“God Drilled the Hole”: The American Who Rescued the 33 Chilean Miners

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Listen to the Perez Hilton podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we continue with our American Stories. The 33 starring Antonio Banderas recounts the extraordinary story of the 2010 Chilean mining disaster that buried 33 miners, 2,300 feet underground for 69 days before their unprecedented rescue. The world was riveted by the story, but the name of the man whose plan and drilling equipment made that rescue possible was never mentioned in the film. His character is conflated with one of his enemies, a driller named Jeff Hart, played in the film by James Brolin.

And as you're about to hear, that's all right with business owner and Catholic deacon, Greg Hall. You've all heard about it, the Chilean mine rescue. They call it, there's been books written about it. There's a movie out about it called The 33 where James Brolin plays me and it's an amalgamation of myself and my driller.

Now I will tell you if you go see the movie, he's much more cranky than I ever was. But I'm going to tell you the back story that the books don't have, that the movies don't have. Before I start, I want just to take a second and I want you to think about that person or persons who's most dear to you and imagine that the phone rings and the voice on the other end tells you that that person is gone. They don't know where they are. They don't know if they live or died.

They just know they're gone. That was a phone call that went out in August of 2010 in the little bitty mining town in Copia Potilli called San Juan Mine. There had been an earthquake in the mine and the walls had begun to shake and the roofs had begun to collapse and the people had ran for their life. And when the dust settled, there were 33 of their brothers unaccounted for, didn't know where they were. The phone calls went out to the families.

The phone call went out to the government. The government immediately dispatched a team of commandos to go try to find the miners. One intrepid team was able to repel down a ventilator shaft down to 400 meters before finding the path blocked. So they knew if the miners were alive, they were somewhere between 400 meters and 800 meters. That was the deepest shaft ever drilled. So the government decided to take all the local drilling rigs out there and get them on site and have them start blindly punching holes, hoping to find somebody. The first problem they ran into is all the drilling rigs, and there were nine available, they only carry enough equipment to go 430 meters.

That's about as deep as you go for a production hole in Chile. And so they asked what was going on and the miners told them, well there's a company called Perfoi Quipos in Antofagasta, Chile that makes all our equipment and they supply all our technical people. Call them. That's my company that I started in 1992. They called my manager there.

I was in Cypress, Texas at the time. I remember thinking as I heard the plans to rescue them, six months, nine months, a year, and I couldn't sleep at night. Everything I'd have tried to develop showed it wouldn't work. All the computer modeling, all the mathematics, everything. Trying to drill a half a mile through solid granite, a two foot hole, without using liquids. It can't be done.

It can't be done. So I finally told my team, well the only answer, stop doing the calculations and let's go. The technical drilling was even worse than I thought. But there was something else that I didn't realize, the political situation we had got into. You see President Piñera was a new president and they're very powerful people in Chile. So they quickly decided if they could have a disaster at the mine that Piñera would fall and they could take over. So they visited us and they offered me as much money as I could have, contracts, anything I wanted if I would just leave.

I was a hero. Go home, gringo. Just let them stay here. But they'll die.

Why do you care? Piñera will fall. And then thinking back of it, I'm no Jesus but there was Satan showing all the riches of the world. So I said no. And they said, well understand that the chances of your failure are very big. And if you fail, you may lose everything.

If you kill them, which is a possibility, you may never leave Chile. One day when we were having tremendously tough times, they maneuvered a meeting with all the government where I had to accept full responsibility for the job or we were finished. And so I did that. And when I walked out, I was very shaken because what had I gotten myself into?

It was lucky that it was time to pray the liturgy of the hours. So I took my liturgy and I actually went out in the desert, that's all it was was desert, to a junkyard. And I would tell you that I was crying but I can't because miners, we don't cry. But I was crying. But I started to read the liturgy and I'll never forget it.

The first Psalm, Psalm 63, oh God, you are my God, for you I long. For you my soul is thirsting, pining like a dry weary land without water. And it just hit me. I thought, you know, that same Holy Spirit's here. He's with us. We're going to do this.

