Rescuers in India reach 41 men trapped underground for weeks
Rescuers on Tuesday evening finally reached the workers trapped under the mountain for 17 days after pushing a 31-inch diameter pipe through the caved-in debris, in one of India’s most-watched rescue efforts in years. The workers were slowly extracted one by one, with all of them rescued by late evening.
“There were some mistakes made by the people who were working on the tunnel project. It should not have collapsed like this,” Harpal Singh, one of the rescuers, said on the phone ahead of the final stretch. “But nobody is talking about it right now as our aim is to get the men out first.”
The tunnel project is part of a major infrastructure development near the country’s contentious and disputed border with China in part to strengthen claims over this wild terrain that holds some of the world’s highest peaks. It is also part of a new network of roads, bridges and tunnels connecting Hindu religious sites in northern India, undertaken with a keen eye on boosting votes ahead of next year’s election.
When a committee flagged environmental concerns about the project to the Supreme Court in 2021, the government cited its importance to swiftly move crucial weapons to the border, in case conflict were to erupt.
But now, the collapsed tunnel in Silkyara, Uttarakhand is seen as another case of infrastructure pitfalls that could have been avoided in the course of the country’s touted development boom.
To cut through almost 200 feet of rock to reach the trapped workers, the rescue teams faced an array of obstacles. An American-made auger drilling machine cutting through the soft Himalayan rock provided a spark of hope, but ultimately failed.
At 72 feet in, the machines started to make the mountain shake and vibrate. “It could have led to the collapse of the tunnel entirely,” said Singh, the head of an ongoing tunnel project in Kashmir who was pulled from his vacation to help with the mission.
“But now things are moving as per plan again,” Singh, who has been camping outside the collapsed tunnel with other experts, said on Tuesday. “All of us are waiting for the last man to come out safely. Until then, there is no stopping for both men and machines.”
Arnold Dix, president of the Geneva-based International Tunneling and Space Association who was brought in to consult, told the BBC this was the toughest job he’d ever faced.
Narrow pipes of four and six inches were used to send food, medicines, oxygen and even a video camera to make visual communication with the workers, who were trapped after a landslide tumbled onto the ongoing construction project on Nov. 12.
The tunnel is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious Char Dham Highway project connecting four Hindu holy sites in the mountainous state with bridges and flyovers. Two years after Modi came to power in 2014, he announced the $1.6 billion mega project to widen strategic, all-weather roads spanning 553 miles in the middle Himalayas region.
However, environmentalists have warned that the hasty and invasive work in the fragile ecosystem is ripe for disaster, given the reoccurring landslides that plague the area.
Ravi Chopra, an environmentalist who chaired a Supreme Court-appointed committee set up in 2019 to assess road development in the region, said his team had warned project agencies during field visits to the tunnel construction site.
On a visit in late 2019 when the drilling for the project began, Chopra pointed out that “muck coming out of the tunnel was dumped on the slopes outside the tunnel.”
“This is not how big projects are done,” Chopra said, presenting a long list of ways in which environmental concerns were ignored at the construction site.
In one case, his committee noted an oak and rhododendron jungle on the slope where the construction was occurring, indicating the presence of water, which meant the limestone rock was riddled with cavities that would leave the area around the tunnel weak, he said.
The government neglected the warnings, telling the Supreme Court that the widened road was crucial to the nation’s defense.
But the geological investigation was “inadequate” and the project was “hurried and rushed,” insisted Chopra. “Interestingly and most importantly, this project managed to avoid an environmental impact assessment. From the events of last week, it is clear that there was no disaster management plan.”
When he realized that the committee was toothless, Chopra resigned.
Ram Prasad Narzary, 45, is one of the workers trapped in the mountain and on Sunday, for the first time, he spoke to his family on a landline phone that was threaded into the cave.
Twice a day his wife has visited the temple back in their northeastern state of Assam praying for his safe return.
“I know my father is working in such difficult conditions so that I can get a better education and a secure future,” Bidang Narzary, his daughter, told The Washington Post. “It pains me a lot to see him suffer now.”
“I miss my father badly,” she said. “I want him to be home soon.”
Irfan reported from Srinagar, India.
