlfriend held him tightly and cried.
‘I know she is impulsive, while he behaved properly. He knew I was going to be watching.’
She said she is not bitter but had a parting shot for her husband and the other miners.
‘This is historic but soon it will be over to the next thing. People move on – in a few years everyone will have forgotten about this.
‘They think they will all be millionaires overnight but it’s not like that. Only the skillful ones will make something from this.’
Mr Barrios is thought not to be alone in his complex domestic arrangements.
According to reports, another Barrios – Carlos – who was rescued yesterday has a five-year-old son with a woman he has not divorced and his girlfriend of seven months is pregnant.
Another miner is said to have four women claiming his affections and perhaps soon-to-be-increased income – a wife he has not divorced, his current live-in girlfriend, a third woman who claims to have had his son and another who says she is having an affair with him.
Freed Chile miners pose together in hospital gowns to celebrate their great escape
Wearing hospital gowns and shades, 33 freed Chile miners plucked to safety from a living tomb today posed together for the first time.
The team, who spent 69 days trapped in a San Jose gold and copper mine, appear to have come through their ordeal remarkably well.
In a display of extraordinary courage, he risked his own life to save those of the 33 trapped Chilean miners.
And not only was mine rescue expert Manuel Gonzalez the first person down the shaft, he was also the last out.
The former professional footballer was strapped into the tiny capsule - nicknamed Phoenix - before plummeting 2,040ft to the 33 trapped miners at 1.55am yesterday.
He had vowed to stay until they were all evacuated - and stayed true to his word as all the miners and five rescuers made it to safety first.
Waving to the camera, bowing and then offering up a prayer, he then climbed inside Phoenix 2 and was then hauled the 2,040ft up the shaft.
As he emerged to massive cheers on the surface, rescue colleagues jokingly asked if he had switched off the lights and made the bed, before helping him on to the ground.
With a pat on the back and a hug from President Sebastian Pinera, the Chilean had yesterday become the first human to try out the capsule and the first person to see the miners in their 69-day captivity.
Gonzalez is a mine safety expert from Codelco, Chile's state copper firm.
Wearing bright orange overalls, he descended slowly down the shaft making safety inspections of the rock and checking telecoms equipment with the capsule.
On his arrival, cameras showed him shaking hands and hugging the trapped miners in the chamber before calmly explaining the rescue plan to them.
After he was successfully hauled out of the collapsed San Jose mine, Mr Pinera asked him what he was thinking on the way up.
He said: 'I was thinking that I hope this never happens again.
'There must be changes to mining so this doesn't happen again.'
The rescue mission was flawlessly executed and proceeded with remarkable speed.
Miner after miner climbed into the cramped cage deep beneath the earth to emerge in precious sunlight after the longest underground entrapment in history.
By 1.55am BST all 33 had been pulled to freedom, as the operation was completed in half the expected time.
After 69 days underground, including two weeks during which they were feared dead, the miners emerged to the cheers of exuberant Chileans and before the eyes of a transfixed world.
Scenes of jubilation erupted every time a miner arrived at the surface of the San Jose gold and copper mine in Chile's northern Atacama desert.
But there are also concerns about the psychological impact of the ordeal on the men.
One has been treated for pneumonia and two others have dental problems, but some have been told they may be able to leave hospital later today.
The rescue is a big success for Chilean President Sebastian Pinera, who waited at the mouth of the rescue shaft to greet and hug the men as they emerged.
'Each rescue is taking 40 minutes... it could be completed today,' said a beaming Pinera, who planned to stay until the last man was out
‘Welcome to life,’ President Pinera told Victor Segovia, the 15th miner out. On a day of superlatives, it seemed no overstatement.
The miners emerged like clockwork, jubilantly embracing wives, children and rescuers and looking remarkably composed after languishing in the depths of a mine that easily could have been their tomb.
Rescuers' anxiety melted away at 12.11am when the stoutest of the 33 miners, Florencio Avalos, emerged from the missile-like rescue capsule smiling broadly after his half-mile journey to the surface.
In a din of cheers, he hugged his sobbing seven-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.
The most ebullient of the bunch came out second, an hour later. 'I think I had extraordinary luck. I was with God and with the devil. And I reached out for God,' said Mario Sepulveda.
While the first miners to be rescued were in good shape, some have been struggling with illness and are more fragile, so medical teams were on hand to treat them.
In the capital, Santiago, a cacophony of motorists' horns sounded. In the nearby regional capital of Copiapo, from which 24 of the miners hail, the mayor cancelled school so parents and children could 'watch the rescue in the warmth of the home'.
All 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.
The entire rescue operation has been meticulously choreographed, with no expense spared in bringing in topflight drillers and equipment - and boring three separate holes into the copper and gold mine.
Pinera put his mining minister and the operations chief of state-owned Codelco, the country's biggest company, in charge of the rescue.
It went so well that its managers abandoned what a legion of journalists had deemed an ultraconservative plan for restricting images of the rescue.
Chile has promised that its care of the miners won't end for six months at least - not until they can be sure that each one has readjusted.
Psychiatrists and other experts in surviving extreme situations predict their lives will be anything but normal.
