First Chile miners allowed home

Chile’s president meets the miners in hospital and challenges them to a football match

Three of the 33 men rescued after 69 days trapped in the San Jose mine in Chile are to be discharged from hospital and allowed to go home.

Officials refused to identify who among the group are being allowed to leave.

But they said that all the miners had responded well to treatment and many more of them would go home on Friday.

The miners were visited by President Sebastian Pinera, who promised that Chileans would never be allowed to work in “such inhuman conditions” again.

Speaking to reporters outside Copiapo hospital, the deputy medical director Dr Jorge Montes said: “The message to the whole community is that they are really progressing very well.

“We believe three miners will be released today and tomorrow, Friday, many more patients will be released.”

He said the three men leaving on Thursday would be allowed to carry out physical activity and would need sunglasses only if they were exposed to intense light.

However, he warned that “the psychological condition of the patients is something we cannot predict”.

Head of regional health, Paola Newman, said the names of the patients being discharged were not being released to protect their privacy.

She said the 33 miners were together in a room and had been quite happy to see each other again.

The miners had been told they would need to be held in the hospital for 48 hours but Health Minister Jaime Manalich announced earlier that their condition was so good that many would be able to leave within 24 hours. He said their condition was nothing short of a miracle.

Some of the men have been given dental surgery and two have the lung disease, silicosis: Mario Sepulveda, the second miner to have been rescued, and Mario Gomez, 63, who is on a course of antibiotics for pneumonia.

The men were hauled to the surface one at a time in a complicated and dramatic operation that took about 22 hours from the time the first miner reached the ground to when the last miner surfaced.

They were winched up a narrow shaft in a metal capsule from where they had been trapped 625m (2,050 feet) below ground since the mine partially collapsed on 5 August.

They survived the first 17 days of their ordeal by eking out rations that were meant to last just a few days before rescuers found them via a probe lowered down a bore hole about the width of a grapefruit.

Food and other supplies were lowered to the men while they waited for a larger shaft to be drilled for their rescue.

Now that the men are safe, thoughts have turned to their emotional wellbeing.

An insight into how the miners are adjusting to life above ground has come from a diary written for the BBC by the three children of Omar Reygadas, the 17th to be freed.

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