The forty Indian workers trapped in the collapse of a road tunnel under construction in northern India since Sunday are alive, a rescue team official said.
“All 40 workers trapped in the tunnel are alive,” Karamveer Singh Bhandari, a senior commander in the National Disaster Response Force, said in a statement.
“We sent them water and food,” he added.
The collapse occurred early Sunday morning in the Indian Himalayas as a group of workers left the site and a replacement crew arrived.
Initial contact with the survivors was made through a message transmitted on a piece of paper, but rescuers then managed to establish communication using radios.
Rescuers said they injected oxygen into the collapsed area of the tunnel and also managed to get food in through the same line.
“A few small food parcels were sent through a pipeline that also carries oxygen,” Durgesh Rathodi, head of the aid agency for the state of Uttarakhand in the Indian Himalayas, told AFP at the scene of the disaster.
According to Mr Rathodi, the excavators have cleared around 20 meters of rubble, but the workers are 40 meters further away.
“Due to the abundance of debris in the tunnel, we are facing certain difficulties in the rescue operation,” Bhandari said.
Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, who visited the accident site on Monday, said it was safe.
“The positive side is that the workers are not standing on top of each other and have a buffer space of about 400 meters to walk and breathe,” assured Devendra Patwal, rescue director at the Indian Express newspaper.
This tunnel is part of the Char Dham highway project close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s heart and aims to improve connectivity to four Hindu sites, among the most important in the country, and also to China’s border regions.
Accidents on large infrastructure construction sites are common in India.
In January, flash floods in Uttarakhand killed at least 200 people, a disaster that experts blame in part on overdevelopment.