Rescue success: All workers safely removed from tunnel in India

Indian rescuers on Tuesday pulled out all 41 construction workers trapped inside a collapsed tunnel in the Himalayas for 17 days, hours after drilling through the debris of rock, concrete, and earth to reach them, officials said.

The evacuation of the men – low-wage workers from some of India’s poorest states – began more than six hours after rescuers broke through the debris in the tunnel in Uttarakhand state, which caved in on Nov. 12.

They were pulled out on wheeled stretchers, with the entire process being completed in about an hour.

Three teams, each of four rescuers, entered the area where the men were trapped to prepare them to be pulled, said Syed Ata Hasnain, a member of the National Disaster Management Authority that is overseeing rescue efforts.

“We have been involved in this for more than 400 hours and are taking all safety precautions until the end,” he told reporters in New Delhi.

The first to be evacuated, a short man wearing a dark grey winter jacket and a yellow hard-hat, was garlanded with marigold flowers and welcomed in traditional Indian style inside the tunnel by state chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami and federal deputy highways minister V.K. Singh.

The men received food, water, light, oxygen, and medicines through a pipe but efforts to dig a tunnel to rescue them with high-powered drilling machines were frustrated by a series of snags.

More than a dozen doctors, including psychiatrists, have been at the site, talking to the men through the pipe and monitoring their health. They were advised to do light yoga exercises, walk around in the space they had been confined to, and keep speaking to each other.

The tunnel is part of the $1.5 billion Char Dham highway, one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s most ambitious projects, aimed at connecting four Hindu pilgrimage sites through an 890 km (about 550 miles) network of roads.

The tunnel did not have an emergency exit and was built through a geological fault, a member of a panel of experts investigating the disaster has told Reuters.

The Char Dham project has faced criticism from environmental experts and some work was halted after hundreds of houses were damaged by subsidence along the route.

Authorities have not said what caused the cave-in but the region is prone to landslides, earthquakes, and floods.

Government agencies managing the unprecedented crisis turned on Nov. 27 to “rat miners” to drill through the rocks and gravel by hand from inside a 3-foot wide evacuation pipe pushed through the debris after machinery failed.

The miners are experts at a primitive, hazardous, and controversial method used mostly to get at coal deposits through narrow passages, and get their name because they resemble burrowing rats.

The miners, brought from central India, worked through the night of Nov. 27 and finally broke through the estimated 60 meters (about 200 feet) of rocks, earth, and metal on the afternoon of Nov. 28.

“Work of laying pipes in the tunnel to take out workers has been completed,” Uttarakhand state chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said on the X social media platform, thanking the Hindu deity, Baba Baukh Nag Ji, as well as the millions of Indian who prayed for the men and the tireless rescuers.

“It was a difficult task, but for us nothing is difficult,” said a beaming Firoz Qureshi, one of the miners, standing with his fellow workers outside the tunnel, their faces patched with white dust after overnight drilling.

The “rat miners” started working late on Monday after a second drilling machine also broke down with 15 meters (50 feet) still left to reach the trapped men.

They worked in two teams of three each, with one person drilling, the second collecting the debris and the third pushing it out of the pipe.

They said they had worked for more than 24 hours.

“When we saw them inside the tunnel after the breakthrough, we hugged them like they were family,” said Nasir Hussain, one of the six miners.

Dozens of rescue workers with ropes, ladders, and stretchers entered the tunnel and 41 ambulances lined up outside to take the 41 men to a hospital about 18 miles away.

Helicopters were on standby there to fly workers to a larger hospital in the city of Rishikesh in case any of them needed specialist attention.

A makeshift medical facility with 10 beds and oxygen cylinders was also set up inside the tunnel for those who might need emergency care on site, officials said.

Some rescue workers in hard hats made victory signs and posed for pictures. Others carried marigold garlands to welcome the workers out in traditional Indian style.

Relatives of the trapped men, who had been camping near the site, were taken inside the tunnel with luggage, ready to accompany the men to the hospital.

“As he comes out, my heart will revive again,” the father of a trapped worker, who gave his name as Chaudhary, said of his son, Manjeet Chaudhary.

Villagers also gathered outside the tunnel, some singing Hindu devotional songs and raising slogans in praise of the Hindu god Lord Ram on hearing news of the breakthrough.

Others gathered on nearby slopes hoping to catch a glimpse of the men as they were brought out.

The government has said it employed environmentally sound techniques to make geologically unstable stretches in tunnels safer.

It also ordered the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) to audit 29 tunnels being built across India.

This story was reported by Reuters.