At least forty construction workers will spend a second night in a collapsed tunnel in India on Monday. Police told international news agencies that oxygen and food such as dried fruit are supplied via pipelines. More than 150 rescue workers are busy digging and removing rubble to free them. The road workers have now been stuck in a space covering about two kilometers for about forty hours. “The team is now at a depth of 15 meters in the tunnel; another 35 meters have to be covered,” a police officer told the AP news agency.
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Rescue workers are now waiting for a large steel pipe to be delivered. They will then push this into an opening between the excavated rubble. According to an official who spoke to the Reuters news agency, the construction workers should be removed from the cavern within about 24 hours. The rescuers have contact with the trapped construction workers via walkie-talkies.
Sagging land
It is unclear how the tunnel could collapse. The tunnel was built as part of a new highway in the northern state of Uttarakhand, which is part of a Hindu pilgrimage route. In recent years, construction has been going on in the region on the Char Dham pilgrimage route, one of the most ambitious projects of President Narendra Modi’s government. Nearly 900 kilometers of road surface will connect four important Hindu pilgrimage sites.
According to geologists and residents, the subsidence of the land is due to hastily constructed constructions in the mountainous area. Landslides, earthquakes and floods occur more frequently in the area. In January, residents were temporarily relocated as more than 600 homes were damaged by land subsidence along road construction sites.