The world sighed with relief as 33 miners were rescued alive form the San José mine in Chile after being trapped underground for 70 days. Few people were aware of the fact that a cable from the Lapp Group had played a small but significant part in the rescue.
In mid-August, about two weeks after the accident, an ultra-slim custom-made telephone was lowered down the first shaft that had been drilled to the emergency shelter, some 700 metres below the surface. A normal telephone cable would not have been sturdy enough, so the handset was attached to a 700-metre long Unitronic data cable that engineers had requisitioned from a mine nearby. The individual strands of this cable are wrapped with an additional layer of copper mesh for shielding.
Normally this sort of shielding would be used to protect against electromagnetic interference. In this case however, a side-effect was more important: it was the shielding that made the cable tough enough to be pulled through the narrow communication shaft without damage. The Unitronic product enabled communication between the surface and the miners – a glimmer of hope that led to a happy ending.
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