First-hand experiences of 2010

Three events that signified a year of drama, tragedy and hope.

January 12: Haiti's capital is devastated by an earthquake. Shahesta Shaitly interviews rescue worker Simon Cording.

Day to day I'm a fireman but I'm also part of the International Search and Rescue Team.

We are deployed whenever disasters take place around the world. I was at work in Manchester when I got a text message telling me to get myself ready because we were going to Haiti later that day. We always have our bags ready, so it was just a matter of grabbing my passport.

It was snowing in the UK and London Heathrow was closed, but we got special dispensation to fly out around midnight and the airport was opened just for us.

We were met by scenes of mass devastation at Port au Prince airport. As we walked out, there were bodies strewn all over the streets. Literally piles of bodies - you couldn't look anywhere without seeing something you didn't want to see. People were sleeping on pavements, in the street and in parks - anywhere where they weren't too close to a wall, for fear of aftershocks.

We were given the task of searching a church that was in mid-service when the earthquake happened.

We found Mia on the first day. A civilian approached someone in my team and said that her family was trapped and asked us to go and help. It was a snap judgment: we stopped what we were doing and headed over to the three-storey nursery about 2km away.

The whole building had collapsed and 2-year-old Mia had been in the basement. We spent four or five hours tunnelling; we couldn't quite get to her, but we could hear her and we were able to pass fluids to her to start the rehydration process. Eventually we crawled into the hole one after another and handed her down the line until eventually we were able to put her in her mother's arms.

The loss of life doesn't shock me any more - it's something that we're prepared for in this line of work. But I became aware of how cheap life seemed in Haiti. In Britain, we have the luxury of grief - of funerals and burials. The memory that will never leave me is the image of a vehicle picking up bodies to be dumped in mass graves. Thousands and thousands of bodies, just like that. It's something you can't comprehend.

April 20: A BP rig explodes, causing a huge oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Shahesta Shaitly interviews oceanographer Sylvia Earle.When the explosion on BP's Deepwater Horizon rig occurred, I heard straightaway - it was on the news, the web, all over the place. My first reaction was absolute dismay.

The loss of lives was immediately apparent and as the tragedy unfolded - the collapse of the rig and then the appearance of huge amounts of oil - there was widespread concern, and fear, that the amount of oil that was actually coming out did not match with the official announcements that BP was releasing. The disparity was clear within the first few days.

As a child, I'd spent many hours on the Gulf of Mexico and along the Florida west coast. My doctoral dissertation - a 10-year study - was on the Gulf. I've spent hundreds of hours diving along the coast, in the area affected by this incident. I know some of the fish personally.

I've seen the place change over the years before the oil spill through natural disasters such as hurricanes, and through the impact of commercial fishing, oil and gas development since the 1950s, with literally thousands of miles of pipelines established on the sea floor and rigs drilling away in that area. It was already bad news, although there were parts that were in great shape, too: the sperm-whale population was expanding and I have personally witnessed areas of coral reef, deep beyond the sunlit areas, that were healthy and prospering.

I went out diving in mid-June, right in the middle of the crisis - initially a little west of where the well head was still spewing out oil at a fast pace. It was heartbreaking. What was happening was clearly not intentional, but it does reflect carelessness and a lack of attention to things we really should make a requirement: you should know how to deal with a problem in 5000ft of water before you allow such operations to proceed.

We were seeking to locate a population of whale sharks. The biggest fish in the sea, they feed in an area where small tunas spawn and we were fortunate to be there at exactly the moment the fish were spawning - more than 100 whale sharks gathered. For the next 11 hours, from sun-up until dark, we were in the water with these animals, watching them feed, tagging some with satellite tags, photographing as many as we could, so that we could understand their movements. We were concerned they'd be doomed if they went a little bit east of where we were, right into the heart of the oil spill.

Months later, the reality is that the ecosystem has been altered through at least 5 million barrels of oil and 2 million gallons of dispersant being spilled into the Gulf. How that will alter the natural ecology of the Gulf long term, we're still unsure. It has changed and will never go back to what it was. We haven't, until now, been forced to consider the real cost of cheap energy. The biggest tragedy of all would be if we fail to learn from the experience.

October 13: After 69 days, 33 miners are rescued from a Chilean mine. Alice Fisher interviews drill operator Jeff Hart.

I was working in Afghanistan, drilling water wells for the US Army when the San Jose mine collapsed. When management first rang me and said I had the most experience with this type of hammer and hole span, I thought they were joking around. But [fellow drill operator] Matt Staffel and I managed to put a crew together and flew out to Chile.

To begin with, we approached it like any other job, but once we got there the thought of those 33 people beneath our feet changed everything. I had this overwhelming stress, imagining if it was me down there, how I'd get through the day.

There were three drilling operations going on to reach them - we were Plan B, and we didn't even know how Plan A and C were doing because it wasn't a competition. We were kept away from the media, too, so we had no idea how much international attention there was.

On day 33 of drilling, we broke through: that moment was crazy. Matt and I hadn't slept for 48 hours because the drill pipe was so deep that it would have cost us a full day to take it out and change it. So we were tired, but excited, too. We just thought: "Let's get those guys out."

But our crew didn't stay to see the miners come to the surface. We decided this was a story about the miners and their families. I could watch it on television just like millions of people around the world did. So as soon as we got the rig down, we moved to a hotel in Santiago.

We thought we'd celebrate and have a drink, but when the rescue capsule came out for the first time, it was sobering. We just looked at each other; we couldn't believe what we'd done.

- OBSERVER