A part of the under-construction tunnel in Uttarakhand’s Uttarkashi collapsed about 200 meters ahead of the starting point on the Silkyara side of Brahmakhal-Polgaon on Sunday. The rescue operation to evacuate 40 workers trapped inside the tunnel is underway.
Uttarakhand tunnel collapse: Here’s a 10-point guide on this big story
1) Eight laborers from Uttar Pradesh are among the 40 trapped for two days under the debris of a collapsed tunnel in Uttarakhand, said officials on Tuesday.
2) The laborers have been identified as Ankit, Rammilan, Satyadev, Santosh, Jaiprakash, and Ram Sunkdar from Shravasti, Manjit from Lakhimpur, and Akhilesh Kumar from Mirzapur, PTI reported.
3) The list of the trapped workers issued by the emergency operation center includes 15 from Jharkhand, eight from Uttar Pradesh, five from Odisha, four from Bihar, three from West Bengal, two each from Uttarakhand and Assam, and one from Himachal Pradesh.
4) A fresh landslide on Tuesday hampered efforts to insert steel pipes through the rubble of the collapsed tunnel here to bring out the 40 laborers trapped under the debris for two days.
5) Uttarkashi District Magistrate Abhishek Ruhela had earlier said that dilling to insert the pipes to create a passage for the laborers began with the help of an ‘auger machine’.
6) The rescue work was affected when the landslide caused fresh rubble to fall from above, causing a stampede-like situation that injured two laborers, as per PTI reports.
7) The plan is to push through both 800- and 900-millimeter diameter sections of mild steel pipes — one after the other — into the rubble using drilling equipment and create an escape passage for the workers, officials said.
8) There are eight 900-millimetre diameter pipes with a length of six metres each and five pipes of 800-millimetre diameter of the same length, the State Emergency Operation Centre said.
9) An expert team of five engineers from the irrigation department is on the spot to oversee the insertion process of the mild steel pipes through the rubble.
10) Contact is being maintained with the trapped laborers and the assurance that a huge rescue operation is being carried out by various agencies to evacuate them has also boosted their morale, National Highways & Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited (NHIDCL) Executive Director Col (Retd) Sandip Sudehra said.
(With inputs from agencies)
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Updated: 15 Nov 2023, 08:20 AM IST