Sebastián Valdés and Iván Silva, members of the Codelco Mine Emergency and Rescue Brigade, El Teniente Division, attended Industrial Week, an initiative organized by the Fires Foundation in Louisiana, United States, to hone their technical rescue skills.

During a week of training, both specialists put their knowledge into practice in modules on industrial technical rescue with ropes and rescue in confined spaces. This international activity allowed participants to exchange experiences and learn alongside firefighters and rescuers from Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and the United States.

The head of the El Teniente Mine Emergency and Rescue Brigade, Iván Silva Pozas, highlighted that this activity allowed them to evaluate the level of the brigade members. “We were able to confirm that in rope rescue we are very good compared to what is taught and to the level of other rescue colleagues from South America.”

During the training, the brigade members faced various scenarios, including some at significant heights of 30 to 40 meters, in which they had to rescue a worker suspended from a fall from a height, in a time of between 3 and 4 minutes.

Brigade member Sebastián Valdés commented that “the scenarios we carried out at a high angle were very useful to us because we have focused more on working at a low angle, due to the reality of the mine.”

Sharing experience and knowledge

The experience gained during Industrial Week in Louisiana will allow them to continue improving the standards of the brigades, and to implement a new brigade course. “All the brigades are taking a comprehensive operations course that allows us to have the same knowledge and experience. To this will be added the new level 2 course, which is more technical, where we will share what we learned in Louisiana,” added Valdés.

The brigade members also had the opportunity to visit the facilities of the Houston Fire Department, which specializes in technical rescue under the NFPA (National Fire Protection Association) standard, and with whom they remained in contact for possible future training.

The brigade members expressed their gratitude for the support received from Codelco División El Teniente to carry out this training: “We appreciate the company's support to carry out this training. The high level of the course leads us to be increasingly better prepared, allowing us to adapt the tools learned to our realities and to have better prepared brigade members in the Division,” Silva commented.