Uttarkashi tunnel rescue work may take 4-5 days, official says

Rescue teams install 3rd auger machine to pierce rubble behind which 41 workers are trapped. 4-5 day timeline projected for workers to get out. Multiple approaches being tried simultaneously, but progress slow. Tensions high as workers, families, and authorities wait.

Rescue workers at the collapsed tunnel in Uttarkashi district worked on Friday to install a third ‘auger machine’ to pierce past the rubble behind which 41 workers are estimated to be sealed (government estimates previously pegged the figure at 40). However, even late into the evening, this machine had not started drilling. Bhaskar Khulbe, a former advisor from the Prime Minister’s Office deputed to the rescue site, put forth a 4-5 day tentative timeline for the workers to get out through any of the approaches authorities are trying now.

Mr. Khulbe said that experts had met and agreed to drill into the mountain around the tunnel from all sides — above, from the sides, and from the other end of the under-construction structure in Barkot — simultaneously. These efforts will play out along with the initial plan to drill into the fallen rubble from the Silkyara side. All these efforts are likely to take far longer than even conservative estimates of the rubble drilling from the tunnel’s south, as they present far more rock and rubble to excavate before the workers can be reached.

The previous machine had faced technical issues, and this one was flown in on Friday morning. The delays in installing the crawlable pipe through which the trapped workers can escape have led to heightened tensions between the families of the workers, their fellow labourers, and local authorities.

“[Seven] days is not a small time,” Mrityunjay Kumar, a day shift worker from Bihar at the tunnel project complained, as workers surrounded police officials behind him. “There has been no end to this, just one new solution after the other. How many days will they [the workers] keep eating dry food?” Elsewhere, an official pleaded with relatives and workers to support rescue efforts, even as patience among the crowd ran thin.

“The entire administration from the Prime Minister’s Office to the State government to agencies are here to get the workers out,” an official from Navayuga Engineering, the firm building the tunnel, told workers at the field office on site.

Authorities projected presence across all levels, as motorcades of officials from the State government crowded the narrow highways, helicopters touched down with senior officials like an Officer on Special Duty with the Uttarakhand government and a Deputy Secretary with the Prime Minister’s Office, and a foreign expert from Australia visited the site to provide counsel. A survey team led by a geologist trickled across the steep heights of the mountain face above the under-construction tunnel, carefully navigating behind the last pine trees on the slope. An excavator started digging in from above there late in the evening, an estimated 170 metres above the tunnel.

And yet, the tip of the spear in all these efforts — the auger machine drilling through the rubble — lay quiet for over a day, and there was no indication that any further progress on the heap was impending; a standstill of progress that has lasted well over 36 hours. The workers’ health conditions, officials insisted, were stable, with continued dry foods, water and medicine being supplied to them.