Indian workers were greeted with wild cheers and flower garlands on Tuesday as rescuers safely brought out all 41 from the collapsed Himalayan road tunnel where they were trapped after a marathon 17-day engineering operation.
With beaming smiles, the rescued men were welcomed as heroes after being hauled through 57m of steel pipe on stretchers specially fitted with wheels, where they were greeted by state officials before embracing their families.
“Hail mother India,” crowds outside the tunnel cheered, as news spread that all had made it safely out of the under-construction tunnel in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, where they had been trapped since a partial collapse on Nov. 12.
Photo: AFP
“We were really scared, every moment felt that death was standing nearby,” rescued worker Deepak Kumar said yesterday. “We were not sure whether our lives would be saved or not.”
“The world is again beautiful for us,” rescued worker Sabah Ahmad said, describing the heartache of hearing his wife’s “worried and hopeless” voice while he was trapped.
“I know it was a difficult moment for those inside and more difficult for families outside,” said Ahmad, who comes from Bihar, one of India’s poorest states. “But at last we have come out, and it is the only thing that matters.”
His wife, Musarrat Jahan, speaking by telephone from Bihar, said that “no words” could explain how happy she felt.
“Not only my husband got a new life, we also got a new life,” she said. “We will never forget it.”
Previous hopes of reaching the men were repeatedly dashed by falling debris and the breakdown of multiple drilling machines, and the men spoke of how hard it had been to keep their spirits up.
“It was not easy,” Kumar said. “After three or four days inside the collapsed tunnel, and the rescue team had failed to reach us, the reality is that our confidence and faith were at a low level.”
Most of the trapped men are migrant workers who left home to find employment, working on the Silkyara tunnel, hundreds of kilometers from home, high up in the bitterly cold Himalayan foothills.
Rescue teams later set up a telephone exchange to allow families far from the site to call in.
“I told my family: ‘I am fine and healthy, do not worry, everything will be all right, we will come out soon,’” Kumar said. “But while I was saying these words to them, sometimes I felt strongly that I will never be able to see my parents.”
Chamra Oraon, 32, from Jharkhand state, described the horror he felt when he heard a thud and debris began to fall deep inside the mountain road tunnel on Nov. 12 — and the terror as the rock fall blocked the only route out with tonnes of rubble.
“I ran for my life, but got stuck on the wrong side,” he told the Indian Express newspaper. “As it became clear we would be there for a long time, we grew restless, hungry, but we prayed silently for help.”
Subodh Kumar Verma said that the first 24 hours in the tunnel were the worst, when they feared they could starve to death — if their air did not run out first.
“We faced problems related to food and air for 24 hours there,” Verma said.
However, morale was boosted after rescue teams managed to connect a thin pipe through to them, bringing in oxygen.
Initially, it was only small packets of puffed rice and seeds, but days later, the tube was widened to be able to send proper meals of lentils and rice, packed into plastic bottles and sent down the chute.
“After food items were sent through pipes things improved,” said Verma.
“When we ate the first morsel, we felt someone above had reached out to us,” Oraon told the Express.
However, keeping busy while waiting for rescue was tough, with the workers playing games on their phones — which they could charge as power had remained.
“We immersed ourselves in Ludo on the phone,” Oraon said. “We spoke among ourselves and got to know each other.”
Although trapped, the men had plenty of space in the tunnel, with the area inside 8.5m high and stretching about 2km in length.
Arnold Dix, president of the International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association, who had been advising the engineers, said he had heard the men had been keeping busy “playing cricket” as they waited for rescue.
That finally came on Tuesday. After a giant earth-boring drill was snapped by metal girders buried in the rubble, a team of miners dug the final section by hand using a so-called “rat-hole” technique inside a narrow tube.
Indian media dubbed the diggers “rock stars.”
“Knights in Mining Armor,” the Times of India called them. “Ace of Spades.”
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