India’s hand-digging rescuers liberate 41 imprisoned tunnel workers after weeks of captivity.

After many failures, rescuers in India are getting ready to excavate by hand in order to reach the 41 workers who have been stuck in a collapsed road tunnel for 16 days.

In order to remove the boulders and debris covering the final 9 meters (29 feet), military engineers intend to employ a method known as “rat-hole mining,” which involves hand excavation in the remote Himalayan state of Uttarakhand.

The 4.5 km (3 miles) tunnel in Uttarakhand state has trapped the men, low-wage laborers from India’s poorest states, since it collapsed on November 12.

Food, water, light, oxygen, and medications have been sent to the men via a conduit, but attempts to construct a tunnel have encountered several mechanical difficulties.

Rescuers have had difficulty drilling a horizontal tunnel through the rubble ensnaring the guys due to damage to their apparatus. Therefore, they will have to dig by hand after removing the damaged equipment from the small evacuation pipe.

Six “rat miners” from central India, who authorities referred to as “skilled workers,” would drill from inside the 900mm (3 feet) broad pipe.

In India, rat mining is a traditional, dangerous, and contentious technique mostly utilized to extract coal resources from small openings. Its likeness to rats crawling through little holes is where the term originates.

One of the miners, Rakesh Rajput, told the Reuters news agency, “Three of us will go inside the tunnel; one will do the drilling, the other will collect muck, and the third one will push the muck through the trolley.”

“There is ample room for us, and we have been doing this for more than ten years. We all want to bring the 41 men out because they are laborers as well,” he remarked.

The agencies participating in the rescue, both public and private, have been looking for other solutions. With the intention of drilling a shaft straight down from the summit of the mountain above, they revealed a second path to the men on Sunday.

According to authorities, by Monday afternoon, they had dug 31 meters (102 feet) out of the 86 meters (282 feet). They also stated that the horizontal path is still the major priority.

“Manual drilling will be done by skilled laborers,” stated Harpal Singh, a former executive of the government-owned Border Roads Organization. “This is a surefire method to advance.”

Unfavorable weather might make the rescue harder. In the mountains, there is a prediction for thunderstorms, hail, and lows of at least 9 degrees Celsius (48.2 degrees Fahrenheit).

“That’s not a worry for us because they are trained to work in every situation,” stated Mahmood Ahmad, managing director of the tunnel-building business NHIDCL.

Principal secretary and chief of staff of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, PK Mishra, visited the location and communicated with the guys who were stranded via a communication link. “Everyone is making efforts to bring all of you out as early as possible,” he informed them.

One of Modi’s most ambitious projects, the Char Dham Highway, includes the tunnel and aims to connect four Hindu pilgrimage sites with 890 km (553 miles) of highways.

Although the reason of the cave-in, which buried the guys as they were almost finished with their night shift, has not been disclosed by the authorities, the area is vulnerable to earthquakes, landslides, and flooding.

source:-aljazeera