Indian Rescue Teams Dig By Hand To Reach Men Trapped In Tunnel For 17days

The 41 men who have been stuck in a collapsed road tunnel for more than two weeks are now only five meters away from Indian rescue crews working by hand, officials said on Tuesday, adding that a breakthrough was anticipated “soon.”

Using a method known as “rat-hole” mining, military engineers and experienced miners are laboriously excavating through rock and debris in the direction of the men by hand in order to clear the last stretch of the operation after it has repeatedly failed.

Pushkar Singh Dhami, the chief minister of the state of Uttarakhand, informed reporters on the scene that about five meters of debris remained as rescue attempts entered their seventeenth day.

“Inside the tunnel, the escape route has been prepared up to 52 meters, and the passage will break through at 57 meters,” Dhami stated on Tuesday morning.

He said, “The rescue operation is expected to be completed soon,” without providing an exact timeline, giving rise to optimism that the protracted operation will soon come to an end.

However, falling rubble and frequent drilling machine breakdowns have destroyed earlier chances of reaching the guys. The Himalayan topography, unanticipated emergencies, and technical faults are all potential threats to timetables, as the administration has cautioned on multiple occasions.

Since November 12, the 41 construction workers have been stranded in a tunnel that is being built between the isolated settlements of Silkyara and Dandalgaon in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand.

“The final hope”

Drilling specialist Rajput Rai told the Press Trust of India that groups of three people were working alternately at the rock face within a narrow metal pipe that allowed one person to pass through.

According to PTI’s report on Tuesday, Rai stated that as one worker drills, another one manually gathers the debris and places it on a wheeled cart for removal. To cut through the metal rods that have been impeding progress repeatedly, rescuers have brought in a superheated plasma cutter.

The rescue teams’ advisor and tunnel specialist, Chris Cooper, warned on Monday that they would still need to cut through the heavy-duty girders that were intended to support the collapsing ceiling, saying that their progress will depend on “how the ground behaves.”

A massive earth-boring equipment was snapped last week when engineers attempting to push a metal pipe horizontally through the 57 meters of rock and concrete ran against metal girders and construction vehicles trapped in the debris.

In a different endeavor, a specially built track was used to raise a drilling equipment to the top of a hill covered in trees above the tunnel.

The 89 meters of vertical drilling it will take to reach the stranded guys is now about halfway completed; this is a dangerous route in an area that has before had a collapse. From the far side of the road tunnel, a much longer third route estimated to be around 480 meters, digging, blasting, and drilling have also started.

Observing through the lens of an endoscopic camera sent down a thin conduit that supplies air, food, water, and electricity, the workers were seen alive for the first time on Tuesday.

Musarrat Jahan, a mother of three whose husband Mohd Sabah Ahmad is a migrant worker imprisoned inside, stated, “Our only source of strength is God, as it is the last hope for us.”

She said over the phone to AFP from her house in one of the poorest states in India, Bihar in the east: “We have more faith in God than anything.”

The tunnel is around two kilometers long and 8.5 meters high, so even though the workers are stuck, they have plenty of room.