Tasmanian miners considered amputating legs

Todd Russell and Brant Webb's lives were saved by a 1m square remnant of safety cage. Picture / Reuters

CANBERRA - A terrifying new picture emerged last night of the 14-day ordeal of Tasmanian miners Todd Russell and Brant Webb, in which they considered cutting each other's legs off with Stanley knives, feared rescuers would kill them, and wrote desperate notes to their families on arms and cigarette packets.

In an exclusive interview on the Nine Network, brokered at a reported price of A$2.6 million ($3.17 million), the two miners also said official reports that their lives had been saved by a massive boulder lodged across the top of the steel cage in which they had been working were wrong.

Instead, their lives had been saved by a 1m square remnant of the cage that held sufficient debris at bay to allow a semi-conscious Mr Webb to dig Mr Russell free from rocks within a four-hour deadline of survival.

Above them was a compacted mass of "millions of little rocks".

And each time they heard the explosives used by rescuers to tunnel toward them, and saw their fragile ceiling send showers of stones down upon them, they shook hands and congratulated each other on their survival.

They used everything they had - jokes, stories, family anecdotes - to keep themselves from breaking in the utter blackness.

"I was just going off my head," Mr Webb said.

"I just thought I was a caged rat."

In the early stages, when rock and debris crushed them in the cage, they were ready for anything.

"We were prepared to take our legs off if we had to, to have ourselves free," Mr Russell said.

Amputation ultimately proved unnecessary, but both men seriously considered the option after their legs were pinned by the Anzac Day cave-in that killed their workmate Larry Knight and trapped them in the steel cage for a fortnight.

Mr Webb added: "We were going to get the material for tourneys [tourniquets] and everything else.

"We had to sort of plan things like that for peace of mind, if you can understand that.

"It's no good something happening and then a frantic, you know, panic.

"We had to control ourselves down there because if one of us lost it, how's the other guy going to survive?

"It was sort of something that we couldn't let happen at the end of the day, wasn't it, mate?"