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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.
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.
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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.
Giving details of the overnight delay, Uttarakhand government secretary Neeraj Khairwal said that the entire drilling machine had to be pulled out and realigned, and the iron girder blocking its path cut by experts.
“To cut the girder, we withdrew the machine and that took more than two hours. Our experts, including those from NDRF, tried to solve the issue by cutting the metal girder with the gas cutter but failed. At around 1.30am, experts from the Trenchless Engineering Services Private Limited were called and they cut the metal girder with the support system of NDRF,” Khariwal said.
Hasnain added that there was no fixed timeline for the rescue operation. But, he said, “If no hindrance comes in the way and the auger machine continues to function at its speed of 4-5 metres per hour, then I can say that maybe tomorrow during the day, you can receive the good news.”
The rescuers, however, have only been able to drill through 1.8 metres in the last 24 hours.
Officials were earlier looking at the possibility of the multi-agency operation ending during the night.
Former advisor at the Prime Minister’s Office Bhaskar Khulbe, who was at the site as special officer of the Uttarakhand government, said early in the morning that it would take 14 to 15 hours of drilling to insert the steel pipes through the debris.
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“The welding (of the pipes) is now underway. We will now fit the 6-metre pipe post 45-metre pipe passage and push the pipe using auger machine,” Khulbe told reporters at around 11am.
Section-by-section a steel pipe is being pushed through the rubble as the auger machine drills. Once the chute emerges from the other end, National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) men will enter it to help bring out the trapped workers one by one. The workers would lie on low-height wheeled stretchers that will be pulled out of the horizontal chute using ropes.
“We have been taking all precautions. An expert team has come to check the vibrations to ensure safety norms at the time,” Khulbe said. The rescuers are in constant communication with trapped workers and they are in “high spirit”, he said.
The mountainous terrain in Uttarakhand has proved a challenge to the drilling machine, which broke down as rescuers attempted to dig horizontally toward the trapped workers. The machine’s high-intensity vibrations also caused more debris to fall.
The trapped workers are being sent food, medicines and other essentials through a new six-inch wide tube, which is also being used for communication.
Union minister of state for road transport and highways VK Singh and NDRF director general Atul Karwal were at Silkyara Thursday to review the rescue effort.
Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami also arrived in Silkyara. “We have come to around 45 metres. We are very close to you now,” Dhami told the trapped workers through the communication system that uses the six-inch wide tube.
International tunnelling expert Arnold Dix said, “It seems we have reached the door and knocking at it. We know people are at the other side of the door.”
An official of the Rail Vikas Nigam Limited (RVNL), speaking on the condition of anonymity said, “Since we have reached over 46 metres, we have put our alternative plans, including vertical drilling and horizontal drilling from the other side, on hold.”
The families of the trapped workers, meanwhile, grew restless.
“They (rescuers) are on the verge of getting through to the other side of the debris, but I don’t know when finally, I will be able to see him (Manjeet),” said Chaudhary Lal, whose son Manjeet Lal is among the trapped workers.
“I just leave the spot outside the tunnel to have my meals, otherwise I keep staring at the mouth of the tunnel. They may come out anytime soon, at least the rescuers have been saying this from yesterday,” Lal, a resident of Kheri in Uttar Pradesh, said.
Jaimal Singh Negi, brother of trapped foreman Gabbar Singh Negi, echoed the sentiment. “How long we should wait … They (rescuers) have been pushing the deadline further with each passing hour,” he said.
The drilling of 800 mm diameter pipes from the Silkyara end was earlier put on hold Friday afternoon when the American-made auger machine encountered a hard obstacle around the 22-metre mark, creating vibrations in the tunnel that caused safety concerns. The drilling resumed around midnight Tuesday and then there was the other, relatively minor, setback the next night.
When the workers come out, they will rushed in ambulances through a “green corridor” under police escort to a 41-bed special ward set up at the community health centre in Chinyalisaur in Uttarkashi district.
If needed, they will then be transferred to other medical facilities.
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