Because as Augustine said, right is right even when no one's doing it and wrong is wrong even when everybody's doing it, we're going to do this. So I went back there and I won't tell you that everything went well. It didn't. We fought, the government was coming, the bad guys would come and entice us with different things and different threads, but we kept on going. By the time I got out there, the drilling had started and they had chain link fences up and everybody's faces were pressed, all the families pressed and they had made a camp called Camp Esperanza, Camp Hope, and they wouldn't leave. So we started drilling. Five days passed, eight days passed, ten days passed. Every now and then we would hit a little cavern and we would send a camera down there and nothing. We started to think, when do we give up?

When do we quit? But all the families were there. And they held up signs, please, don't leave my son down there. And it's funny because when I start talking about it, I actually go back there and I get emotional.

That's just the way it is. I'll try not to be too long, but I can remember the smells of people. But anyway, on day 15, we hit a cavern and we heard tapping on the drill pipe. All 33 people were alive. They had been rationing, if you go see the movie, it's very good showing the valor of the miners and their families. They were surviving on almost no food, starting off with a little half a cup of milk and a teaspoon of tuna, cutting it down.

On day 10, they cut it in half. By the time we found them, they had no food left and they were drinking out of radiators of some machinery that was down there to stay alive when we found them. So we found them. But as we kept on drilling one day, we were within 100 meters of the miners.

And what happened is what all the models showed. We got stuck a final time. And we couldn't get out.

Our drill rig was maxed, way over-maxed, so over-maxed that the drill rig manufacturer had sent their top technician to sleep on the rig with us because I had everything about 200% higher than it was allowed. We were doing what we were doing. But we were stuck. And everybody looked at me and there was nothing that I could do. We were finished. And when you're stuck in that kind of drilling, every minute you're stuck, you're worse stuck.

It doesn't get better. And we were finished. But I remember thinking, and I don't know how it popped into my mind, the Lord works in mysterious ways. But Bartimaeus popped into my mind. Bartimaeus, you remember the blind guy? We were thinking, God, why is Bartimaeus, you know, can't you like give me some lube oil or, you know, some bread and air or, you know, Bartimaeus?

But then I started to think about it. You remember the story of Bartimaeus? He was blind. And he came up and he called Jesus. And Jesus asked him a very simple question. What do you want me to do? Whenever I used to read that, I always thought, what a weird question. If I was Bartimaeus, I'd say, what do you think?

Take me skiing. I'm blind. But I don't know what you want me to do. But you know something? It's an important question.

And we understand because Jesus had told the apostles when he washed their feet. He said, I call you friend. And think about what friends do. They talk to each other.

They have relationships. And so Bartimaeus had told him, I want to see. And Jesus said, you'll see. So I said it and I said it very clearly on that drill rig. I said, Lord, I've done everything I could. I can do nothing else.

Those are your kids down there, not just my brothers. You need to send your angels down and you need to dig that bed out. Or we're finished.

And really, they're finished. And I don't know how long I prayed. I don't know if it was 20 minutes or an hour.

I have no idea. Time went crazy. But the bit started to move.

And it can't. The bit cannot move. I have given over 60 talks all over the world.

And what's funny is when I talk to a secular group, they'll come back and say, well, you know, Deacon, you're renowned, whether I am or not, you're renowned in the world as an expert at drilling. Tell me really what happened. I'll say, God moved the bit.

You don't know what you're talking about. But God moved that bit. And we went down and we reached the miners and we left. We made it. We decided we didn't want to stay around until they came up. We didn't want glory. We were going home. And as I was leaving, one of the head drilling engineers in South America, he came up to me and he said, Greg, there's no way you can drill that hole.

It's impossible. I said, oh, you're right. He said, God drilled that hole. God drilled that hole.

And I told him, yes, but I have a very good seat. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. You've been listening to business owner and Catholic Deacon Greg Hall and his story. And my goodness, that quote from Augustine is just so dead on. Right is right when no one is doing it.

Wrong is wrong when everybody is doing it. The story of Greg Hall, the story of so much more here on Our American Stories. High Five Casino. High Five Casino is a social casino with real prizes and big Vegas hits at highfivecasino.com. The hottest games right from Vegas and all winnings go straight to your bank account.

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