Trapped men used skin as paper

2006-05-21 22:34

Canberra - Two miners trapped for two weeks almost a kilometre underground in an Australian gold mine said on Sunday they wrote farewell messages to their families on their own skin in expectation of dying.

In the first media interview broadcast since their ordeal ended, Brant Webb, 37, and Todd Russell, 34, told their survival story in a four-hour paid exclusive interview with Australian television's Nine Network.

The pair will soon fly to New York for an American television interview.

Webb and Russell were trapped in a tiny cage lodged under tons of rock and drenched by seeping water in the humid bowels of the century-old Beaconsfield Gold Mine in Tasmania state after a small earthquake on May 25 triggered a collapse.

They were finally rescued two weeks later by miners who tunnelled through solid rock to reach them, in a rescue that entranced the nation.

"I'd written letters on my arms to my wife and family and ... because of the sweat and the wet that we were getting from the water, it had actually washed off," Russell said.

"The hardest part of the ordeal, I think, was writing ... letters to the loved ones at home," he added.

Singing

Rescuers who blasted their way into the collapsed shaft discovered that the pair had survived when they heard them singing five days after the cave-in that killed their colleague Larry Knight.

Both men said they had legs initially pinned under rubble and had discussed amputating the limbs with box cutters if necessary to survive.

"I shut my eyes and I just imagined ... the picture of my wife and three children and I said to myself: 'I'm not dying here'.

"I've had a few blues (fights) in my life, but I've never fought that hard," said Russell.

Webb spoke of desperation as he heard rescuers bore toward them.

"I just thought I was a caged rat, you know, 'get me out of here' you know, I just didn't want to be there," Webb said.

Russell said he used humour to calm Webb in the confines of the cramped machine safety cage.

Kiss

"I said: 'Look mate, if you don't settle down, I'm going to have to give you a kiss.'"

He said he used that tactic four times and Webb always became quiet.

Both men said they discovered during their ordeal that they had nothing in common except for love of family and knowing the words of the Kenny Rogers' song The Gambler.

"Everyone knows The Gambler, you know, so we were singing The Gambler," Webb said of the moment rescuers detected that they were alive three days after excavating Knight's body.

The men said they both had spinal and knee damage although they had managed to walk out of the mine without assistance - against medical advice that they should be carried.

"We've both held up pretty well," Webb said. "We thought we'd hit a point where we'd flatten off and go down a bit ... but we haven't."

- AP