The Thirty Three

Photo taken from the Internet

 A few years ago I remember some miners being in a mine for sixty-nine days and being rescued. I had forgotten the story until today when I saw  a movie called The 33. What an exciting movie that gave me a better understanding of what it must mean to work in a mine. On the Internet, a report by Rosa Flores, a CNN correspondent, spoke on the rescue of the miners five years after it happened.

The gold and copper mine was over 100 years old and the digging was as deep as a forty story building. On August 6, 2010, there was a massive collapse, trapping the thirty-three men in the 100 degree mine. One miner said, "I lived with death, slept with death, lost hope but not my faith, because faith is life." Another miner said he lost thirty-three pounds in seventeen days. One miner stuck in the mine said that his wife was pregnant and they were going to name the baby Carolina, but he changed his mind and would name her Esperanza (Hope). Another comment on being rescued was that "it was like being born again, thank God I am alive."

I remember seeing the publicity on television and how it seemed as if the whole world was watching the rescue. After they were all out of the mine, it became a whirlwind of visits to Disneyland, the Holy Land, New York City, Los Angeles and appearing on talk shows. I remember seeing one of the miners do an impression of  Elvis Presley on the David Letterman's show. The same miner, who had the miners singing Elvis songs, also got to visit Graceland.

Today when I saw the suspenseful movie, even though I knew what the outcome would be, I enjoyed  and found it to be a very interesting movie with great acting. As the miners are rescued and come up in a tube one by one, up a half mile tunnel, I had to agree that it truly was a miracle that all of the miners survived. I read that many have psychological problems that have never been dealt with and money they thought they would receive was never given to them. At the end of the film we learned that the mining company was not negligent and none of the miners was able to sue the company. None has returned to mining.

The movie was taken from the book by Hector Tobar; Deep Down Dark: The 33 The Untold Story of 33 Men Buried In a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free.