The terrified group men spent 15 days underground with no contact from the outside world. For more than two weeks, they had no idea if anyone was coming to get them, or whether they would be left to die following a catastrophic mine collapse in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

Some believed they were ‘trapped underground with the devil’ following the San Jose copper mine disaster, 15 years ago on 5 August 2010. And just as the miners were terrified they wouldn’t make it out alive, above them, their families had no idea whether they had survived the collapse.

The San Jose mine, a large shaft which zig-zags down into the earth, had been destroyed when a boulder the size of the Empire State Building collapsed, sealing 33 miners half a mile underground.

Their lives had only been saved from the cave-

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