Here's a post of the news article. It refers to using Stanley knives to cut themselves free as well as planning a much more drastic measure if necessary...
Miners planned to cut off legs
From: AAP
May 22, 2006
RESCUED miners Brant Webb and Todd Russell made contingency plans to amputate their own legs with Stanley knives while trapped underground in Tasmania's Beaconsfield gold mine.
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 "like rats" in a steel cage for 14 days.
"Brant and I we were prepared to take our leg off if we had to to have ourselves freed," Mr Russell said last night in a Nine Network interview that made both survivors millionaires.
"We had actually discussed that if we had to come to that conclusion, our leg had to come off because it was pinned and it was going to be a risk for us."
Mr Webb added: "We were going to get the material for 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?"
Miner Todd Russell said five years of mine-rescue training made him aware of the immediate danger to his life and that of workmate Brant Webb following the rockfall that trapped them.
The men knew they had just hours to free themselves from rocks which crushed them in the small steel cage in which they were entrapped, or die.
"I was aware that with a crush injury we had to get me leg free within a four-hour period because the toxins in the body could transfer through and kill you," Mr Russell, 34, told the Nine Network in the exclusive interview.
"So with that, Brant and myself, I actually felt up the side of the basket in near darkness and found that the basket had been cut somehow and I pulled the mesh back.
"And because I only had so much movement in one hand I was taking one rock at a time, putting it out of the basket."
Mr Webb, 37, said he knew Mr Russell was in trouble and that he had to remove the rocks which had filled the basket and which were crushing them.
"Todd was in trouble. I knew that. I was buried up to the armpits. So all's I could do was just say 'look buddy, we've got to hold on 'cause I've got to get to help you'," Mr Webb said.
Mr Russell, 34, and Mr Webb, 37, were speaking publicly for the first time since their dramatic rescue on May 9, which sparked elation around Australia.
Mr Russell said the two were initially buried side by side up to their armpits.
His training told him he had four hours to free himself before potentially fatal toxins built up in his leg and spread through his body.
The feat was achieved in four hours and 15 minutes.
Mr Webb managed to claw rocks and rubble away from himself sufficiently to cut his overalls and boots free with his Stanley knife, then helped free Mr Russell.
With Mr Russell disabled, Mr Webb spent three days clawing a five metre tunnel through fallen rock, but got nowhere.
Mr Russell revealed that rescuers first made physical contact with the pair five days after the rockfall.
"I shook hands with a fella, I actually shook hands with a fella," he said.
"I actually touched his hand."
But the two miners asked rescuers not to get them out via that route because of the precarious nature of the cage in which they were trapped.
The men were rescued on May 9 after an April 25 rockfall trapped them almost a kilometre underground of the Beaconsfield Gold Mine in Tasmania
