CNN 2010-10-17

Hi, I'm Carl Azuz. It is Thursday, October 14th. We are very pleased to welcome you to a special edition of CNN Student News. That video clip we showed you at the start of today's show gives you an idea of why today is a special edition. When we taped this show last night, 25 miners had been rescued; the other 8 were waiting for their turn. The footage you're seeing here is of Florencio Avalos. He was the first man to ride up in that Phoenix 1 capsule and reach the surface after more than two months underground. It was a rescue that came with concerns and potential danger. But so far, a success.

This is an incredible story, one that we've been covering for a while. We want to go back and look at some of the biggest moments that have happened. This all started on August 5th. That's when a collapse 2 in the San Jose mine in Chile left 33 men trapped 2,300 feet underground. At first, emergency workers couldn't get in touch with the miners. But about two-and-a-half weeks after the cave-in, on August 22nd, a probe that officials were using to try to find the miners came back up with this note attached to it. It said, "We are fine in the shelter, all 33 of us." That's when things kicked into high gear.

Below ground, the miners were getting supplies from the surface. Above ground, authorities started working on three plans to drill down and reach the men. Plan B -- one of the drills -- hit the mark first. On September 17th, it reached the room where the miners had been staying. But the hole from Plan B, the drill, was only 12 inches wide. Officials had to make that bigger so that the men could escape. Last Saturday, October 9th, more than two months after the cave-in, the escape hole broke through.

And that is how we got to where we are now. There have been some amazing images all along from this rescue mission. That one you saw at the start of today's show, for example. That was Mario Sepulveda, the second miner to come up. He had a ton of energy; he was cracking jokes, leading the crowd in that cheer.

Meanwhile, this is what things looked like underground. Rescue workers rigged up a camera down there so that people could watch a live feed of the miners getting ready to go up. You see that here. That's the Phoenix rescue capsule, with one of the miners inside, and this is what it looked like on his way up to the surface, for the first time in more than two months. This video was actually shot inside the tunnel as the capsule went up.

Mario Gomez, the oldest of the trapped miners, used to tell his wife to quit bugging 3 him about saying his daily prayers. When he came out of the mine, Gomez hugged her and then kneeled down to pray. And when Claudio Yanez made it up to the surface, he ran right over to his fiancee. When he went down into the mine, she was just his girlfriend. She proposed to Yanez through a letter that she sent down to him while he was trapped underground.

And here is what that ride up looks like. This is a replica 4 of the rescue capsule that CNN built. We want to give you some perspective here. I am not the smallest guy in the world -- I'm 6'2", about 210 pounds -- and you can see when the door's closed how tight a fit this thing is on me. I can't move around hardly at all. I can move my head just a bit. But this gives you an idea of what the miners traveled in, as they were hauled about half-a-mile through the Earth. Even someone smaller, as you can imagine from looking at this, would have very little room on the estimated 15-minute ride.

So, a lot of people have been concerned about the miners' medical condition, not just their state of mind as they traveled up through this. But being underground for two months, you might expect some of these miners to be in pretty bad shape. But, as you've seen over and over again, they seem to be doing great! Dr. Sanjay Gupta explains a little bit about what's happening during the rescue and afterward 5 to make sure these guys are as healthy as possible.