Chilean miners emerge to glare of sunlight and publicity as world rejoices

After 69 days trapped 700m below surface, workers are winched up in cramped escape capsule to a hero's welcomeIn another era it would have been a tomb, the mountain that swallowed men. But as the 33 miners emerged one by one, blinking and waving and shouting for joy, the scene became a stage.Instead of a slow, lonely death in the bowels of the earth, the fate of so many other miners, they escaped to the surface 69 days later as triumphant heroes in a very modern drama.

Hey, China, are you paying attention? This is what a first world, industrialized country does for its citizens.
Just saying, while there was a rescue of >100 miners in China this year, the industry is still unacceptably dangerous.

Anyway, back to the story... (Ron)

"Chile's first astronaut is arriving," yelled Captain Christian Tapia, one of the rescuers, as Florencio Ávalos became the first of the 33 miners to be winched to safety. Ávalos bounded out of the capsule with a grin that sent church bells across Chile tolling in jubilation. "This is a miracle from God," said Alberto Ávalos, the first rescued man's uncle, and few relatives at San José mine were minded to argue.

Bells were tolling again early this morning, less than 24 hours later, as the last miner came to the surface. The first glimpse of Luis Urzua, the shift leader who like a ship's captain wanted to be the last out, was the cue for celebrations in plazas and an end to a TV marathon for a worldwide audience.

At first authorities used a huge Chilean flag to cover the scene from a phalanx of TV cameras on a nearby ridge but as dawn broke over the Atacama desert and the extractions continued smoothly, boosting confidence in the winch and capsule, the flag was thrust aside.

"This rescue operation has been so marvellous, so clean, so emotional, that there was no reason not to allow the eyes of the world which have been watching this operation so closely to see it," said President Sebastián Piñera, who greeted each miner.

The 5 August accident at the copper and gold mine sealed the men beneath 700,000 tonnes of rock, a dungeon that in other earlier times would have spelt death and oblivion, but just over two months later a drill reached their refuge 622 metres below ground, providing a narrow escape shaft just wide enough for a man's shoulders.

Elizabethan theatres used a trapdoor to raise and lower supernatural figures into their dramas but the Chileans used a beeping, blinking hi-tech steel capsule dubbed the Phoenix.

Shakespeare may not have approved of the script: no tragedy, no blood, not even a villain. Except, perhaps, for the San Esteban mining company which owns the mine and has been accused of safety failures. Executives have apologised and begged forgiveness.

Relatives, officials and journalists at the scene, and millions of TV viewers around the world, watched spellbound as this patch of South American desert yielded a story of human survival and ingenuity.

"Without a doubt this rescue has been an odyssey of solidarity, the determination of a government and of technological capacity, but I think that the most memorable impression has been the courage and resilience of the miners," the Chilean writer Isabel Allende said last night. "Those 33 men have given all of us a lesson in humanity. When they were finally contacted, 17 days after the accident that buried them alive, their first concern was for the other workers who were in the mine; and when they had to decide the order in which they would be rescued, each one of them asked to be the last."

When the meticulously choreographed operation began just before midnight local time it looked like the meeting of two different worlds. The capsule, with rescuer Manuel González inside, entered a primeval realm of rock and darkness where the miners survived more time trapped underground than anyone on record.

Grainy images evoked Nasa footage as González stepped out to greet the inhabitants of a land not on earth, but beneath it. Those gathered above at Camp Hope, an improvised settlement at the mine, shivered in the biting night cold but here the trapped miners were bare-chested from the heat and humidity. The moment they hugged González – the first physical human contact – Camp Hope erupted in cheers. "They touched him! They touched him!" yelled a member of the Ávalos family.

Since a probe discovered the men alive on 22 August, the miners had been spectral figures who loomed in and out of focus in inky images. Now, with each taking turns to clamber into the capsule and rise through the dark, smooth-walled tunnel, they were about to become flesh and blood.

After Ávalos, a father of two, it was Mario Sepúlveda's turn for the 16-minute twisting ascent – about one metre per second – through the horribly narrow shaft, a thin straw between stone canyons. Upon surfacing he shouted in exhilaration and plopped souvenir rocks into the hands of his rescuers. "I'm so happy!"

He kissed his wife, gazed into her eyes and said something Hollywood would not have scripted: "How's the dog?" Then came Juan Illanes, who called the claustrophobic ascent a "cruise". Like a ship's giant wheel the winch kept spinning, hauling up beaming faces from the depths.

Among the last was the former national football player, Franklin Lobos, 53. Tossed a ball as he emerged, he bounced it on his foot and knee. "This was the toughest match of my life," he said.

Earlier Ávalos, 33, the first out, shuffled into the field hospital beside the shaft, flopped down on a white couch and stared at the world through a pair of dark sunglasses. "It's over, it's over at last." After a brief chat with a social worker he huddled down to speak to his wife and children. The fluorescent blue lamps, square white couches and sleek glass table made the scene look more like a relaxed lounge than a post traumatic recovery area.

"God was always present. It is a miracle, this rescue was so difficult, it's a grand miracle," said his wife, Monica. "He has so much experience in this mine [four years] and he was a leader, like a pastor with his sheep." Many of the men wore T-shirts printed with Psalm 95:4: "In his hand are the depths of the Earth and the mountain peaks belong to him."

