“All 33 of us are well inside the shelter.”
That was the message, written in red with a pen almost out of ink, that announced to the world one year ago that the miners were alive, 17 days after being trapped deep underground by the collapse of a mine in northern Chile.
The miners had sent a number of messages, but that little piece of paper, penned by miner Jose Ojeda, was the only one spotted by rescue workers on August 22, 2010, unleashing an explosion of joy and celebration throughout Chile.
It came as hope for their survival had nearly guttered out. No sign of life had been detected since the August 5 cave-in as engineers probed deep inside the San Jose mine with an assortment of drills. There was little optimism among operators or family members, but suddenly, with just a few words everything changed.
“It wasn’t the only message. There were many messages. We wrote the first ones with ballpoint pens,” Ojeda, 47, told AFP.
The message emerged attached to the end of a drill that broke through to a chamber 600 meters down where the miners were trapped.
A drill operator was the first to see it. Mining Minister Laurence Goldborne then took it. President Sebastian Pinera was told and he rushed to the scene of the mine, spoke to the miners’ families, and then went before television cameras with the news.
“This came out of the bowels of the earth on this day,” a visibly moved Pinera said, holding up the piece of paper. “It is a message from our miners who tell us that they are alive, that they are together.”
“Never have such few words filled an entire country with joy,” he said.
A year after the ordeal, which ended with the rescue of all the miners after 69 harrowing days underground, Ojeda told AFP he never thought of the message as more than “a technical report.”
“With all my years as a miner, I knew perfectly well that if something were to happen I would have to say how many people there were and where they were located,” he said.
“When I wrote it, there were two pens, one black and the other red. The black one wouldn’t write. I tried it but nothing happened. There was little ink left in the red pen, that’s why it came out a little faint,” he said.
“The pen belonged to an electrician. The electricians used them to mark up cables. The paper came from a notebook that an operator used to keep a daily log of work done.”
“We wrapped it in an explosives bag, which is a thick bag, we tied it with rubber from an inner tube and insulating tape, and that’s why the message came out looking so clean,” he added.
Many other messages — some telling of the miners’ hunger, their hopes, their appeals for help — were destroyed by friction when the drill was pulled up.
But the one that made it through went around the world. Pinera gave copies of it to various world leaders.
It was copyrighted in the name of its author and after a year was finally returned to Ojeda, who is now on medical leave and still traumatized by the experience.
But it was his just for a few minutes, as he turned it over to the Atacama Regional Museum to preserve.
“I would like to have taken it around with me, but that’s not going to be possible. Better that I make another one for myself,” the miner said with a laugh.
