Jonathan Franklin: 33 Men: Inside the Miraculous Survival and Dramatic Rescue of the Chilean Miners

On 5 August 2010, a cave-in occurred at the San José copper-gold mine in the Atacama Desert near Copiapó, Chile. The accident left 33 men trapped 700 metres (2,300 ft) below ground. The miners survived underground for a record 69 days. All 33 were rescued and brought to the surface on 13 October 2010; the first miner emerged from the Fénix 2 rescue capsule at 00:10 CLDT and the last at 21:55 CLDT. After the last trapped miner was winched to the surface, the rescue workers held up a sign stating "Misión cumplida Chile" (English: "Mission accomplished Chile") to the estimated more than 1 billion people watching the rescue on live television around the world. The San José Mine is about 45 kilometres (28 mi) north of Copiapó, in northern Chile. The miners were trapped approximately 5 kilometres (3 mi) from the mine entrance. The mine had a history of instability that had led to previous accidents, including one death. The retrieval of the first miner, Florencio Ávalos, began on Tuesday, 12 October at 23:55 CLDT, with the rescue capsule reaching the surface 16 minutes later. Less than twenty-four hours later, at 21:55 CLDT on 13 October, all 33 miners had been rescued, almost all in good medical condition, and expected to recover fully. Two miners were suffering from silicosis, one of whom also had pneumonia, and others were suffering from dental infections and corneal problems. Three of the rescued miners had immediate surgery under general anesthesia for dental problems. The total cost of the rescue operation was estimated at US$20 million, a third covered by private donations with the rest coming from state-owned mining corporation Codelco and the government itself.





Surviving 2,300 feet below the ground: The miners had a 50 square meters (540 sq ft) emergency shelter with two long benches, but ventilation problems had led them to move out to a tunnel. In addition to the shelter, they had some 2 kilometers (1.2 mi) of galleries in which to move around. The miners used backhoes to dig for underground water sources. Some water was obtained from the radiators of vehicles inside the mineshaft. Food supplies were limited and the men had lost an average of 8 kilograms (18 lb) each. Although the emergency supplies were intended for only two or three days, the miners rationed them and were able to make them last for two weeks, running out just before they were discovered. They consumed "two little spoonfuls of tuna, a sip of milk and a biscuit every 48 hours" and a morsel of peach. The men used truck batteries to power their hard hat lamps for illumination. After his release from the hospital, Mario Sepúlveda said "All 33 trapped miners, practicing a one-man, one-vote democracy, worked together to maintain the mine, look for escape routes and keep up morale." He said, "We knew that if society broke down we would all be doomed. 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." He and some of the older miners helped to support the younger men, he said, but all have taken an oath of silence not to reveal certain details of what occurred down the mine, particularly during the early weeks of desperation. Ávalos said the men kept hope of a survival by pulling together to beat hunger, thirst and desperation underground. “As a group we had to keep faith, we had to keep hope, we had to all believe that we would survive,” he said. Franklin Lobos, a former professional footballer, said he and his fellow miners had acted like a great football team. "We pulled together when things got rough, when there was nothing, when we needed to drink water and there wasn’t any to drink. We pulled together when there was no food, when you just had to eat a teaspoon of tuna because there was nothing else. That really bonded us," he said.





Jonathan Franklin (born 6 September 1964) is an investigative journalist and TV commentator on Latin American politics and news Franklin was born in Manchester, New Hampshire and raised in Lincoln, Massachusetts where he graduated from Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School. Franklin attended Brown University in Providence, R.I. from 1983–1988 and then worked as a news clerk at the New York Times in Manhattan. From 1990 to 1995 Franklin lived in San Francisco and worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and San Francisco Weekly as well as the Boston Globe. As a reporter for Playboy Magazine in the early 1990s, Franklin interviewed prominent figures in the United States including Patrick Buchanan and Timothy McVeigh. Since 1995 Jonathan Franklin has lived and worked in South America, with a base in Santiago, Chile. His work is regularly published by Playboy, GQ, Esquire, Marie Claire and hundreds of other magazines around the world. He currently lives in Santiago, Chile with his wife Toty Garfe and his six children - Francisca, Susan, Maciel, Kimberly, Amy and Zoe. Jonathan is the Chile correspondent for the Guardian newspaper Franklin is also co founder of www.addictvillage.com, a news and media agency based in Chile. Through Addictvillage Jonathan has written adventure news stories from Latin America, about topics ranging from U.S deportation of illegal immigrants to hidden cocaine labs in the Colombian jungle to "eco barons" in Chile. In October 2010 Franklin secured a book deal to write a novel about the experience of the miners in the 2010 Copiapo mining accident. He reported extensively from the San Jose mine for The Guardian and The Washington Post. Franklin says "While 2,000 journalists were locked behind police lines, my 'Rescue Team' pass enabled me to experience up close the final six weeks of this miracle rescue. It was my honor to watch the drama unfold in its many moments of beauty and courage and comedy; and to see, first-hand, the profound unity that made this operation succeed"

