With Fist Pumps and Prayers, the Miners Surface

(Oct. 13) -- They are a 19-year-old new father and a veteran miner more than three times his age, a groom planning his wedding and another man preparing to meet his infant daughter for the first time.

As the 33 Chilean miners are hauled up to the surface one-by-one -- some laughing, some in tears and some with tears and laughter -- disparate personalities also emerge, offering clues to their 69-day survival half a mile underground. Brought together by their profession and fate, the miners each have unique ways of coping with captivity, and now freedom.

"How's the dog?" was the first thing Mario Sepulveda asked his wife after his rescue today, according to CNN. Within moments of emerging from the earth, Sepulveda also emerged as the group's comic relief, pumping his fists, jumping up and down in front of reporters -- just to show he could -- and handing out souvenir stones to giggling paramedics.

The Chilean newspaper Las Ultimas Noticias had two words for this behavior: "Super Mario."

Another Mario reacted to freedom in a more understated way. Mario Gomez, who at 63 is the oldest trapped miner and the ninth man to be rescued today, hugged his wife and then dropped to his knees in thankful prayer. He has been married for 30 years, and he has four daughters and seven grandchildren.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, his wife, Lilianet Ramirez, described him as a stalwart who's always loyal to his co-workers. She tried to persuade Gomez to skip work and attend an outing with his grandchildren on Aug. 5 -- the day the mine collapsed -- but said he didn't want to leave his co-workers in a bind.

"No, I don't want to be irresponsible. I have to go," Ramirez quoted her husband as saying.

After more than two months together underground, each miner will be left to his own thoughts -- contemplating what he's just been through -- for about 25 minutes during a solo trip up through a claustrophobic borehole to freedom.

"I have suffered much," the youngest miner, 19-year-old Jimmy Sanchez, wrote in an emotional letter to relatives before his rescue today. "In the toughest times, I thanked God I had a daughter.

"God wanted me to stay here, I do not know why," he wrote in a letter excerpted by The Daily Mirror. "Maybe for me to change."

The man credited with keeping the miners calm and sane is their shift foreman, 54-year-old Luiz Urzua, who took charge during the first 17 days when the men were trapped with no contact from the outside world.

"We had to be strong," Urzua told The Washington Post in a rare telephone interview from deep underground. "All the workers in the mine fulfilled their roles."

His role was to ration the group's food during those initial nail-biting days when no one knew if they'd be rescued. He doled out one spoonful of tuna to each miner every 48 hours, stretching two days' food supply more than two weeks.


Urzua is being honored with the final rescue slot. Pending last-minute changes from paramedics, he'll be the last miner to ascend the rescue tunnel and thus will hold the record for the longest survival underground.

"This was a group with different personalities and manners of being," he said. "We have had a stage here in our lives that we never planned for."