A remarkable 14-day rescue mission ended in success this week, when Mexican army divers pulled a 42-year-old miner to safety after nearly two weeks trapped in a flooded, collapsed gold mine in the northern state of Sinaloa. The incident unfolded on March 25, when a tailings dam — the containment structure built to hold toxic mining waste — burst at the site, sending mud and water rushing through the underground tunnels. At the time of the collapse, 25 workers were operating deep below the surface. Twenty-one of those workers were able to evacuate to the surface immediately, but four were cut off and trapped 300 meters underground by the disaster.
In the days that followed, rescue teams launched a frantic search through the waterlogged tunnels. Five days after the collapse, one trapped miner, José Alejandro Cástulo, was pulled to safety, while a second was found deceased. It took rescuers a full 13 days of continuous, painstaking searching to locate the third trapped miner, Francisco Zapata Nájera. After more than 300 hours of navigating murky, debris-filled water, divers finally spotted the faint, repeated blinking of Zapata Nájera’s headlamp, which he had been switching on and off intentionally to signal his location to search teams.
Footage captured from the rescue mission shows Zapata Nájera standing in waist-deep water, visibly exhausted but unbroken in spirit. When divers reached his position and told him that his torchlight had been critical to finding him, he repeated again and again that he never lost faith that he would be saved. Even after locating him, however, the rescue team faced a new obstacle: the water level in the connecting tunnel was still too high for an immediate extraction. Divers left Zapata Nájera with emergency supplies including clean drinking water, canned tuna, and energy bars, and promised to return once they could lower the water enough to bring him out.
Over the next 20 hours, rescue teams operated heavy pumps to drain excess floodwater from the tunnel system. Early Wednesday, the water level dropped enough to allow extraction, and Zapata Nájera was finally brought to the surface. Wrapped in a thermal blanket to stabilize his body temperature and seated on an electric utility cart, he exited the mine entrance, and was immediately airlifted by helicopter to a local hospital for evaluation, where he was reunited with his waiting family. Doctors reported that while he is frail after his 14-day ordeal, his vital signs are stable and he is expected to make a full recovery with appropriate medical care.
The search is still ongoing for the fourth miner, who remains missing in the collapsed mine. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum issued a public statement praising both the relentless effort of the Mexican army rescue team and Zapata Nájera’s extraordinary resilience and unwavering hope, which she credited for making the “astounding rescue” possible.