Hits And Misses: What Led The Rescue Team To Success

The 17-day-long operation that ended on Tuesday evening with the rescue of 41 workers trapped in the under-construction Silkyara-Barkot tunnel marked the culmination of a mission that went through its share of peaks and troughs.

- Amit Bathla

Since November 12, authorities deployed a spate of plans to bore through a 57m-thick wall of debris to free the men, even as one technique after another failed to yield results. Eventually, a spirited team of “rat miners” manually drilled through the rubble and freed the trapped workers, a successful final chapter in a nerve-wracking process.

The rescue operation began on November 12, when authorities from the National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF) put into use excavator machines to scoop out the debris. Within a day, the machines had carved through 21 of the 57m of debris. But that plan met its first hurdle within a day, when a fresh cave-in wiped out a third of those gains and added seven metres more rubble to the wall.

Amid fears that the continued use of excavators could potentially cause more damage during an already precarious situation, authorities began hunting for a fresh strategy on November 14.