Master Cpl. Shane Dich, a traffic technician with the air force, says 8 Wing Trenton snapped into action quickly to transport crucial excavation equipment from a drilling company in Val D'Or down to the island nation to get the miners out.
Finding out the miners were safely removed "was probably the single most relief I've ever had," said Dich. "This is what we've trained for."His job was to go to Val D'Or and see if the giant drill was deployable to the Dominican Republic. The drill weighed thousands of pounds and had to be transported on a C-17 aircraft.
"It's a situation or something that had never been done before," said Dich, and "time was of the essence to get all this stuff there all at once." I’m very glad to learn that miners trapped in the Dominican Republic have now been rescued, with assistance from Canada.Following a request for assistance, an @RCAF_ARC CC-177 from 429 Squadron, transported mining equipment from Val D’Or, Québec, to Santo Domingo. 🇨🇦🇩🇴 pic.twitter.
St-Amour and four other staff flew to the Dominican Republic in the C-17 with the drill. He said that despite the work they put into planning the shipment, there were a lot of unknowns about the conditions on the ground that made the task daunting.He said he saw when the rock in between the miners and freedom broke, and heard the miners call out to the rescuers. St-Amour said the two miners looked to be "in pretty good shape" as they drove back to the surface.