How 33 Chilean miners fought to win their freedom

• Carlos Barrios, one of the 33 recently rescued from San Jose mine, opens a bottle of champagne upon arrival at his house in Copiapo, 800 km north of Santiago. Picture: Getty

Reports emerged yesterday of angry squabbles and fisticuffs before contact was made with the outside world.

It took rescuers 17 days to find the 33 miners were alive in the San Jos mine after it collapsed on 5 August.

They were finally brought to the surface on Wednesday and all but two have now been released from hospital and reunited with their families. One of the miners is still in hospital suffering from a dental infection while the second has symptoms of vertigo.

Early accounts of life trapped underground revealed how majority decision-making and collective bonding proved to be key to their survival.

However one miner, who asked not to be named, said the men had to be "separated into three groups because of fighting. There were fist fights."

• Coal mine gas blast kills 20 and traps 17 underground

The men are said to have made a pact only to talk about how they overcame their problems and not speak about their differences.

The first to leave the mine, Florencio Avalos, said: "What went on in the mine stays between us and always will. That's what we've agreed."

Franklin Lobos, a former professional footballer, said he and his fellow miners had acted like a great football team.

"We pulled together when things got rough, when there was nothing, when we needed to drink water and there wasn't any to drink. We pulled together when there was no food, when you just had to eat a teaspoon of tuna because there was nothing else. That really bonded us," he said.

The man tasked with digging out the 33 miners yesterday told how he and his team of experts performed the amazing rescue.

Three days after the men were sealed 2,000ft within the copper and gold mine, engineer Andre Sougarret, 46, was summoned by Chile's president Sebastian Piera and told he would be in charge of the rescue.

His mission was unprecedented. No-one had ever drilled so far to reach trapped miners and no-one knew where to find them.

Sougarret's management of the crisis is credited with insuring nearly all of the miners emerged in good health. Sougarret, who ran the world's most productive deep mine, El Teniente, for Chile's state-owned Codelco copper company, said he tried not to dwell too much on those he was trying to save.

"I never allowed myself to think about what was happening with them - that's anxiety-causing," he said."I told myself, 'My objective is to create an access, a connection. Put that in your head'.

"Why they were there and what happened, that's not my responsibility. My responsibility is to get there and get them out."

Sougarret met widespread confusion when he flew to the mine in the Atacama desert, with rescue workers, firefighters, police, volunteers and relatives desperate for word about the trapped men's fate.

His first influential move was to order out the rescue workers until there was someone to save. He then asked for maps of the mine and assembled his team, starting with the 35-year-old risk manager at El Teniente, Rene Aguilar. In the weeks that followed, the two men built a team that involved 300 people.

Among their first steps was to ride into the mine in a truck. "What we found was a block, a tombstone, like when you're in an elevator and the doors open between floors," Sougarret said.

They found the cave-in started at a depth of about 1,000ft and brought down the very centre of the mine, some 700,000 tons of rock. Drilling through would risk another collapse, crushing anything below, so a new shaft would have to be drilled to reach the men.

They spoke to the miners who had narrowly escaped being crushed in the 5 August collapse and who knew the depths of the mine, with its water tanks, ventilation shafts and a 48-hour food supply contained in a reinforced refuge.

The drills would have to seek a path through solid rock to avoid veering off into an open or collapsed space below. But the mine had been so honeycombed over its long history that there were no exact maps.

"We were building an idea about where they might be," Sougarret said.

The miners who surfaced before the cave-in described where the men would have been working: probably near a workshop and refuge where they normally gathered to be taken to the surface for a lunch break.

"Now with all these elements, one could clearly say there is a hope that they were alive," Sougarret said. "I clearly thought the men could survive for 30 days, maybe 40 depending on the condition of some of the people, with water and air, without food... That was the fact that I kept in my head."

Then, on 19 August, came a crisis. The drill reached 700 metres - and nothing. "It passed 710, passed 720, and we got to 770 and didn't find anything," Sougarret said. The drill had in fact veered off, passing so close to the refuge the miners could hear and feel it.

"That started a crisis with the families. They were very upset because we hadn't reached them," Sougarret said. Finally, on 22 August, the drill broke through to the shaft about 150ft from the refuge. From the surface, the rescue team thought they could hear banging on the drill head.Pulling it up, they found a message written in Spanish tied in a plastic bag and pressed inside the thread of the drill: "We're all OK in the refuge, the 33."

In the days that followed, two more boreholes would break through, providing a lifeline for sending down food, medicine and messages of encouragement.

As soon as the miners were found alive, Sougarret mobilised three much more powerful drills, known as Plan A, Plan B and Plan C, each with different methods of pounding through the rock. At 8:05am on 9 October, Plan B broke through.

"This last stage for me was like butter," Sougarret said.

Meanwhile President Piera flew into Britain yesterday for talks with Prime Minister David Cameron.

He decided to bring lumps of rock from the bottom of the San Jos mine as gifts for both the PM and the Queen, whom he is also due to visit.