The rescue operation has entered the 17th day in the Silkyara tunnel, the undergoing work of the manual drilling has started for taking out the 41 trapped workers.
Chris Cooper, a micro tunnelling expert has said that 3 metres of manual drilling has taken place so far and about 50 metres of drilling work has been completed in total. As per the official sources, there is about 57 metres of drilling work is to be done that is from the mouth of the tunnel to the place where the trapped workers are present. The 57 metres tunnelling is done to lay a pipe for the trapped workers.
When asked about the ongoing manual drilling work, Chris Cooper, Micro tunnelling expert said, “It went very well last night. We have crossed 50 metres. It’s now about 5-6 metres to go. We didn’t have any obstacles last night. It is looking very positive.” The manual drilling work is being carried out by the rat hole miners which has been taking place since Monday night. There are twelve rat-hole mining experts who have been involved in the horizontal excavation which is through the last 10 or 12-metre. The following stretch of debris is the collapsed portion of the under-construction tunnel on Uttarakhand’s Char Dham route since Monday.
The drilling which is dine on a manual basis was earlier used by an auger machine but as the machine got stuck in the rubble on Friday, the rescuers decided to go for a manual drilling. Praveen Yadav is one of the rescuers who has been involved in the removing and cutting the hurdles from the debris. He told that about 51 metres have been drilled so far.
#WATCH | Uttarkashi (Uttarakhand) tunnel rescue | Visuals from the Silkyara tunnel where the operation to rescue 41 workers is ongoing.
— ANI (@ANI) November 28, 2023
First visuals of manual drilling ongoing inside the rescue tunnel. Auger machine is being used for pushing the pipe. So far about 2 meters of… pic.twitter.com/kXNbItQSQR
