Doctors stated that although the 41 workers were in good health and being monitored at a community health centre, they were scheduled to be airlifted to Rishikesh’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) following their rescue from the collapsed road tunnel in Uttarkashi, Uttarakhand, on Tuesday, after 17 days of searching.
According to RCS Panwar, chief medical officer (Uttarkashi), the employees’ physical and mental well-being was satisfactory. Since the workers were pulled out of the tunnel, we have kept a close eye on them all. Nobody has mentioned any illnesses. They will be flown to the AIIMS in Rishikesh, he continued.
After 422 hours, the trapped workers were freed, with the first one emerging on Tuesday at around 7:45 p.m. All the workers were taken to the health centre one by one.
In the last breakthrough on Tuesday, twelve “rat-hole miners” used hand-held tools to burrow through a wall of rock, mud, and debris. Hours later, the workers were evacuated by disaster relief personnel. A 57-meter-long steel chute that was inserted into the vast tunnel connecting Silkyara and Barkot was used to wheel the workers out.
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As their loved ones were wheeled out, relatives of the trapped workers gave them hugs. Relentless collapses of debris and machine failures shattered hopes for a rescue.
A massive earth-boring auger machine broke last week when engineers trying to drive a metal pipe horizontally through 57 metres (187 feet) of rock and concrete ran into metal girders and construction vehicles buried in the debris. Even as they ran into new difficulties barrelling into the collapsed tunnel, rescuers made video contact using an endoscopic camera and sent in food and fruits through a second six-inch pipe inserted into the debris.
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Finally, on November 27, a group of rat-hole miners was sent in that allowed for this breakthrough. It jammed into a metal pipe and used a handsaw to chisel through the rock face.
