Chilean Miners

Written by: Marc Aronson, Trapped is a book about the Chilean mine disaster in 2010. Trapped talks about how the mine collapsed, and how millions of years ago is when it really started. The book starts off with the author talking about the history of how the earth was formed. He then talks about how mining areas were formed, by the shifting earth’s crust.

This is the earth’s shifting crust

The heat causes all the atoms in the crust to form compounds like silver and gold. When humans find those slips of the crust that have those elements in it they form mines to collect the elements and sell them. The metals that are found in those mines are extremely valuable. This lust for money sends people deeper and deeper into the earth’s crust. The mines are dangerous because if you mess up with any part of the mine it could collapse killing everyone. What happened with the Chilean miners was they were trapped under tons of rock and dirt in an enclosed space. Rescuers couldn’t simply drill through the wall of rock that enclosed the miners because it might collapse the rest of the mine. So they had to drill down to them from the surface. First they had to find them, they would have teams of drill crews constantly drilling down to find the miners. Then one day a drill reached the enclosure the miners were in, people immediately sent water and food down to the miners. Then the rescuers were stuck with the problem of getting the miners out. They decided to have oil drills shipped to them because they could go farther down and were more percise. They decided on three drills from different companies that were to be shipped. One was from a company in Pennsylvania, it turned out to be the one that rescued the miners. The company sent over a drill that would start a hole with a small drill bit then use bigger and bigger drill bits until they had a hole big enough to fit a man.

This video shows how the drill works and what it does (click link for video)

http://www.centerrock.com/cri-in-action/low-profile-drill-action

 

Then NASA came in with a specially designed capsule that would bring the miners up.

Once the hole was drilled they sent NASA’s capsule down and pulled all 33 Chilean miners out one by one. This took about three days to get them all out. That was all followed by a large celebration where the families thanked all the people who came and helped.

I think this was a great book but the beginning was a little slow, describing how the mines were formed and how the earths crust moved. The end was more entertaining because it talked about the rescue and how many people used their knowledge as whole to get the miners out.