After days of being stuck in a tunnel, workers wait for a rescue plan B
Four days after 40 workers were trapped in a Himalayan road tunnel, Indian authorities were still trying to find a way through the rubble and rescue them on Thursday, while anguished relatives and colleagues protested outside to demand faster action.
The workers were stranded about 150 meters from the tunnel’s entrance on Sunday after landslides in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand caused a partial collapse. Communications were lost, leaving the men to wait inside, unsure of what would happen.
Over the next few hours, officials made contact with workers by sending radios through an undamaged pipe into the tunnel. Later, a larger pipe, 35 inches in diameter, was inserted through the rubble to send in food, water and oxygen using compressors. Authorities have said the men are safe in the tunnel.
Officials put dozens of rescue workers to work around the clock to remove debris using drilling equipment and excavators. But they abandoned those efforts after a heavy drill failed to create an escape passage, with the drill causing more debris to fall into the tunnel, said Arpan Yaduvanshi, a police official in Uttarkashi district, the site of the rescue operations.
Indian officials said Thursday they were trying a different approach and were working on deploying an advanced machine that could cut through the rubble. “We are inserting steel pipes into the rubble to create a passage for the workers to come out,” said Ranjit Sinha, a top disaster management official in Uttarkashi. The plan was for the men to crawl through the pipe to avoid the problem of falling debris.
The powerful drill was assembled after being flown from New Delhi by an Indian Air Force aircraft. The machine will cut through the rubble at more than double the speed of the previous drill, officials said, adding that they hoped to reach workers by Friday.
India sought advice on the operation from a company from Thailand, which helped rescue children from a flooded cave there in 2018. Officials said they were also in contact with technical experts from the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute.
Uttarakhand attracts hundreds of thousands of Hindu pilgrims every year and has also become a major tourist attraction. In recent years, the mountainous state has experienced tremendous growth in the construction of buildings and roads.
The trapped workers were part of the construction of an all-weather road intended to provide faster access to four Hindu shrines. Construction took place in a landscape that has become increasingly vulnerable to major development projects as glaciers are melting rapidly.
Environmentalists and experts appointed by the Indian Supreme Court have done just that criticism of the federal government for going ahead with the project despite their environmental concerns. Throughout the year, landslides and floods caused by heavy rainfall have caused widespread damage to infrastructure, killed dozens and washed away entire villages.
In January, authorities displaced hundreds of people after a temple collapsed and cracks appeared in large numbers of houses due to sinking ground in and around the town of Joshimath in Uttarakhand.
A majority of the workers trapped in the tunnel are migrant workers from states hundreds of miles away. Those whose relatives live nearby have camped at the site and spoken to their relatives via portable radios. State government officials said they were in contact with other families.
Colleagues of the trapped workers protesting outside the tunnel said they feared for their well-being after five days of confinement.
“We want them gone as soon as possible,” said Lokesh Rathori, a construction worker. “They’ll die there soon.”