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Lisa Margonelli: Oil on the Brain: Petroleum's Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank

From the New America Foundation: Lisa Margonelli writes about the global culture and economy of energy. Her book about the oil supply chain, Oil On the Brain: Petroleum's Long Strange Trip to Your Tank, was published by Nan Talese/Doubleday in 2007. Recognized as one of the 25 Notable Books of 2007 by the American Library Association, Oil On the Brain also won a 2008 Northern California Book Award for general nonfiction. Ms. Margonelli has been published in The Atlantic, New York Times online, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, Discover, Salon, Business 2.0, San Francisco Magazine, and California Monthly, among other publications. Her column, "Money Tales," which combined economics and oral history in the San Francisco Chronicle online, won an Excellence in Journalism award from the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists in 2003. In 1999-2000, she was awarded a Sundance Fellowship. She is a graduate of Yale University.



Publisher-provided book-description: Oil on the Brain is a smart, surprisingly funny account of the oil industry—the people, economies, and pipelines that bring us petroleum, brilliantly illuminating a world we encounter every day. Americans buy ten thousand gallons of gasoline a second, without giving it much of a thought. Where does all this gas come from? Lisa Margonelli’s desire to learn took her on a one-hundred thousand mile journey from her local gas station to oil fields half a world away. In search of the truth behind the myths, she wriggled her way into some of the most off-limits places on earth: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the New York Mercantile Exchange’s crude oil market, oil fields from Venezuela, to Texas, to Chad, and even an Iranian oil platform where the United States fought a forgotten one-day battle. In a story by turns surreal and alarming, Margonelli meets lonely workers on a Texas drilling rig, an oil analyst who almost gave birth on the NYMEX trading floor, Chadian villagers who are said to wander the oil fields in the guise of lions, a Nigerian warlord who changed the world price of oil with a single cell phone call, and Shanghai bureaucrats who dream of creating a new Detroit. Deftly piecing together the mammoth economy of oil, Margonelli finds a series of stark warning signs for American drivers.





Lisa Margonelli recently wrote "Forget About $5 Gas: $3 Gas Is Bad Enough" for the periodical, The Atlantic. The author wrote: James Schlesinger famously said that Americans have two modes when it comes to oil: complacency and panic. This week, it seems, we're having both at the same time. Today the national retail average for gasoline is $3.07 per gallon, which is higher than it's been since 2008. But instead of freaking out about that, the media has been focusing on the possibility of $5 gasoline in 2012, a claim made by former Shell President John Hofmeister. Hofmeister's point (he heads a non-profit called Citizens for Affordable Energy) is that the problem is that we're "essentially frittering at the edges of renewable energy, stifling production in hydrocarbon energy," leading to "blackouts, brownouts, gas lines, rationing." When Platts printed Mr. Hofmeister's predictions the day after Christmas, he became an instant media sensation. Even Platts claimed to be surprised by the ruckus, since Mr. Hofmeister had predicted the same many times before, and it would imply that the price of crude reaches $180 a barrel, which even the boldest analysts think is too high.





In May of 2010, the author, Lisa Margonelli, wrote "A Spill of Our Own" for The New York Times, and said this: THE history of American oil spills is the history of the environmental movement. The 1969 blowout of an oil platform off Santa Barbara, Calif., gave rise to Earth Day as well as President Richard Nixon’s National Environmental Policy Act, and led to a moratorium on new drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts. Twenty years later, the spill from the Exxon Valdez tanker near Alaska quashed the first Bush administration’s ambitions for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and ushered in the laws that made oil shippers liable for damage caused by their cargo. Now 5,000 barrels of oil a day are apparently spilling from the wrecked Deepwater Horizon rig off New Orleans, and ghastly floating pads of emulsified oil are reaching the sensitive marshlands and coastline of the Gulf of Mexico, coating birds and fish. On Thursday, as the scent of fuel hovered over New Orleans, residents joked online that they should eat fish now, because they might not be able to again for a while. One longtime offshore oil worker told me this looked like a “game changer,” and he was thinking about finding another line of work.

Daniel Yergin: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

Recently, USA Today invoked the author in a story about the demand for gas in the United States: "A combination of demographic change and policy change means the heady days of gasoline growing in the U.S. are over," says Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the oil industry. This isn't the first time in U.S. history that gasoline demand has fallen, at least temporarily. Drivers typically cut back during recessions, then hit the road again when the economy picks up. Indeed, the Great Recession was the chief reason demand fell sharply in 2008. But this time looks different. Government and industry officials — including the CEO of ExxonMobil— say U.S. gasoline demand has peaked for good. It has declined four years in a row and will not reach the 2006 level again, even when the economy fully recovers. Read that USA Today report here.