As 33 Chilean miners are lifted 2,300 feet from a copper mine, Emma Sepulveda will stand just meters from the spot where they breathe fresh air for the first time in two months. But the miners won’t see loved ones faces for several more hours.
“They have to come up with their eyes covered because the impact of the sun will be too brutal,” said Sepulveda, the director of the U. Nevada-Reno’s Latino Research Center. “They will be taken to an on-site hospital where eye covers will be removed and they will reunite with family.”
On miner’s rations and shantytown beds, Sepulveda has spent the last month gathering information from a number of people associated with the effort to rescue the 33 miners trapped by a collapse on Aug. 5. In what started as research for a book on the miners’ wives, Sepulveda, a Chilean citizen, said the project immediately expanded to include a much wider perspective.
“When I started interviewing (the wives), I realized the story would have to be bigger,” she said. “I began talking with doctors on the scene, with psychologists and miners who had worked in the mine.”
Aside from her work on the book, Sepulveda said she has become an impromptu journalist and an intermediary for a number of world media outlets. She has spoken on Spanish radio in Reno and Argentina and has been interviewed by media outlets from France, Belgium, England and Australia.
Sepulveda’s stay at the mining site has required a high degree of discipline, she said.
“I have to be in the middle of the desert with a huge sun heating us up,” she said. “It’s freezing at night. I eat what they’re giving people for free here. I carry my own water.”
As reporters from around the world have swarmed the spot to cover the final rescue, Sepulveda said the atmosphere around the mine has changed.
“A month ago there weren’t many reporters here,” she said.
“Just family members. There was a lot of family and solidarity. We sat around the campfire and drank mate.
“This past week has been hell. Four hundred reporters have shown up. Every country in the world has a reporter here.”
Sepulveda said she will return to Reno only after all 33 miners have reached the top of the mine. Due to delays and false alarms in the miners’ rescue, she has changed her return ticket three times, she said.
Iris West, assistant to the director at the Latino Research Center and a Chilean citizen, said Sepulveda’s work will look at the mining disaster from a perspective not seen in the news media.
“It’s will show a more personal and human side of what’s happening at the mine,” she said.
Sepulveda’s work will also take a much-needed look at the lives and rights of women associated with the mining industry in Chile, West said.
Jazmin Aravena, a civil environmental engineering graduate student at UNR, said the disaster has been frontpage news for two months.
“I check the news all day about the mining incident,” she said. “It’s important to Chile because Chile is a big mining country.”
Sepulveda, a Chilean citizen, will return to Reno with a true Chilean perspective of the ordeal, Aravena said.
“It’s the Chilean view right here in the U.S.,” she said.