India's transportation minister says all 41 construction workers who were trapped in a collapsed mountain tunnel in the country's north for more than two weeks have been pulled out after rescuers reached them on Tuesday.
Nitin Gadkari, the minister of road transport and highways, said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he was “completely relieved and happy” after all were rescued from the Silkyara Tunnel in Uttarkashi after an ordeal that lasted 17 days.
“I am very happy that all the 41 trapped workers have come out and their lives have been saved,” he said in a video message posted on X. Gadkari added that “this was a well-coordinated effort by multiple agencies, marking one of the most significant rescue operations in recent years.”
Cheers and jubilation erupted as the rescuers reached the construction workers, who were trapped in a collapsed mountain tunnel for over two weeks in the country's north.
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They were pulled out through a passageway made of welded pipes which rescuers previously pushed through dirt and rocks.
The rescue mission has grabbed the country’s attention for the past weeks. The workers got trapped on Nov. 12, when a landslide caused a portion of the 2.8-mile tunnel they were building in Uttarakhand state to collapse about 650 feet from the entrance.
They survived on food and oxygen supplied through narrow steel pipes. After being pulled out, they were to be taken to a makeshift health center inside the 42.6 feet wide tunnel, officials said.
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Kirti Panwar, a government spokesperson, said about a dozen men had worked overnight to manually dig through rocks and debris, taking turns to drill using hand-held drilling tools and clearing out the muck for the final stretch of the rescue operation.
As dusk fell Tuesday, families of those trapped underground gathered near the site of the accident, anxiously waiting to see their loved ones emerge from the tunnel.
Among them was Jaimal Singh who said he was hopeful he would soon see his brother Gabbar Singh, who is trapped inside. “Even nature looks cheerful today ... the weather is good. Let’s hope this ends soon,” he told the Press Trust of India news agency.
Rescuers resorted to manual digging after the drilling machine broke down irreparably on Friday while drilling horizontally from the front because of the mountainous terrain of Uttarakhand. The machine bored through nearly 154 feet out of approximately the nearly 187-196 feet needed, before rescuers started to work by hand to create a passageway to evacuate the trapped workers.
Rescue teams inserted pipes into dug-out areas and welded them together so the workers could be brought out on wheeled stretchers.
Most of the workers are migrant laborers from across the country. Many of their families traveled to the location, where they have camped out for days to get updates on the rescue effort.
Authorities supplied the trapped workers with hot meals through a 6-inch pipe after days of surviving only on dry food sent through a narrower pipe. They got oxygen through a separate pipe, and more than a dozen doctors, including psychiatrists, were at the site monitoring their health.
The tunnel the workers were building was designed as part of the Chardham all-weather road, which will connect various Hindu pilgrimage sites. Some experts say the project, a flagship initiative of the federal government, will exacerbate fragile conditions in the upper Himalayas, where several towns are built atop landslide debris.
Large numbers of pilgrims and tourists visit Uttarakhand’s many Hindu temples, with the number increasing over the years because of the continued construction of buildings and roadways.
