Talking about the challenges, he mentioned that a minor earthquake on November 16 caused the debris to shift 3 inches inside the tunnel.Furthermore, “a loud cracking sound the following day panicked the workers, leading us to halt the work for three days”.
Jain told TOI that experts believed “there was a possibility of the tunnel face collapsing, which could pose a significant setback to the entire operation. Consequently, we opted to formulate multiple strategies (five-pronged, as reported by this newspaper earlier) in case such an eventuality occurred”.
Later, the Uttarakhand chief minister announced financial assistance of Rs 1 lakh to each of the workers. He added that the state government would bear all the expenses of their treatment and that he would request authorities of NHIDCL, the executing agency of the tunnel project, to provide 15 to 20 days leave to help them go back to their respective states.
The penultimate part of the rescue, which lasted over 40 hours, had turned out to be a test of determination and endurance for individuals on both ends of the 57 meters of rubble (behind which the workers were stuck).
The biggest setback was the breakdown of the auger machine used in drilling an escape passage through the debris. The machine’s blades had on Friday got lodged in the passage, leading to rescue efforts through the main tunnel route coming to a grinding halt for over 60 hours. Expressing the despair that the situation had created all around, Haridwar Sharma, whose brother Sushil Sharma was among those trap-ped inside, had said, “We are sensing that it is our misfortune, and now only a mir-acle from God can bring about a change.”
The “miracle” that everyone was hoping for was brought to fruition by a group of diminutive workers referred to as ‘rat-hole’ miners. They were brought in to manually dig through the last stretch of debris – around 12 meters – after the auger machine parts were cleared from the escape passage.
Getting down to work on Monday evening, the ‘rat-hole’ miners, armed with shovels and spades, had dug through the final stretch of debris by Tuesday morning, achieving in less than 24 hours what drilling machines deployed for the past several days could not.
Once that was done, rescue personnel were able to push inside 800mm pipes, welded together, which served as an escape tunnel through which the stranded workers eventually came out.
(With inputs by Shivani Azad & Kautilya Singh)