Rescuers announced on Tuesday that they had managed to transport a camera to the 41 workers who were stranded for 10 days in a tunnel under construction in India that collapsed. Men who would be “safe” but whose rescue in the Indian Himalayas proves complex.
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A video released by local authorities shows these men, with grown beards, properly helmeted and apparently in good health, gathering around the camera in the huge cave where they found refuge.
“We’ll get you out safely, don’t worry,” insists an audible voice on this video’s soundtrack.
The camera was guided along an expanded emergency pipe with a diameter of 15 centimeters, through which hot meals can now be delivered to them.
Workers have been stuck underground since November 12 when the tunnel they were building partially collapsed near the northern Indian city of Dehradun in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, with no casualties reported.
Thanks to an initial narrow line that urgently needed to be laid, emergency services were able to quickly provide them with oxygen, water, food and radio communications, eliminating concerns about their immediate survival.
But the construction of an emergency line to transport the workers had to be interrupted on Friday for fear of new landslides.
On Saturday, an official said plans were now underway to dig an 89-meter-long shaft to get the workers out at the top.
But this alternative also carries the risk of landslides and, according to Indian media, a third option is being examined: drilling a line from the other end of the tunnel through the still intact rock over 450 meters.
“We are doing everything in our power to get them out safely soon,” Uttarakhand state leader Pushkar Singh Dhami said, assuring in a statement that “all workers are completely safe.”
Mr Dhami said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with whom he spoke, had ordered that the rescue be a “top priority”.
Arnold Dix, President of the International Association of Tunnels and Underground Spaces, wants to reassure the mobilized foreign experts. “These 41 men will return home,” he told the Press Trust of India. “When exactly? I’m not entirely sure,” he admitted.
The construction of this tunnel is part of the infrastructure work initiated by the Indian Prime Minister, in particular to improve access to strategic areas on the border of the major Chinese rival.