Rescuers had by Sunday evening cleared 17 metres of the twisted mass of damaged auger, shaft and rotor that got stuck in the channel of drilling and halted the Uttarkashi tunnel rescue effort since Friday, with another 8.1 metres of fragments left to be extracted, officials said.
After clearing all the fragments, the rescuers will start “manual removal” of the remaining 8m barrier of debris behind which 41 workers are trapped in the under-construction Silkyara Bend-Barkot mountain tunnel since November 12, chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said.
The manual drilling will be done by the army’s engineering regiment with the help of workers from a Mumbai-based company involved in cleaning sewers.
“Jawans of the 201 Engineering Regiment and workers of the Mumbai-based company have reached Silkyara and will start their work manually soon,” Colonel Deepak Patil, who is in charge of rescue operations by the National Highway and Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited, said.
“We have also sent inside the tunnel a nano-excavator for certain operations, because it doesn’t vibrate,” he added.
The auger drill, which has so far cut through 49 metres of the 57-metre-thick barrier of debris from the Silkyara side, produced enough vibrations to create cracks in the tunnel.
Dhami said that vertical drilling had begun as an alternative option but was being done very carefully to prevent any further damage to the tunnel.
He said horizontal drilling from the Barkot side too had begun because “the experts believe they should initiate all alternative measures instead of sticking to one”.
“The DRDO, Hyderabad, sent the plasma cutter from Chandigarh and a laser cutter from Hyderabad. We are using a combination of plasma, laser and gas cutters to remove the stuck parts of the damaged auger machine,” said Neeraj Khairwal, an Uttarakhand government secretary and the nodal officer coordinating between the agencies involved in the rescue operation.
Families restless
With the crisis into its 15th day, restlessness has been growing among the family members of the trapped labourers who have arrived in Uttarkashi from states such as Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, Bengal, Assam and Himachal Pradesh.
“I have been hearing for the past week that the rescue would be completed soon,” Sunita Devi, sister-in-law of labourer Vikram Kisku who has arrived from Jharkhand, said.
“I spoke to Vikram through the audio system set up by the National Disaster Response Force and found him uncertain of survival. He was asking me whether he would really be saved.”
She said: “Every day the government makes some or other excuse. We don’t want to mount pressure on the rescuers but it’s clear that the government still has no plan.”
Indrajeet Kumar, brother of trapped labourer Vishwajeet Kumar from Jharkhand, said: “Every morning we wake up with hope and go to bed despondent in the night.”
Dhami on Sunday visited the home of trapped labourer Pushkar Singh Airi in Tanakpur, Champawat district, and assured his parents that the labourers would be saved.
Airi’s mother Ganda Devi said: “The chief minister has given me the guarantee that he would return all the 41 labourers safe to their families. But the question haunting us is, when will it happen?”
Government sources said the trapped labourers had demanded mobile phones – to be sent through the pipes via which food, water, oxygen, clothes and medicines are being supplied to them -- so they could talk to their families directly.
“We have provided a few smartphones but there’s no network inside the tunnel. We have asked the BSNL to try to provide network there in two or three days,” an official of the state disaster management authority said, unwittingly letting on that the rescue is not expected anytime soon.
