Knowing Your Audience Paper and Communication Release
03/19/2014
Danielle McGee
BCOM/275

Introduction

San Jose mine is a small copper operation owned by Minera San Esteban Primera located in northern Chile. In the past, Minera has been questioned by local organizations about safety records regarding fatal accidents and after a fatal accident in 2007 the mine was closed, but reopened a year later in 2008 for unknown reasons. On August 5th 2010, a mine structure collapse incident occurred at San Jose mine; the incident left 33 workers trapped underground at a depth of approximately 300 meters. Rescuers appeared at the site to drill holes in attempt to locate the trapped workers; with limited water, food, and oxygen it was not certain the trapped workers would survive underground for more than 4 days. During the rescuers attempt to locate the workers a second cave-in forced the rescuers to delay drilling for several hours, increasing the chances of death amongst the trapped workers. Chile’s president Sebastian Pinera promised a thorough investigation into the incident. This paper will focus on how the mining company can communicate the incident to company employees and family/friends of the 33 trapped workers.

Nonverbal Communication

Nonverbal communication is all types of communications that do not involve the exchange of words (Cheesebro, O’Connor, & Rios, Chapter 4, 2010). Some components of nonverbal demonstrative communication include space, posture, facial expressions, emotion, tone of voice, personal style, and touch. All of these components can be implied as positive and negative causing effective or ineffective communication between the sender and receiver; therefore it is important to pay close attention to the signals, of nonverbal communication components, being sent.
Types of Nonverbal Communications

The component space refers to the