How movies, laundry and ice-cream help trapped Chile miners survive

The miners are sleeping on camp beds that were sent down in pieces. They can speak with their families using a phone that has been lowered down.

They have brief video chats with their families on Friday and Saturdays, for a maximum of eight minutes each, thanks to a fibre-optic cable.

Settling in for the long wait, they have established a disciplined routine designed not only to keep them mentally and physically fit, but working together.

The plan, according to the rescue effort's lead psychiatrist, Alberto Iturra Benavides, is to leave them with "no possible alternative but to survive" until drillers finish rescue holes, estimated to be done by early November.

"Surviving means discipline, and keeping to a routine," Mr Iturra said.

So when the miners do get moments to relax, they can watch television - 13 hours a day, mostly news programmes and action movies or comedies, whatever is available that the support team decides won't be depressing. They've seen Troy and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Brad Pitt and Jim Carrey's The Mask. But no intense dramas - "that would be mental cruelty," said Mr Iturra.

The news the miners see is also reviewed first by the team above, said Luis Felipe Mujica, the general manager of Micomo, the telecommunications subsidiary of Chile's state-owned Codelco mining company. Though some miners have requested them, sending down personal music players with headphones and handheld video games have been ruled out, because those isolate people from one another.

Since 22 August, when a bore hole reached the miners, their rescue and support team has grown to more than 300. It includes communications experts, doctors, psychologists, launderers and cooks in addition to the drilling engineers. The miners' families are also present.

Togetherness is what initially saved the miners when an estimated 700,000 tonnes of rock collapsed on 5 August and sealed off the central section of the mine shaft above them, plunging them into darkness and kicking up thick clouds of dust that made it impossible to see. The collapse happened just as the men were gathered for lunch in the refuge - a space about 12ft by 12ft with a fortified ceiling nearly 15ft high that normally doubles as a dining room in the lower reaches of the mine.

When the dust finally settled, they could see they were trapped in a large open space, about 1,200ft long, that runs up the corkscrew-shaped shaft to another workshop about 2,000ft underground.The space had several mining vehicles with battery and engine power, a chemical toilet and industrial water, which together with their meagre emergency food supply enabled them to survive with no help from the outside world.

"They were 17 days in the darkness (and] in the first five days they could barely breathe from the dust," Mr Iturra said. "And then they had to say, 'I didn't die' - this in itself stops you from being frightened."

Mr Iturra said the miners have taken it upon themselves to solve their problems as miners do - through hard work.Divided into three groups of 11, they sleep on beds in three separate parts of the mine, work in three shifts and share lunch at noon to maintain unity.

Their routine starts with breakfast - hot coffee or tea with milk and a ham-and-cheese sandwich. Then lots of labour: removing loose rock that drops through the bore holes as they are being widened into escape tunnels, cleaning up rubbish and emptying the toilet and attending to the capsules known as palomas - Spanish for carrier pigeons - that are lowered to them with supplies.

While Mr Iturra's team of psychologists talks with the miners at least twice a day, the men know their survival ultimately depends on each other. So they have a kind of group therapy in which they discuss disagreements, plans and achievements.