Chile Rescues Miners: Lesson in Disaster and Crisis Management

Chile Miners Rescue Video: Joy as capsule raises trapped men to surface



Chile’s CEO moment by Nathan VanderKlippe, San Jose Mine, Chile— From Saturday's Globe and Mail Published Friday, Oct. 15, 2010 6:59PM EDT

On the morning of Aug. 6, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera spoke to his Mining Minister, Laurence Golborne.

Twenty-four hours before, a small gold and copper mine had collapsed in northern Chile, sending a geyser of dust into the air and plunging the families of 33 men into despair. Accidents are not uncommon in a country with a mining tradition that extends back to the Spanish conquistadors and a blemished safety record nearly as long.
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Yet this tragedy struck a chord with Mr. Pinera, who took power in March just two weeks after a devastating earthquake struck the country. He immediately dispatched Mr. Golborne to the mine.

His instructions: Fix this. Spare no expense. Baldo Procurica, a Chilean senator who was present, recalls the leader saying that there was “no limit to the resources” to be spent on the effort.

It was a critical executive decision by a man whose long walk through the halls of a different kind of power – the world of business – made him uniquely qualified to make a gamble that anyone with political savvy would have avoided.

It didn’t hurt that Mr. Pinera’s mining minister happened to have a similar pedigree.

What followed was what might be called the MBA rescue.

It was a $10- to $20-million exercise in crisis management run by a Harvard-educated billionaire President and his Stanford-educated retailer lieutenant, each only recently transplanted into government office.

It ended this week, of course, as a brilliant political masterstroke, one that has vaulted to immense popularity the first conservative government to reach power in this country since far-right dictator Augusto Pinochet’s reign ended in 1990.

But behind the scenes, it was a carefully directed exercise by men whose pasts have given them an uncommon appetite for risk – and an uncommon expectation of success.
Chile’s CEO moment by Nathan VanderKlippe

Lessons Learnt: Deploy or Employ Professionals for Crisis and Disaster Management rather than depend on Bureaucrats whose interests are focussed mainly on making a fast buck on the tragedy rather than saving lives of citizens.