Photo: Google

By MARK LORENZANA

Specialists from a U.S. company joined the efforts to rescue 10 workers who have been trapped for 15 days at the El Pinabete mine in the Mexican state of Coahuila, Laura Velázquez, national coordinator of Civil Protection, reported on Wednesday, Aug. 17.

“The company from the United States will join the work, and we are going to see what their opinion is,” Velázquez said.

Velázquez, reporting remotely from the municipality of Sabinas, told Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in his daily morning press conference that engineers from the U.S. company will give a second opinion, as well as provide feedback on the strategy implemented by a Mexican technical advisory team.

On Tuesday, Aug. 16, 13 days after the accident, the federal government of Mexico announced that it would request help from both the United States and Germany.

Meanwhile, the families and relatives of the trapped miners demanded that Mexican authorities in charge of the rescue recover their loved ones “dead or alive.”

“It’s sad because it has been two weeks since the accident, and there seems to be no progress,” said María Guadalupe Cabriales, sister of Mario Alberto Cabriales, one of the trapped miners.

“Right now, what we’re asking is that they don’t just leave my brother down there,” said Magdalena Montelongo, sister of another trapped miner, Jaime Montelongo. “I ask that they hand him over to us, dead or alive, but that they hand him over to us.”

Given the circumstances of the flooded mine, at this point, most experts have considered this stage of the operations as a recovery, and not a rescue.