Sepúlveda, the second up and the most familiar face from having narrated many of the subterranean videos, strode into the hospital, thanking and hugging strangers and friends alike.

Speaking for the miners as a group, he said: "We are so happy and very proud of our country for all they did for us." Asked what he learned from the nearly 10-week stint underground, Sepúlveda said: "I would like to see the world united by love, not a religious love, but just no more fights, no more war."

Later, awaiting a helicopter ride to a hospital at the nearby town of Copiapo where the men will undergo 48 hours of medical observation, he stuck a theological note. "I think I had extraordinary luck. I was with God and with the devil. And I reached out for God. We always knew that we would be rescued, we never lost faith."

Sepúlveda's gregarious performance in and outside the mine boosted speculation of a career in TV but the 39-year-old electrical specialist suggested he would stick to what he knows best. "The only thing I'll ask of you is that you don't treat me as an artist or a journalist, but as a miner," he told reporters. "I was born a miner and I'll die a miner."

Andres Llarena, the lead physician for the rescue, called the miners "way above average, not what we expected". About the only surprise in their health, said the doctor, was the men's colour. "They are very pale." As the families one by one huddled in private rooms they were greeted by the president. While many of the men were chatty and energetic, others fell asleep, from fatigue or injections issued upon their arrival topside.

"Things are going extraordinarily well so far," said the health minister, Jaime Manalich.

Carlos Mamani, a Bolivian and lone foreigner of "los 33", remarked how nice it was to breathe fresh air and see the stars. He was visited in hospital by Bolivia's president, Evo Morales.

Mario Gómez, the ninth to emerge and at 63 the oldest miner, dropped to his knees and bowed in prayer. His wife, Lilianette Ramirez, pulled him up from the ground and embraced him.Like a ship's captain, the one out was the shift foreman, Luis Urzúa, 54, whose leadership was credited with keeping the men focused.

In the first few hours after being rescued, the men showed no signs of extreme stress or dangerous ailments. Instead they begin to accommodate to the simple luxuries of life above ground. "They were very happy to be sleeping in a bed, they loved the shower," said Llarena. "Their skin is kind of tender. When they shave most of them get cut in the face."

Panic attacks during the ascent had been the main health concern but with over half the men out there was no sign of that. The biggest technical fear was that a rock would fall and jam the capsule in the shaft. Every so often engineers lubricated the capsule's spring-loaded wheels. The 13ft-tall device turned more grimy and chipped with each voyage but continued to operate smoothly.

Davitt McAteer, the head of US mine safety under the Clinton administration, told AP there were many risks: a miner might get claustrophobic and somehow jam the capsule, the cable could get hung up, or the rig that pulls the cable could overheat. "You can be good and you can be lucky. And they've been good and lucky."

Chile felt more than good. From car horns honking in celebration in the capital Santiago to bells tolling in Andean villages, it felt a country blessed. The miners' solidarity, and the state's impressive response to the crisis, earned praise and thanks from all over the world including David Cameron, Barack Obama, Nasa and the pope. For a country historically unpopular with its neighbours, it was a novelty to bask in adulation.

"Hopefully this example of the miners will stay with us forever because these miners have demonstrated that when Chile unifies, and we always do it in the face of adversity, we are capable of great things," said Piñera.In almost any other context it would have sounded glib, not least because of a simmering, sour conflict between the state and Mapuche Indians, but here at San José mine, in the middle of a scorched desert landscape, the president's words resonated.

The land of Pinochet has a dark history of polarisation: left against right, poor against rich, government against people. Piñera is a conservative billionaire president with perfect teeth and silver hair. The miners' poverty is written in dark, pockmarked features. Yet there was no mistaking the warmth of the hugs between the president and the saved. Chile lives off mining – it supplies 40% of state revenues – but barely knows the poor and marginalised men who toil beneath the earth. Its accuracy was questionable but a presidential soundbite caught the mood: "Chile's wealth is not copper: it's miners."

Wealth and the 33 miners is about to become a hot topic. With 2,000 journalists at the mine chasing interviews and book deals and film screenplays in the works the story will become a metaphorical goldmine that could spare the men ever returning below ground.With several still trapped, much of the media at the mine began to decamp to the hospital at Copiapo. Police and security barriers were erected in anticipation of a near siege. Allende, who is herself no stranger to celebrity, said she hoped the virtues that allowed the miners to survive underground would help them survive that imminent "media frenzy".

As fame and scrutiny follow each man, soap opera-type sub-plots are likely to emerge. Before he even emerged one miner tried to seduce the nurse who spoke to him daily on a phone line.

"He was asking to go out with me, then he started talking about how he likes to make love. I began to blush," said the nurse, who asked not to be named because the married miner still has a crush on her.

"I went home and told my husband: 'What do I do? One of the miners is falling in love with me.'"

Such details, however, are likely to be but a footnote in the drama that played out beneath the vast wilderness of sand that is the Atacama desert.

As night fell across the mine Pedro Gallo, a technician who helped build the rescue capsule, watched helicopters ferry away ordinary men whose extraordinary story captivated the world's imagination.He pondered what it all meant. "They have left a permanent record of something beautiful that happened here."