Nonetheless, the most inspiring aspect of the miners' behavior was their almost immediate decision to act in solidarity. Tobar had exclusive access to the miners, and while that kind of snug situation inevitably places some constraints on a storyteller, Tobar complicates the purely uplifting version of the men's ordeal, describing occasional resentments and petty thievery. Hector Tobar, a former journalist for the Los Angeles Times, spent three years and hundreds of hours interviewing all 33 miners for Deep Down Dark. Neither the miners buried under half a mile of rock nor their families above ground in a makeshift tent city called Campo Esperanza - "Camp Hope" - ever completely succumbed to despair, despite the fact that for 17 days, before a drill finally broke through to "The Refuge," the room where the men were gathered, no one knew whether they were alive. It was a feat of engineering and a triumph of faith. 13, 2010, all 33 of those Chilean miners trapped for 69 days inside the San Jose Mine were raised to the surface of the earth - resurrected - through a newly drilled escape tunnel into which a capsule was slowly lowered and raised by a giant crane. If the beginning of this horror tale seems the stuff of legend or nightmare, the conclusion is reasurringly familiar, because some 1 billion of us viewers around the world watched it unfold on live TV. Thirty-three miners were sealed inside the mountain by this "megablock" of stone, some 770,000 tons of it, "twice the weight of the Empire State building." Staring at that flat, smooth wall, Luis Urzua, the crew's supervisor, thought: "It like the stone they put over Jesus's tomb." causing a chain reaction as the mountain above it collaps too." ![]() ![]() When the dust settled, the men discovered the source of the explosion: "A single block of as tall as a forty-five-story building, ha broken off from the rest of the mountain and fall through the layers of the mine. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Deep Down Dark Subtitle The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free Author Hector Tobar
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