After a 16-day effort to free dozens of Indian construction workers trapped inside a Himalayan road tunnel, rescuers were finally preparing to pull the men out on Tuesday as diggers labored to clear a final stretch of debris by hand, the authorities said.
The rescue operation had hit repeated roadblocks, with officials ultimately trying multiple ways to reach the 41 stranded men.
But a breakthrough came on Tuesday afternoon, as trained miners using hand tools made rapid progress after picking up at the point where a drilling machine had failed.
“The work of putting in the pipe to rescue the workers has been completed,” Pushkar Singh Dhami, the chief minister of the northern state of Uttarakhand, the site of the tunnel, said in a brief statement on social media.
“Soon, all the worker brothers will be taken out.”Syed Ata Hasnain, a member of India’s National Disaster Management Authority, gave a less definitive assessment and said that about two meters, or six feet, of drilling remained.
Persons:
Pushkar Singh, ” Syed Ata Hasnain
Organizations:
Disaster Management Authority
Locations:
Uttarakhand