Rescuers Break Through to 41 Trapped Workers in Indian Tunnel After 17 Days
New Delhi - After 17 days of tireless efforts, a team of "rat miners" successfully reached 41 construction workers who were trapped in a highway tunnel in the Himalayas on Tuesday. The breakthrough came after a series of failed attempts and the use of heavy machinery, ultimately resorting to the traditional method of rat-hole mining. The workers had been stranded since November 12, when a partial collapse occurred in the under-construction tunnel in the Silkyara district of Uttarakhand state.
Rat-hole mining, a primitive and officially banned technique of manual coal extraction, involves digging narrow, vertical shafts into the ground for miners to descend and extract coal. This method, known for its lack of safety measures and damaging environmental impact, is still prevalent in parts of India. The team of 24 rat miners was called in on Monday as previous efforts to reach the trapped workers using heavy machinery had failed.
Under the guidance of Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, the rat-hole miners began manually drilling through the debris pile on Monday. Their goal was to create a narrow passageway to free the trapped men. Dhami expressed gratitude for the tireless work of all the rescue teams involved in the operation, stating on social media that the work of laying pipes in the tunnel for the workers' extraction had been completed and that the workers would soon be rescued.
Ambulances and a medical team were stationed outside the tunnel entrance on Tuesday afternoon, prepared to provide immediate medical checks and assistance to the workers upon their exit. The workers had been receiving a sufficient supply of oxygen, food, and medicine through a small pipe drilled into the tunnel since the first day of the collapse. Last week, a slightly wider pipe was forced through the rubble, providing the trapped men with hot meals and enabling the use of a medical endoscopic camera to assess their condition.
The rescue efforts faced various challenges, including the unstable hillside and technical difficulties encountered with drilling machinery. Previous attempts to insert a wide pipe horizontally through the debris pile failed when the drilling machine broke. Since then, rescuers have been trying different strategies, both horizontally and vertically, to access the section of the tunnel where the workers were trapped.
The new rescue plan involves drilling vertically into the tunnel from the top of the hill, which would require drilling over 280 feet straight down. Additionally, the rat-hole mining technique will be utilized to manually remove the remaining rock and soil from the two-and-a-half-foot pipe already inserted into the debris pile. This approach, though challenging, was seen as the best option to finally reach and rescue the trapped workers.
The families of the trapped men, who had been waiting anxiously at the collapse site for over two weeks, have been hoping for a successful outcome. The rescue operation has been closely monitored by officials from the National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation. In the wake of the Uttarakhand tunnel collapse, the federal government ordered a safety audit of more than two dozen tunnels being constructed by the country's highway authority.
As the rescuers continue their efforts to safely extract the workers, the nation remains hopeful for a successful conclusion to this arduous rescue operation.
