There’s great news for the trapped miners, of course.
But then I realized that there’s a bit of bad news for the poor doctor…
The procedure will be to lower a doctor down to the trapped miners, who will determine in which order to send the men to the top, one a time, over 3 days.
Here’s a picture of the rescue cage…and its a very,very tight fit.
I shivered at the thought of being locked into that thing, and then dropped down into a hole where there is a real possibility of getting stuck. (engineers are downplaying the worries, but the fact that they are considering working another 10 days to line the shaft with metal pipe shows how dangerous it may be.)
Now, those miners are heros…and they are experienced with tight ,dark spaces.
But the doctor who goes down there is probably an average guy like you or me…and
I’ll admit that I’d be way too scared and claustrophobic to do it. How about you?
Interesting–this tube is just about the same diameter as a torpedo tube on a submarine.
When a torpedo is fired, or the system is cycled with a so-called “water slug,” someone has to crawl all the way down the 21-foot long, 21-inch diameter tube to wipe down the seawater on the way down the tube, and oil it on the way back–to reduce the risk of corrosion. It takes about 15-20 minutes to do a thorough job.
It’s not a job for the claustrophobic. As a division officer, I did it once. It wasn’t very pleasant, but I got used to it after a few minutes.
I think it would be worse to be locked into a steel cage. At least I could have always just backed out of the torpedo tube.
The whole part about them being trapped in the mine for months reminds me of being on a submarine, too. As a midshipman trainee, I knew another midshipman who didn’t take too well to submarine life, but didn’t figure this out until a few days into a three-month, continuously submerged patrol. He used to spend hours staring up at one of the internal hatches that led to an escape trunk. Some of us wondered if he were going to decide to just leave one night. :eek:
One big difference between a modern submarine and the trapped miners is that a submarine has fans and air conditioning (and lights, power, showers, hot meals, etc.). These miners are enduring heat and high humidity, and of course it was much worse before they drilled the first supply tunnel to reach them.
Let me see…I can stay down here in this cramped, dark, hot, hell hole, with 2 months accumulated shit, piss and god knows what, from 33 other hopeless men or I can climb in a little tube and get out shortly.
I’m having the oogies just thinking about it. (Obviously, were I one of the miners I’d tear your ears off for a chance for a ride.) I think they’d have to give me some sort of calming sedative (or get another doctor who’s a caver or something.)
If you don’t get stuck.
The cage is being lowered down a pitch-black, airless tube which has bends and curves. If the cage, or the winch cable it hangs from, gets stuck on a protuding piece of rock or something, the guy inside is trapped, maybe for days, unable to even move his arms.
That doctor’s a hero in my book.
(note: there is real concern about the cage getting stuck.The procedure will be for the doctor to find the strongest, healthiest miner and send him up first, in the hope that if anything goes wrong, he will be able to withstand it. Only after the first successful trip will the doctor then send up the miners in reverse order…the weakest who need medical treatment first, the healthiest last.)
It wouldn’t bother me that much. I have a mental strategy for surrendering to such a thing. You have absolutely no control when you are in the cage and it is so cramped it is impossible not to make the ride down as long as the people controlling it do their job correctly. You can’t even kill yourself if you feel like it. Basically, you just have to exist for the length of the ride down but you would have had to do that anyway and it takes no effort to be successful. You can have a full-blown panic attack and still be fully successful as long as you can calm down at the other end.
I have had an MRI and I got ticked off because the loud sounds kept waking me up.
I don’t think the impulse itself was jerkish. Everybody has poor impulses from time to time. That’s not jerkish in itself. Giving into them is what’s jerkish.
If there were concerns of the cage binding (in both directions, if getting stuck meant they could still pull me UP, no biggie), I’d be nervous, other then that, it wouldn’t be a problem. I’ve never had an issue with tight spaces,* in fact, I’ve always wanted to get an MRI. What everyone always seems to hate about it sounds intriguing to me.
*tight spaces where getting stuck isn’t an issue. Hiding in small linen closet between the shelves and the door, no problem…having half my body under a late model car…the kind that you have to turn your head sideways to get under bothers me, if something happens, I won’t be able to get out quickly.
I’m not particularly claustrophobic and I can easily imagine worse things to do. I would never have the required balls to skydive, for instance, but this? Sure, I would even try it once just for the heck of it.