Since August 22, when a narrow bore hole broke through to their refuge and the miners stunned the world with a note, scrawled in red ink, disclosing their survival, their families have been exposed in ways they never imagined. Miners had to describe their physical and mental health in detail with teams of doctors and psychologists.
In some cases, when both wives and lovers claimed the same man, everyone involved had to face the consequences.
Expectant: Christian Rodriguez watches the drama unfold with his daughter Isabella in the Chilean Embassy in Washington
The team, who spent 69 days trapped in a San Jose gold and copper mine, appear to have come through their ordeal remarkably well.
In a display of extraordinary courage, he risked his own life to save those of the 33 trapped Chilean miners.
And not only was mine rescue expert Manuel Gonzalez the first person down the shaft, he was also the last out.
The former professional footballer was strapped into the tiny capsule - nicknamed Phoenix - before plummeting 2,040ft to the 33 trapped miners at 1.55am yesterday.
He had vowed to stay until they were all evacuated - and stayed true to his word as all the miners and five rescuers made it to safety first.
Waving to the camera, bowing and then offering up a prayer, he then climbed inside Phoenix 2 and was then hauled the 2,040ft up the shaft.
As he emerged to massive cheers on the surface, rescue colleagues jokingly asked if he had switched off the lights and made the bed, before helping him on to the ground.
With a pat on the back and a hug from President Sebastian Pinera, the Chilean had yesterday become the first human to try out the capsule and the first person to see the miners in their 69-day captivity.
Gonzalez is a mine safety expert from Codelco, Chile's state copper firm.
Wearing bright orange overalls, he descended slowly down the shaft making safety inspections of the rock and checking telecoms equipment with the capsule.
On his arrival, cameras showed him shaking hands and hugging the trapped miners in the chamber before calmly explaining the rescue plan to them.
After he was successfully hauled out of the collapsed San Jose mine, Mr Pinera asked him what he was thinking on the way up.
He said: 'I was thinking that I hope this never happens again.
'There must be changes to mining so this doesn't happen again.'
The rescue mission was flawlessly executed and proceeded with remarkable speed.
Miner after miner climbed into the cramped cage deep beneath the earth to emerge in precious sunlight after the longest underground entrapment in history.
By 1.55am BST all 33 had been pulled to freedom, as the operation was completed in half the expected time.
After 69 days underground, including two weeks during which they were feared dead, the miners emerged to the cheers of exuberant Chileans and before the eyes of a transfixed world.
Scenes of jubilation erupted every time a miner arrived at the surface of the San Jose gold and copper mine in Chile's northern Atacama desert.
But there are also concerns about the psychological impact of the ordeal on the men.
One has been treated for pneumonia and two others have dental problems, but some have been told they may be able to leave hospital later today.
The rescue is a big success for Chilean President Sebastian Pinera, who waited at the mouth of the rescue shaft to greet and hug the men as they emerged.
'Each rescue is taking 40 minutes... it could be completed today,' said a beaming Pinera, who planned to stay until the last man was out
‘Welcome to life,’ President Pinera told Victor Segovia, the 15th miner out. On a day of superlatives, it seemed no overstatement.
The miners emerged like clockwork, jubilantly embracing wives, children and rescuers and looking remarkably composed after languishing in the depths of a mine that easily could have been their tomb.
Rescuers' anxiety melted away at 12.11am when the stoutest of the 33 miners, Florencio Avalos, emerged from the missile-like rescue capsule smiling broadly after his half-mile journey to the surface.
In a din of cheers, he hugged his sobbing seven-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.
The most ebullient of the bunch came out second, an hour later. 'I think I had extraordinary luck. I was with God and with the devil. And I reached out for God,' said Mario Sepulveda.
While the first miners to be rescued were in good shape, some have been struggling with illness and are more fragile, so medical teams were on hand to treat them.
In the capital, Santiago, a cacophony of motorists' horns sounded. In the nearby regional capital of Copiapo, from which 24 of the miners hail, the mayor cancelled school so parents and children could 'watch the rescue in the warmth of the home'.
All 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.
The entire rescue operation has been meticulously choreographed, with no expense spared in bringing in topflight drillers and equipment - and boring three separate holes into the copper and gold mine.
Pinera put his mining minister and the operations chief of state-owned Codelco, the country's biggest company, in charge of the rescue.
It went so well that its managers abandoned what a legion of journalists had deemed an ultraconservative plan for restricting images of the rescue.
Chile has promised that its care of the miners won't end for six months at least - not until they can be sure that each one has readjusted.
Psychiatrists and other experts in surviving extreme situations predict their lives will be anything but normal.
Since August 22, when a narrow bore hole broke through to their refuge and the miners stunned the world with a note, scrawled in red ink, disclosing their survival, their families have been exposed in ways they never imagined. Miners had to describe their physical and mental health in detail with teams of doctors and psychologists.
In some cases, when both wives and lovers claimed the same man, everyone involved had to face the consequences.
Expectant: Christian Rodriguez watches the drama unfold with his daughter Isabella in the Chilean Embassy in Washington
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