Close your eyes for a second and imagine that you are sitting in a warm, dark room. All you can hear is the incessant dripping of water from far away and the slow monotonous sound of feet shuffling. Then imagine that you’ve just received word that it will be like that for at least the next 100 days.
That’s the hell that 33 miners are currently living through. Trapped 700 metres below the surface of the San Jose mine in Chile, they must wait for the rescuers to come. And they won’t be coming anytime soon.
Spare a thought for Carlos Mamani in particular. He’s the only non Chilean down there and must be the butt of many “A Bolivian walked into a bar” jokes by now.
Perhaps it’s just me, but Irish people seem to revel in stories from far flung places involving boys trapped down wells, astronauts floating in an airless capsule, or miners huddled in an underground chamber after a rock fall.
We have led the rush to places like California, South Africa and Victoria whenever a whiff of gold was in the air. One place we didn’t make it to was Chile. While it seems that every earthquake in Sumatra and bus crash in the Philippines has to involve at least one Irish backpacker, it’s safe to say that none of them are among the 33 unfortunate men currently trapped in the bowels of a deep and dark mine.
I can’t help feeling some of their pain when watching news reports of their plight and imagining how I would feel in the same situation. I don’t feel like this when I look at reports on oil spills in the Caribbean or airplane crashes in Russia. Mining disasters like this are different. They offer the immediate shock of a catastrophe and the possibility of redemption. News will be delivered breathlessly each night of progress and unlike most news stories; people trapped down mines who survive the initial accident are normally pulled out alive.
In the meantime, the media keeps us updated on their phone calls and video links with relatives, which just goes to show that mining disasters are staying up with the times. No doubt one of them will open a twitter account and keep us informed in 140 word tit bits such as “Went to bed last night and it was pitch dark and woke up this morning and it was the same. When is Spring due?” or “Is it hot down here because we’re closer to hell?”
The fact that they have MP3 players and video links is fantastic. But it does make you wonder how we could put a man on the moon in 1969 but it takes four months to dig a hole in the ground. In the last forty years, technology has moved on apace with digital TV, the Internet and mobile phones. But engineering is still where it was in the 1960’s. Those guys will have to wait for months to be rescued but the information hungry world can be fed with electronic feeds from the depths of the world on a daily basis.
Information is the drug of the 21st Century. We need GPS gadgets in our cars to get us to the same shopping centre we’ve been to for the last ten years. Mobile phones to tell our partners we are on the tram, even though we make the same trip at the same time each day and Twitter to tell the world when we’ve been to the toilet or found a large and unexpected bogie.
But as Leo in the West Wing said, technology developments in the last forty years are designed to deliver a more efficient method for the transmission of pornography and gossip. Some of which one presumes is being fed to the miners as we speak.
As a blog writer, I’m probably being hypocritical in this condemnation of modern technology. I text and email for example but draw the line at social networking or internet technology that involves more than checking out the Irish Times and the BBC. This is probably a generational thing. I was one of the first people in my peer group to have an email address and I treat that medium with the ease and efficiency that 12 years olds have for downloading illegal movies.
And as for mobile phones, I upgraded to predictive text a few years ago but draw the line at including smiley faces and I’m illiterate in the fine art of “text speak”.
Now we live in an era of IPads and wireless internet on mobile phones. I see people on the tram watching movies on screens the size of postage stamps and shake my head. I see them reading novels on Ipads and think “would it not be easier to buy a book and certainly a lot less hassle if it got wet or you lost it”.
If they can use these resources to entertain and inform those unfortunate Chilean miners, it will be worthwhile. But they should be careful about going too far.
Yesterday for example, they sent down a miniature TV set and allowed the guys to watch Chile play the Ukraine in Kiev. It’s not clear how the 2-1 defeat affected their spirits or whether Senor Mamani from Bolivia felt excluded from the process. Hopefully Chile doesn’t play Bolivia in the next 100 days or we could be looking at the first example of subterranean football hooliganism and I wouldn’t fancy Carlos’s chance of winning that argument.
Psychologists have been helping them deal with the stress of their confinement. But it’s not clear if this includes advice on how to deal with disputes that will arise when all 33 guys argue over the TV remote control. Imagine if the History channel was showing a documentary on the hunt for Nazi war criminals and Discovery had a show on killer sharks? At least there are an odd number of them and a majority will always arise. Unless the first decision of their community was that Bolivians don’t get a vote!
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