Chilean authorities have confirmed the death of the Six missing workers after the collapse in the El Teniente minethe largest underground copper site in the world. With the finding of the last corpse, during the early hours of Sunday, in one of the affected galleries a rescue operation is closed that has had to be carried out to counterreloj, in extreme conditions and without having contacted at any time with the disappeared, after an earthquake of magnitude 4.2 last Thursday the Andesite gallery, more than 1,200 meters deep.
“We have been able to rescue the bodies in a short term, despite the risk of maneuvers. We have thus contributed to the peace of families,” said O’Higgins regional prosecutor, Aquiles Cubillos. The Chilean Prosecutor’s Office has ordered the temporary closure of the area affected by the incident and keeps an investigation open to clarify whether the earthquake was of natural or induced origin by the perforations that it is carrying out Codelcothe state company that exploits the mine.
The cause of the seismic movement, three days later, is still not clarified. The president of Codelco, Máximo Pacheco, slipped last Friday that drilling works could have been the trigger for the tragedy: “When one is working in the rock and drilling, the rock reacts with seismic movements,” Pacheco said. A version that denied hours later the general manager of the Division El Teniente, Andrés Music, by ensuring that “there are no explosives or perforations that have generated this event.”
Given the speculation, the Chilean government has called for caution. “We want to be well precise. In Chile, when there is an accident in mining, the investigation is carried by Sernageomin,” said Interior Minister Álvaro Elizalde, in reference to the National Geology and Mining Service, the agency in charge of supervising security in mining farms and establishing the causes of this type of accidents. It is, as Elizalde said, of a “highly technical” investigation whose conclusions are going to be the ones that the Chilean State considers as valid.
Also the Chilean president, Gabriel Boric, has asked that conclusions be racked while, when trying to access the workers trapped in the El Teniente mine, he promised an investigation into what happened. “It is not time to find guilty. Now the priority is to concentrate all the efforts to rescue the miners,” said Friday, before promising that all security protocols will be reviewed in depth as soon as the rescue operation is completed. “Companies cannot separate themselves from that responsibility for any reason,” warned the president.
A copper colossus
Located 120 kilometers south of Santiago, in the middle of the Andes mountain range, the lieutenant is one of the oldest underground mines in the world and the largest copper site of this type. Nationalized in 1971 under the mandate of Salvador Allende, the mine produces more than 350,000 metric tons of fine copper per year and has more than 4,500 kilometers of tunnels, a distance similar to the one that Madrid separates from Moscow. More than 20,000 people work in it.
Thursday has been the worst tragedy in more than three decades in this installation. In 1990, another “rock burst” also resulted in six dead. But the greatest catastrophe in the history of the lieutenant is still known as ‘Smoke tragedy’, occurred in 1945, when a fire caused 355 dead and more than 700 injured by inhalation of toxic gases.
During the rescue works, more than a hundred people were mobilized, including several veterans of the historic rescue of the 33 miners of the San José mine in 2010. On this occasion, more than 3,200 tons of rubble have been removed to clear the galleries. The bodies of the five trapped workers have finally been located at Lieutenant 7, where contact was never established.
Chile, the world’s main copper producer, has drastically reduced its mining accidents in recent years. According to Sernageomin data, from the accident of the 33 Atacama the mortality rate has fallen by 75 %. However, only as far as 2025 have already registered eleven deaths, a figure that exceeds the previous year and has turned on the alarms again.
