On October 13, 2010, the Last of 33 Trapped Chilean Miners Emerged After 69 Days Underground

A rescue capsule named Fénix carried men from half a mile below the Atacama Desert into a waiting world that had refused to give up on them.

For 69 days, the world had watched a hole in the Chilean desert with something between dread and hope. On October 13, 2010, that hope was vindicated: one by one, 33 miners trapped nearly 2,300 feet underground since an August cave-in at the San José mine were pulled to the surface in a narrow steel capsule, ending one of the most closely followed rescue operations in modern history.

The Fénix Rises

The men had survived on rationed tuna and milk for the first 17 days before rescuers even confirmed they were alive, sending down a narrow probe that returned with a note reading, in Spanish, that all 33 were well in the shelter. What followed was a scramble of engineering improvisation: NASA consultants, drilling teams from at least three countries, and a purpose-built capsule barely wider than a man's shoulders, christened Fénix after the mythical bird. Chilean President Sebastián Piñera stood at the mine site for the extraction, greeting each miner as he stepped out blinking into sunlight he hadn't seen in over two months. Shift foreman Luis Urzúa, credited with organizing the men's survival underground, was the last to ascend, closing out an ordeal that had become a fixture of nightly news broadcasts worldwide.

An estimated one billion people watched the rescue unfold live, drawn by a story that offered something increasingly rare on television: an outcome nobody had to spin. The operation, dubbed Plan B by rescuers, used a drill borrowed from oil-field technology to bore the escape shaft in just over a month, far faster than initial estimates of Christmas. Each miner wore sunglasses to protect eyes unaccustomed to daylight and had lost an average of 20 pounds. The men later became briefly famous, visiting Piñera's palace, meeting Manchester United players, and touring as minor celebrities, though several would spend years afterward navigating the psychological weight of having been declared dead by their own government before anyone knew otherwise.