Tunnel rescuers hope to get 41 trapped men out today

There was hope of an immediate breakthrough at the site of a tunnel collapse in Silkyara as the drilling to reach the trapped workers resumed around 10am on Thursday morning, after a 14-hour-long halt due to a metal object in the debris damaging the blades of the drilling machine.

- Amit Bathla

The drilling was put on hold around 1pm after the platform on which the equipment was mounted was destablised. The rescue workers will stabilise the platform on which the 25-tonne auger machine is mounted before drilling is resumed, likely early on Friday.

This means it is possible that the rescued workers may finally walk out of the tunnel the same day, officials at the site said.

“The platform of the drilling machine got destabilised while piercing through rock debris, and technicians need to fix it before the rescue operation can resume,” Kirti Panwar, a spokesperson for the Uttarakhand government, was quoted as saying by AP.

The 41 men have been stranded inside a 2km stretch of the 4.5km Silkyara-Barkot tunnel on the National Highway in Uttarkashi district since November 12, when a portion of the under-construction tunnel collapsed. In the 12 days since, there have been multiple attempts to engineer methods to evacuate the workers, including the use of an American auger machine to drill through close to 60 metres of debris from the Silkyara end.

Till 7.30pm on Wednesday, the rescuers had only 18 metres of the debris left to drill through, when the augur machine hit an iron girder. While the obstacle was addressed overnight, and drilling restarted at 10am on Thursday, another obstacle blocked the progress at around 1pm.

“We need a lot of time in these things and such was the case last night that the drilling machine identified a girder and then resources were used to bring the auger out and bring in oxyacetylene torches to cut the girder and these are time-consuming things and cannot happen within a given time frame. This is an arduous task,” said National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) member Lt General Syed Ata Hasnain told reporters in Delhi.