33 Chilean Miners Were Buried Alive. These Are the Tactics That Kept Them Sane.
As the world raced to rescue the trapped miners in a disaster that made international headlines, two psychologists were tasked with maintaining everyone's mental health.
For Alex Vega, the morning of August 5, 2010 started off just like any other. He headed towards the San José mine in Chile’s Atacama region, then descended 2,100 feet into the ground to start his work. Suddenly, after four hours on the job, he and the other men working alongside him heard several high-pitched, whistling noises. Then came deeper, thunder-like sounds, followed by the rumbling noise of fast-flowing rocks.
The mine had collapsed.
The 33 miners were practically buried alive in an environment boasting 95°F heat, 98 percent humidity, and absolute darkness.
“The initial thundering and the bangs we kept hearing meant enduring another psychological weight at the thought of the mountain sinking before rescuers reached us,” recalls Vega.
The incident gained global media attention, with dozens of news organizations gathering outside the mine alongside the miners’ family, friends, and other onlookers—all of whom were looking to the Chilean government for answers. The disaster is also the subject of National Geographic’s latest docuseries, Chilean Mine Rescue: Race Against Time, premiering September 25 on National Geographic and streaming the next day on Disney+ and Hulu.
The miners maintained a fragile social order for 69 days until their rescue. They were forced to ration food and water they already had with them, and resorted to either hugging or slapping each other out of panic attacks.
While teams worked to get them out, Chilean psychologist Alberto Iturra, who had previously worked with miners, and NASA psychologist Albert Holland were brought in to help with an equally important task: maintaining the mental sanity of these 33 men.
“We braced ourselves for the worst,” says Iturra. “But upon finding and speaking with them, the assessment of their physical awareness, sense of time, use of language, and social appropriateness was a total surprise.” The miners were in much better psychological shape than the experts expected.
But the men were not psychologically evaluated before starting their mining jobs, apart from questions about their experience and their ability to work in mines; they were thrust into the situation completely unprepared. Time was of the essence, as prolonged sensory deprivation and a sense of disconnection from the outside world could lead to feelings of hopelessness, depression, and panic.
Once rescue teams were able to make contact with the men, Iturra and Holland dove into a process of extreme operational psychology over the course of 49 days. Their immediate concern was sparing the trapped men further anxiety by establishing appropriate communication strategies between all parties involved.
“In a disaster of this magnitude, you can't just think of the miners,” says Holland. “You have to think of them as an integrated system: the isolated crew, their families, and the managers on the ground,” a process NASA calls the Triangle of Support. “If the surface management fails to communicate with the families, the families transmit anxiety down to the miners, destroying their morale.”
Iturra and Holland worked in close tandem, holding daily 6 p.m. meetings with families gathered at a makeshift tent community next to the entrance of the mine.
Speaking directly to this camp, both psychologists had one message: “This is not a sprint,” they said. “We are running a marathon.”
From his experience at NASA, Holland was also concerned about a “we-they” split forming, where isolated crews and ground control inevitably grow frustrated with one another. To address this, he implemented a strategy of relentless routine and community building. He stressed that the miners' periods of being awake and asleep had to strictly match those of families and other people outside the mine to maintain a sense of connection, so lights were used to train the miners’ circadian rhythms.
At the same time, Iturra deployed a philosophy he called todo suma: Everything adds up. Every positive action from miners, their families, and the rescue crews was amplified; every negative influence was neutralized.
Crucially, Iturra’s strategy relied on empowering the miners. They were not to be treated as helpless victims, but rather as “agents of their own rescue.” He fiercely protected their autonomy, recognizing that stripping away their decision-making power could lead to depression.
“You immediately put them to work on finding solutions, on giving them a reason to be proud and effective,” says Iturra, “so you are changing the circle from victim to rescuer.”
When the miners established a sacred hour of daily prayer, Iturra forbade the surface team from interrupting it. When political figures attempted to send wine and empanadas down for Chile's Bicentennial, Iturra successfully blocked it, knowing that reintroducing alcohol to a group that had not consumed it for such long a period of time could pose a catastrophic risk and lead to addiction.
Not all the strategies worked with the miners, though. An uproar ensued after Iturra imposed a 30-second limit on calls with family members. The measure was intended to protect their emotional stability by shielding them from receiving bad news from relatives, but it was later relaxed to allow more time.
Vega was one of the loudest complainers of this rule. “I remember being quite crossed,” he says. “I told him I was going to climb the mine’s shaft on my own, and then I hung up on him. But later, after the rescue, I understood the reason for the protocol.”
Iturra says he was happy to be the lightning rod in order to nurture the right kind of communication to protect the men.
“You have to give space to the encounter and the emotional flow, but not to discourse,” Iturra explains. “Communication should allow room for love and emotion, but not for complex arguments, family problems, financial issues, or the transmission of surface-level stress.”
Holland also notes that their strategy eventually pivoted to “retroactive training,” teaching coping mechanisms to the men while they were still trapped. One of these methods involved fighting boredom, which turned out to be an important part of the survival strategy. According to Vega, the miners played dominoes and makeshift board games, and even watched soccer games on a tiny video screen.
The San José mining disaster did reveal the staggering power of natural human resilience. “Evolution has given humans a huge capacity to adapt, even more than other creatures,” says clinical psychologist George Bonanno, professor at Columbia University and author of the book The End of Trauma. “I call this cultivating cognitive flexibility, meaning identifying the situation and then using the tools that we have in our repertoire in order to adjust to an outcome. We are more resilient than we realize.”
Despite the innate fortitude displayed by the 33 miners, they were still faced with lingering effects of trauma well after their rescue on October 13. Iturra and Holland proposed a plan to reintegrate the miners into society slowly through light work and therapy. They recommended giving them time alone with their families first. But Holland was called back to the United States before the rescue, and a team of doctors from Chile’s public health sector took over Iturra’s responsibilities. Although the two psychologists recommended against the miners taking antipsychotic and antianxiety drugs, they later heard that some of them did anyway.
Vega’s post-rescue experience eventually managed to take a positive turn. “After I was rescued, I had a lot of nightmares, especially about the moments that affected me most, which were during the first day of the collapse,” he says. “I had to sleep with the lights on.” Despite this, he stopped taking most of the medication after a few weeks. Guided by his father, a veteran miner, he underwent self-directed exposure therapy, gradually re-entering a smaller mine over seven days. A few days later, the nightmares vanished.
For both psychologists, the lessons are equally clear. “One of the biggest things I learned was that the psychological knowledge base NASA developed for long-duration spaceflight is highly portable to other extreme environments,” says Holland.
For his part, Iturra realized that standard psychological procedures do not work in unique, extreme disasters. “Protocols must be written specifically for the exact situation and tailored to the actual capacities of the people applying them,” he says.
Both psychologists believe the miners handled the situation extremely well.
“It is admirable how these men did not go mad, did not become alienated, and how they have managed to integrate their trauma into their daily lives,” says Iturra. “They faced the greatest fears that can exist in human experience, overcame them, and learned to live with them.”
Teamwork and fellowship played a part, but their own mettle was key to their survival.
“I do believe that in difficult and high-pressure situations, people bring out the best in themselves,” Vega says. “In those moments, we 33 managed to become one.”
