As the clock ticks, authorities initiated preparations on Saturday to drill a vertical hole from the hill’s summit in their effort to reach 41 workers who have been trapped inside a collapsed tunnel for seven days, facing limited food and communication.
As the sun slipped behind the mountains, casting the day into darkness, officials clung to hope. They anticipated that the Border Roads Organisation’s (BRO) efforts to establish an alternative route to the under-construction Silkyara tunnel would be completed by Sunday afternoon. This development raised expectations that the rescue mission, which had been at a standstill since Friday, could finally resume.
“We are trying to make a vertical track from the top of the tunnel. A point at the top of the tunnel has been identified from where drilling will start soon. This track is about 1,000-1,100 metres long. Simultaneously, we are also conducting a survey to know how much time it will take. As per our calculations, the track should be ready by tomorrow afternoon,” BRO’s Major Naman Narula told reporters.
A high performance drilling machine was brought here from Indore on Saturday to pierce through the rubble of the collapsed tunnel on the Char Dham route and was being assembled before it is deployed to resume drilling, officials at the site said.
The Silkyara tunnel, about 30 km from the district headquarters of Uttarkashi and a seven hour drive from the Uttarakhand capital Dehradun, is part of the ambitious Char Dham all-weather road project of the Central Government. It is being constructed under the National Highways & Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited (NHIDCL).
The tunnel collapsed around 5.30 am last Sunday. One week on, the desperation of families waiting outside mounted. That rescue operations had been suspended since Friday afternoon when a US-made auger machine deployed to drill and push in pipes through the rubble to prepare an escape passage for the workers developed a snag exacerbated the anxiety.
By the time the drilling was halted, the auger machine had drilled up to 24 metres through the rubble spread over a 60-metre area inside the tunnel.
While families back home and those gathered at the mouth of the tunnel counted the hours, officials waged their own frantic battle against time as they weighed the various options available to them.
Four machines have been currently put to work right now and four more are arriving, he added.
Other officials and experts gathered at the site too to figure a way out of the crisis and save the 41 men counting the hours inside the dark tunnel.
“We have come here to assess what options are available with us, to explore what possibilities are there that can help rescuers reach the trapped workers as soon as possible. We are discussing all options,” Bhaskar Khulbe, former adviser to the Prime Minister and now OSD in the Uttarakhand Government, told reporters in Silkyara.
He was part of a team, including secretary of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways Mahmood Ahmed, Deputy Secretary, PMO, Mangesh Ghildiyal, geologist Varun Adhikari and engineering expert Armando Capellan.
