Friday, November 20, 2015

The 41

The 33 overshadowed them:

"Five Tanzanian miners found alive after 41 days" Washington Post  November 19, 2015

Above ground, the families of the missing gold miners accepted the inevitable and mourned their dead.

Forty days had passed since six men had descended into an unstable mining shaft in northern Tanzania in search of 11 missing colleagues.

On the 41st day, after an interminable incarceration during which they subsisted on roots, frogs, bugs, and water that dripped from the mine’s dirty ceiling, the miners were finally able to catch the attention of another group working in a shaft nearby.

Five of the men who were trapped were pulled to freedom Sunday, Tanzania’s Ministry of Energy and Mines announced on Tuesday. A sixth died of hunger during the six-week ordeal.

The men futilely sought a way out, scouring the mining shaft’s tunnels and passages until their headlights and cellphones ran out of battery power.

On Oct. 11, six days after the collapse, then Deputy Minister for Energy and Minerals Charles Kitwanga had announced that the trapped men were presumed dead.

On Sunday, someone finally heard them — a fellow miner who, like everyone else, had resigned themselves to the fact that their colleagues were long gone.

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I can't wait for the sequel.