Last Tuesday, rescue teams removed the first of 41 workers previously trapped for 17 days in a tunnel under construction in northern India. Authorities expect all workers to be gone within about three hours.
“The first one is out,” Chandran, an engineer from the rescue team, told media at the tunnel exit in the town of Silkyara in the northern state of Uttarakhand.
A spokesperson for the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Lieutenant General Syed Ata Hasnain, told a press conference this afternoon that it will take each worker between three and five minutes to leave.
“A total of three to four hours,” Hasnain said, until all the workers emerged from the rubble.
Workers were stranded in the early hours of November 12 when part of a tunnel under construction collapsed, separating them from the entrance by a layer of rubble. 60 meters thick.
Since then, and after more than two weeks of drilling, mainly carried out by a tunnel boring machine that broke down last Friday, the final stage of excavation work to save it was carried out by three teams of prospectors specialized in tunnels. Tight, despite the risk.
Ultimately, rescue teams managed to complete the installation of a gas pipeline with a diameter of about one meter and a length of about sixty meters, said the head of the government of the state of Uttarakhand, in the north of the country, Pushkar Singh Dhami. , on social media. X.
Up to 41 ambulances are now waiting outside the tunnel, first transporting people to a makeshift hospital at the crash site before taking them to the district hospital using military helicopters.
The workers are predictably very weakened, although since the day of the collapse they have been given food, water, medicine and oxygen thanks to a narrow tube that connected their cavity to the entrance and survived the collapse.
The rescue of the workers, which has been going on for more than 400 hours (almost 17 days), has suffered numerous setbacks since its inception, significantly delaying the deadline expected by authorities for live liberation after minor landslides, metal obstacles that made drilling impossible or malfunctions in tunnel boring machines.
Source: La Neta Neta
Karen Clayton is a seasoned journalist and author at The Nation Update, with a focus on world news and current events. She has a background in international relations, which gives her a deep understanding of the political, economic and social factors that shape the global landscape. She writes about a wide range of topics, including conflicts, political upheavals, and economic trends, as well as humanitarian crisis and human rights issues.
