After Rescue, Miners Tell of Ordeals and Plot New Lives

In the days before he was rescued, Mario Gómez had reached a breaking point.

Though he was the oldest and possibly the most experienced of the 33 miners trapped nearly a half mile underground, he began to “feel strong explosions” in the shafts surrounding him, his sister said, and started panicking that another cave-in like the one that had hemmed them in two months earlier was imminent.

“He said, ‘They needed to get us out right away,’ ” his sister, Eva Gómez, 61, recounted him as saying after his rescue.