About 700m underground, in the most traumatic of circumstances, Luis Urzua has no intention of relinquishing command of the 32 men in his care. Urzua, 54, went to work as usual on Aug. 5 as shift foreman for the ill-fated group of Chilean miners who became trapped below the Atacama desert in the north of the country. Now he finds himself shouldering responsibilities of the most extraordinary kind.
“The hierarchy and power of a supervisor in the world of the miner is extremely powerful; it is a military discipline,” Chilean Minister of Health Jaime Manalich said as he explained the ability of Urzua to organize the miners’ increasingly sophisticated underground existence.
“Natural selection is extremely strong in this world,” said Manalich, who emphasized the “rigid system” of power which effectively makes a shift foreman “owner of the mine” during his typical 12-hour shift. “This is an extremely dangerous job, if you look at the statistics, this region of Chile has the highest worker mortality rate in the nation and that is led by mining.”
“[Urzua] is a leader in his field and has been for ages. He is recognized by his peers as a leader,” said Andreas Llarena, a commander in the Chilean Navy who has been sent to the scene of the mining accident to help coordinate medical aspects of the rescue operations. “For a miner, their shift leader is sacred and holy. They would never think about replacing him. That is carved in stone; it is one of the commandments in the life of a miner.”
For Urzua, the command challenges began within moments of the mine collapse — he quickly ordered his men to huddle while he took three miners and scouted up the tunnel, searching for information on the massive cave-in. Correctly deducing that the men were trapped, Urzua instituted a set of rules and regulations that were both methodically rigid and crucial to the men’s survival. He ordered that the mine’s stash of emergency food be rationed into minimal portions — two spoonfuls of tuna fish and half a glass of milk every 48 hours.
As rescuers spent 16 days in frustrated attempts to drill a rescue hole 700m down to the trapped men, Urzua also used his training as a topographer to make detailed maps of the miners’ underground world, which includes more than 2km of tunnels, caves and a 35m2 refuge.
With a white Nissan Terrano pickup truck as his office, Urzua drew maps; divided the miners’ world into a work area, a sleep area and a sanitary facility; and used the headlights of mining trucks to simulate sunlight in an attempt to provide a semblance of routine to the men’s daily lives. Urzua also kept the men on a 12-hour shift schedule.
When the first letters from the trapped men arrived “top side,” rescue workers were heartened to see the messages carefully worded and dated, a sign that the miners were not disorientated.
“You think they wrote those letters in the moment? No,” Manalich said. “Urzua had that material prepared. He knew there would be a rescue mission.”
The rationing of food was by all accounts a remarkably prescient move by Urzua. When rescuers finally drilled a hole through the roof of the miners’ shelter, their food was all gone and the men had not eaten in 48 hours.
“Their health was on a curve like this,” said Manalich, sweeping his hand down.
As Urzua’s 12-hour shift stretches to over a month of command and control, the former soccer coach has such complete dominion over the situation that on Friday last week during a daily medical conference call, he told Manalich to “keep it short, we have lots of work to do.”
Indeed, as the miners’ role shifts from basic survival to active participants in a sophisticated rescue plan, Urzua has a host of tasks to prepare. On Saturday, the men began the move to a new shelter — an area with less mud about 200m down the mine shaft. The men not only reinforced the roof, but spent days chipping away at loose rocks in the ceiling to avoid being struck by falling stones at night.
Urzua receives three daily briefings: One from a doctor, another from a psychologist and the third from a miner updating him on the technical aspects of the rescue operation. The Chilean government has three separate rescue plans in place, called simply plans A, B and C. Each effort is a multimillion-dollar gamble; all count on Urzua to organize a host of tasks for his mining crew.
“You realize that if we do it this way, there will be some 70,000 liters of water coming down into your chamber,” said Andre Sougarret, the lead engineer in overall rescue plans as he briefed Urzua by telephone on Friday.
For 10 minutes Urzua and Sougarret discussed plans to engineer drainage and holding pools to shunt the water into canals, away from the miners’ living quarters.
A simple audio recording of their talk would have sounded like a normal conversation between a mining manager and a shift supervisor. However, in this case, Sougarret was standing inside a windswept tent talking into a Nitsuka phone system the size of a small suitcase, with cables running straight down 700m into the ground, where a weary Urzua prepared a mission that will determine the survival of his men.
“I fully believe they will do it [survive],” said Al Holland, a psychologist with NASA who rushed to Chile in an effort to share the agency’s experience of human isolation in extreme environments. “The miners are quite hearty, quite resilient ... They have shown every sign that they can organize themselves; they are masters of their own fate.”
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
In an article published on this page on Tuesday, Kaohsiung-based journalist Julien Oeuillet wrote that “legions of people worldwide would care if a disaster occurred in South Korea or Japan, but the same people would not bat an eyelid if Taiwan disappeared.” That is quite a statement. We are constantly reading about the importance of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), hailed in Taiwan as the nation’s “silicon shield” protecting it from hostile foreign forces such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and so crucial to the global supply chain for semiconductors that its loss would cost the global economy US$1
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS