Stranded for five days now, workers in a collapsed tunnel in northern India may be seeing the light this Thursday, November 16. The drilling to allow them to extract themselves from the tunnel has just begun.
Will the 41 workers stuck in a collapsed tunnel in India since Sunday November 12, 2023 soon be able to get out? In any case, this is the objective of the drilling operations which began this Thursday on this site in the state of Uttarakhand.
As AFP explains, this operation involves the introduction of a steel pipe of approximately 90 centimeters in diameter into the tunnel. It is by passing through this pipe that the workers can be evacuated.
Excavators began trying to create an evacuation tunnel on Sunday, but new landslides from the roof of the tunnel injured two workers overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday.
“The evacuation of trapped personnel is the absolute priority”Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said in a statement posted on social media. “We are trying to safely extract the workers as soon as possible”.
To carry out these operations, Indian authorities sought advice from a Thai company which had rescued children stranded in a flooded cave in 2018. Experts in soil mechanics and geologists from a Norwegian institute were also contacted.
The workers were seen alive on camera for the first time since Sunday, November 12, as rescue teams attempted to create new passages to free them.
Looking exhausted and anxious, with thick beards, the men peered into the endoscopic camera sent by rescuers into the thin pipe through which air, food and water are delivered. Before the camera was introduced, rescuers communicated with workers using radios.