Updated 15.12 | Published 15.02
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Indian rescue workers are now to begin digging by hand to approach the 41 tunnel workers who have been trapped in a collapsed tunnel for over two weeks.
The rescue work has faced several setbacks during the operation. Attempts to drill horizontally from the mouth of the tunnel ended after 57 meters with a destroyed drill. When you now try to get in vertically, from the roof of the tunnel, you have to get over a hundred meters down.
After almost 100 meters of machine drilling, you now have to start digging by hand, in a hole where one person can barely fit. Nine meters remain to reach the trapped people.
One of the difficulties will be getting through the strong beams that were put up in the tunnel roof during construction.
The space where the men are trapped is about 200 meters from the tunnel’s opening, and the effort is made even more difficult by the fact that it is down to minus 20 degrees in the area.
The trapped workers initially survived on dry food sent through a narrow pipe. Now they have been able to get hot food through a pipe of around 15 centimeters. The authorities have also supplied oxygen through another pipe.
Uttarakhand state leader Pushkar Singh Dhami promises that everyone will come out clean.
“Do not worry. All workers will be taken out safely,” he writes on X.
The roughly four kilometer long tunnel is being built in the mountainous state of Uttarakhand in northern India, near the Himalayan massif. Most of the trapped workers are migrant workers from the rest of India.