Pushkar Dhami and Minister VK Singh Present Garlands to the First Rescued Workers

After 17 days, the first laborers were removed from the collapsed section of the Silkyara tunnel in Uttarkashi. At the scene of the rescue effort, Pushkar Singh Dhami, the chief minister of Uttarakhand, and General VK Singh, the union minister of state for roads and highways, met the first personnel.

The Chief Minister showered the first workers with flowers, gave them hugs, and expressed relief. All of the workers have been successfully removed from the tunnel; the first workers were removed at 8:00 p.m.

One by one, the workers emerging from the tunnel are greeted by the Chief Minister and General VK Singh, who are present at the location. Each worker’s extraction will take between five and seven minutes, according to rescue officials.

When sophisticated, imported machinery malfunctioned during the drawn-out operation, a mining technique that had been outlawed for being dangerous saved the lives of 41 men who were stranded within an Uttarakhand tunnel.

Rat-hole mining to free the stranded laborers commenced yesterday following the failure of a 25-ton auger equipment during the final part of the difficult task. The laborers who have been imprisoned for 17 days have been reached by the diggers thanks to their rapid progress with this manual drilling technique. One by one, they are being pulled from the tunnel.

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It is taking some time for each worker to re-acclimate to the surface conditions due to the current temperature of about 14 degrees Celsius during the extraction procedure.

First three workers to be saved were hauled out on stretchers that had been specially made; these were manually lowered down a two-meter-wide pipe that had been bored into the slope.

The National Disaster Response Force, or NDRF, had descended the pipe first in order to evaluate the men’s conditions and provide them with instructions on how to do a rescue. After the stretcher was manually hauled up through 60 meters of rock and rubble, each worker was fastened to it.