SYDNEY, Australia — Glenn Burns peered through the narrow opening he had chiseled through the rock. Staring back were Todd Russell and Brant Webb, their dirt-caked, bearded faces illuminated by the beam of his miner's lamp.

The two-week Herculean effort to rescue the two miners was drawing to a close.

"We just made eye contact, that was first," said Burns, 47, a wiry hard rock miner known to his friends as "The Fox." He quickly pushed through his calloused fist and shook the men by the hand.

While Webb and Russell reunited with their families after 14 days entombed underground, the men who rescued them recounted details of an ordeal that riveted Australia.

"They had no room to move. They couldn't even lay their legs out straight," said Burns, one of several miners whose accounts were published today in Australian newspapers, as he described the cramped conditions endured by the pair.

Among those who joined the rescue effort was David Johnson, one of 17 miners working the night shift in the belly of the century-old Beaconsfield Gold Mine in Tasmania when a 2.1-magnitude earthquake struck April 25. Johnson fled to a reinforced safety chamber, complete with its own oxygen supply, food and first aid equipment.

"It was like a nuclear bomb had gone off," the miner said. "We ran for our lives."

A head count was conducted and three men were missing — Webb, 37, Russell, 34 and Larry Knight, 44. The three had been shoring up a tunnel more than a half mile below the surface. As Knight operated the controls, Webb and Russell stood in a steel basket attached to a hydraulic arm, fixing mesh to the walls and roof of the tunnel.

Knight was crushed under tons of rock as the roof crumpled, but miraculously Webb and Russell survived. A huge slab of rock had fallen on the roof of their safety cage, protecting them from the falling debris, but sealing them inside.

Knight's body was discovered two days later at the end of the tunnel. Webb and Russell were missing, feared dead under tons of rubble and rock.

"To be truthful, it looked like an absolute disaster. Like a war zone," Johnson, 32, told The Sydney Morning Herald. "You look up and there's things bigger than houses hanging off the walls held in by a bit of ground support which can give way at any time."