Humanitarian Rescue Actions with the Chilean Miners

(Reuters) - Chile's trapped miners were shuttled up a narrow escape shaft to freedom and joyous reunions on Wednesday in a meticulously planned rescue operation that ended their two-month ordeal deep underground.

Today all 33 Chilean miners who were trapped for 69 days were all rescued safely. Their face filled with tears of happiness and joy to return home. They were rescued by a capsule named "Phoenix" named after a bird resurrected from ash in a legend.  "Welcome to life," President Sebastian Pinera of Chile told Victor Segovia, the 15th miner out. On a day of superlatives, it seemed no overstatement.
This rescue was extremely well planned and worked out flawlessly.

"This rescue operation has been so marvelous, so clean, so emotional that there was no reason not to allow the eyes of the world — which have been watching this operation so closely — to see it," a beaming Pinera told a news conference after the first miner safely surfaced.
The miners' vital signs were closely monitored throughout the ride. They were given a high-calorie liquid diet donated by NASA, designed to prevent nausea from any rotation of the capsule as it traveled through curves in the 28-inch-diameter escape hole
.
Engineers inserted steel piping at the top of the shaft, which was angled 11 degrees off vertical before plunging like a waterfall. Drillers had to curve the shaft to pass through "virgin" rock, narrowly avoiding collapsed areas and underground open spaces in the overexploited mine, which had operated since 1885.

President Barack Obama said the rescue had "inspired the world." The crews included many Americans, including a driller operator from Denver and a team from Center Rock Inc. of Berlin, Pa., that built and managed the piston-driven hammers that pounded the hole through rock laced with quartzite, some of the hardest and most abrasive rock.

What are your thoughts? Do share :).