The Miners Who Came Back

On October 13, 2010, a billion people worldwide watched their television screens as a narrow rescue capsule broke the surface at the San José mine in Chile's Atacama Desert. For sixty-nine days, thirty-three miners had been trapped half a mile underground beneath 700,000 tons of rock. Engineers said the collapse was catastrophic. Early reports assumed no survivors. The Chilean government even prepared families for the worst.…