All 41 workers have been rescued from a collapsed tunnel on Tuesday after being trapped for 17 days in India’s Uttarakhand, as per ANI.
The labourers have been trapped since Nov. 12 when a landslide caused a portion of the 4.5-kilometre (2.8-mile) tunnel they were building to collapse about 200 meters (650 feet) from the entrance.
First visuals of the rescued workers have emerged.
Rescuers resorted to manual digging after the drilling machine broke down irreparably on Friday while drilling horizontally from the front because of the mountainous terrain of Uttarakhand.
Kirti Panwar, a state government spokesperson, said about a dozen men had worked overnight to manually dig through rocks and debris, taking turns to drill using hand-held drilling tools and clearing out the muck in what he said was the final stretch of the rescue operation.
The machine bored through about 47 meters (nearly 154 feet) out of approximately the 57-60 meters (nearly 187-196 feet) needed, before rescuers started to work by hand to create a passageway to evacuate the trapped workers.
Most of the trapped workers are migrant labourers from across the country. Many of their families had travelled to the location, where they camped out for days to get updates on the rescue effort and in hopes of seeing their relatives soon.
Authorities had supplied the trapped workers with hot meals through a 6-inch (15-centimetre) pipe after days of surviving only on dry food sent through a narrower pipe. They were getting oxygen through a separate pipe, and more than a dozen doctors, including psychiatrists, had been at the site monitoring their health.
The tunnel the workers were building was designed as part of the Chardham all-weather road, which will connect various Hindu pilgrimage sites. Some experts say the project, a flagship initiative of the federal government, will exacerbate fragile conditions in the upper Himalayas, where several towns are built atop landslide debris.
Inputs from AP