So, you think your job sucks?

[War Wagon]

It could be worse

Chilean officials are offering lots of advice to help 33 miners trapped underground keep their health and sanity as they wait to be rescued. One thing they're not sharing with the men is their estimate that it could take four months to drill them out of an emergency shelter nearly half a mile below the surface.

Pretty sure I'd go stark, raving, Toddowen driveway insane.

[Diego in Seattle]

I wonder if they get OT.

[FLW Buckeye]

Probably get charged rent...

[poptart]

This is what happens when you fuck around with the earth.

[War Wagon]

If that mine was an oil well spewing into the gulf, they'd have them out in no time flat.

Oh, wait...

[Cueball]

INS will be there shortly to kick 'em out for overcrowding

[Trampis]

I wonder if they get OT.

They should . Rare occassion Ill agree with your liberal coastie ass.

Fucking mines...whats this one for?...copper and gold i think. Dig some big cavern and throw people down it. Nice

Rack those dudes for working together...sorta reminds me of that soccer team from??? that crashed there plane high up in the Andes. Uraguay?

[Diego in Seattle]

I wonder if they get OT.

They should . Rare occassion Ill agree with your liberal coastie ass.

Lighten up, Frances.

[Goober McTuber]

Trapped in a mine that had caved in
And everyone knows the only ones left
Was Joe and me and Tim
When they broke through to pull us free
The only ones left to tell the tale
Was Joe and me

Timothy, Timothy, where on earth did you go?
Timothy, Timothy, God why don't I know?

Hungry as hell no food to eat
And Joe said that he would sell his soul
For just a piece of meat
Water enough to drink for two
And Joe said to me, "I'll take a swig
And then there's some for you."

Timothy, Timothy, Joe was looking at you
Timothy, Timothy, God what did we do?

I must have blacked out just around then
'Cause the very next thing that I could see
Was the light of the day again
My stomach was full as it could be
And nobody ever got around
To finding Timothy

Timothy, Timothy, where on earth did you go?
Timothy, Timothy, God why don't I know?

Timothy...

[BSmack]

I wonder if they get OT.

They should . Rare occassion Ill agree with your liberal coastie ass.

Fucking mines...whats this one for?...copper and gold i think. Dig some big cavern and throw people down it. Nice

Rack those dudes for working together...sorta reminds me of that soccer team from??? that crashed there plane high up in the Andes. Uraguay?

Didn't those guys eat each other? I guess you could call that teamwork.

[Trampis]

Now I see they have finally told those poor basterds that they wont be coming out for awhile. Chilean presidente, Manuel Andes, dropped a mic down the 6" hole and said, "see you at Christmas boys!"

Also, the miners are being encouraged to stay thin, so as to fit through the hole they are going to drill...like there dropping potato chips and baby back ribs down the hole to them. What a nightmare.

[Dan Vogel]

It is a nightmare. You almost wish for those men that they could somehow go into a hibernation mode to make it through the ordeal. Wishing them the best and wishing for the best outcome.

[Jobocky]

[PSUFAN]

This is what happens when you fuck around with the earth.

[War Wagon]

might as well reset this.

they just extracted the 28th lucky fuck and they seem in good shape, considering.

Pretty amazing story, coming soon to a theater near you.

[War Wagon]

Yanking the last miner from the hole now.

Rack the made in USA drill and American operators who bored that hole.

[Screw_Michigan]

Anybody got any good Chilean miner jokes?

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

Anybody got any good Chilean miner jokes?

I think it would have been hilarious if the rescuers dressed up as apes before they pulled the miners out.



"Get your hands off me, you damned, dirty ape!"






What a mind-fuck that would have been.

[War Wagon]

I sent this message to the people at Center Rock Inc. of Berlin PA.

Congrats to you folks for showing the entire world what American ingenuity and dogged determination can accomplish. I have no doubt that w/o your superb efforts, those men in that mine wouldn't have seen the light of day for weeks, if not months. I wish your company great success in the future.

[Dinsdale]

While it has, for some BSmack reason, become a sin...

Ain't nothing wrong with American Pride.


RACK the AMERICANS who hooked a brother up. No country has ever done it like we have.

[Carson]

Anybody got any good Chilean miner jokes?

Q: How many Chilean miners does it take to fill up a mine?

A: We'll never know; they keep pulling them out.

[Diego in Seattle]

[jiminphilly]

I sent this message to the people at Center Rock Inc. of Berlin PA.

Congrats to you folks for showing the entire world what American ingenuity and dogged determination can accomplish. I have no doubt that w/o your superb efforts, those men in that mine wouldn't have seen the light of day for weeks, if not months. I wish your company great success in the future.

U.S. firm Schramm Inc. rejoices over its key role in miraculous rescue of 33 Chilean miners
Mike Lupica - News

Thursday, October 14th 2010, 4:00 AM


Greg Hillier sat in his office at a West Chester, Pa., company called Schramm Inc. on Wednesday as the 18th miner came up and out of the hole in Chile, as another one of the 33 came into the light.

They all came out of a hole in the earth that a piece of equipment from Schramm helped make. As the world cheered.

The piece that helped bring them back is called the T130XB. It helped bore a hole - originally some 28 inches in diameter - through rock that was just big enough for the cocoon that carried brave rescue workers down half a mile below the surface, then began bringing the 33 back, one by one.

It was the remarkable last chapter of a story about the best in these men, the best we want to still believe is in all of us.

"If you want to be precise about it, the hole eventually became 26 inches in diameter because of the wear and abrasion near the bottom," said Hillier, Schramm's product manager.

There was a pause on the other end of the line before Hillier said: "But the hole held. It worked."

