Indian rescuers are once again at an impasse. With just nine meters left to drill through the rubble to reach the 41 workers trapped in the collapsing Silkyara tunnel under construction, the machine ran into a tangle of metal rods and construction vehicles making dam. “Work is underway to cut and clear the blockage,” Abhishek Ruhela, a senior local official, said on Saturday.
Since the collapse, rescue efforts have been complicated and slowed by falling debris and successive failures of drills crucial to rescuing workers. “The work to reach the workers trapped inside is in the final stages,” continued Abhishek Ruhela, “all possible options to reach them are being considered.”
Three avenues explored
Arnold Dix, president of the International Association of Tunnels and Underground Spaces, which is helping with the rescue operations, explained that the machine used so far had broken in the face of the latest obstacles encountered and that it was in the process of being repaired. ‘to remove. “The machine is broken and beyond repair,” he told reporters on site. But there are still “several ways” to reach the trapped men. “I am confident, these 41 men will return home,” he concluded.
Rescuers are still trying to reach the men through the main entrance, now working to clear the way without a drill, rescue officials said. At the same time, according to AFP journalists present on the site, a heavy excavator went up a specially constructed track to the top of the wooded hill overlooking the tunnel, in order to begin vertical drilling of a well in the tunnel. Officials estimate the proposed shaft would be 89 meters deep, a complex excavation operation above the stranded men, in an area that has already suffered a collapse. Work has already begun to dig a third but much longer lane at the other end of the road tunnel, estimated at around 480 meters.
The Himalayas, “difficult terrain”
The trapped workers have been surviving for two weeks on air, food, water and electricity delivered through a conduit through which an endoscopic camera was inserted, allowing their families to see them for the first time on Tuesday since the tunnel collapsed. Stretchers on wheels were provided to evacuate exhausted men when they could be reached.
Since Wednesday, the authorities have said several times that they expect a happy outcome in the coming hours. But the government warned that the situation was “likely to evolve due to technical problems, the difficult terrain (that constitutes) the Himalayas, and unforeseen events”. The Silkyara tunnel, located in the state of Uttarakhand, in northern India, is part of the Char Dham highway project, dear to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, designed to improve connections with four sites Hindus among the most important in the country and also with the border regions of China.