It worked. That is why the people at Schramm's felt like they had been a part of the rescue effort, had played a part in an event that made the world come together in a way it never does anymore, made us cheer in a way we hadn't since the Berlin Wall fell.

At a time when there is a general notion that the world is broken, things worked. The machinery worked. The people at the place called Camp Hope would not stop working.

The miners were heroic from the beginning. So were the efforts of the Chilean government, starting with President Sebastian Piñera. All in the name of human life. Thirty-three human lives.

The people of Schramm felt invested in it, because of their products, because of the T130XB and another drill rig, the T685, which helped drill the first hole in the rock.

That hole, just 51/2 inches in diameter, helped locate the trapped miners 17 days after the collapse of the San Jose Mine. It was the way another Pennsylvania company, Center Rock, felt invested because it supplied drill bits and expertise.

You saw how this came out, you watched one happy ending after another and you wished the government of Chile and these workers had been in charge of saving the Gulf of Mexico after BP.

"We watched the images here at our company and felt the same hope that everyone else felt, I'm sure," Greg Hillier said. "And while I can't speak for all 165 people who work at our office here, I have a feeling most of them have been watching those miners come back to us with a sense of incredible pride."

He said there were about 40 Schramm drill rigs in Chile when the San Jose Mine collapsed, and the 33 men were trapped 2,000 feet beneath the surface. He talked about other companies involved in the rescue effort, Center Rock, and Geotech Broyles Bros. in Chile. And Terra Services. And Major Services. And Addison Drilling.

Hillier talked with admiration about the way the Chilean government pulled the entire operation together, while the world watched.

"Just looking at it as a professional, it couldn't have come together any better than it did," Hillier said. "We were just happy to feel as if we were a small part of it."

We constantly hear about things collapsing, the economy and mines, and maybe the belief that things are never going to get better.

Then something like this happens, in such a dark, cynical time, and we see people come together. We see the same kind of greatness bringing these lives back that we saw in downtown Manhattan when people went down there to bring the city back.

"A good day to come to work," Hillier said.

For this one day, maybe it wasn't just miners coming into the light.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... z12Kt9PmWg

JOE MANDAK
The Associated Press
updated 10/13/2010 5:12:34 PM ET 2010-10-13T21:12:34 Share Print Font: + - PITTSBURGH — Proud employees of a small drilling company too remote to have cable television found themselves Wednesday at the center of the world's biggest news story — but they still had to get the day's work done.

As rescuers brought 33 Chilean miners one by one in a metal capsule through a 2,000-foot hole bored by drill bits made by Center Rock Inc. of Berlin, Pa., workers in the small southwestern Pennsylvania community occasionally paused their daily routines to follow computer news feeds. Lunch was brought in to help them celebrate.


"We still have customers who still need products today, so we're working and we're celebrating," inside sales manager Becky Dorcon told The Associated Press.

Center Rock has a brief, but storied, history. Founded in 1998, the company's profile rose appreciably in July 2002, when it pitched in during a similar rescue to free nine miners trapped underground for more than three days in the flooded Quecreek Mine a few miles away.

Tom Foy, 61, who still lives in Berlin, was one of the Quecreek miners but has worked for Center Rock for nearly five years.

"The kids won't let me go back," said Foy, a married father referring to his four children, ages 34 to 38. "I gave the mining up. I wasn't about to put them through that again."

Although Quecreek helped put Center Rock on the map, it was the company's LP Drill — or low-profile drill — developed five years ago that has seen the company grow from 16 to 75 employees and put the company at the center of the Chilean rescue, Dorcon said.

Schramm Inc. of West Chester, Pa., makes the T-130 drill used to make the hole; Center Rock makes the 28-inch wide canisters that function as the bit. Each canister contains four air hammers and four drill bits that move in tandem to dig through rock.

Center Rock owner Brandon Fisher, just back Tuesday night from Chile, fielded dozens of interview requests — and hoped to sneak away for some sleep.

In an exclusive interview with the Daily American of Somerset, Fisher said he and wife, sales director Julie Fisher, were back in Berlin in time to watch on television as the first miner was pulled from the hole where he and his colleagues had been trapped since Aug. 5.

Fisher, 38, and Richard Soppe, 58, his director of construction and mining tools, spent 37 days with scant sleep drilling the rescue shaft. Julie Fisher joined them about two weeks ago, and relatives and friends gathered to welcome them home Tuesday.

"When I saw the first guy looking healthy, that's what it's all about," Fisher told the newspaper. "But the mission is not over until the last guy is out."

Fisher was especially drawn to miner Mario Sepulveda Espina, with whom Fisher interacted by video during the drilling process.

Espina, the second miner pulled from the shaft, made made a bizarre request while still underground: wigs. Officials granted Espina's request, Fisher told the Daily American, and the miner wore one in front of a video monitor, joking about what shampoo did to his hair — perhaps a reference to a commercial in which a wig-clad Troy Polamalu blames his big hair on shampoo.

Once rescued, Espina ran along high-fiving those above ground.

"He was a practical joker; he used humor to keep the morale up," Fisher told the newspaper.

Dorcan said the company took "tremendous pride" in the rescue.

"Everybody here has been giving 110 percent since the day Brandon got in contact with the people of Chile and it was thought he was going and our tools were going to be used," she said.

Foy said Center Rock volunteered to help in Chile after officials there confirmed the miners were still alive Aug. 22, but said soon afterward that they expected it would take until Christmas to dig a rescue shaft.

"They said, 'Well, heck, they ain't getting out till Christmastime, and I know and Brandon knows and we all knew we could get down to them faster than that," Foy said. "We proved that Center Rock is a little company, but they do big things."