Uttarkashi Tunnel Accident Rescue Operation Live Updates: The option to drill vertically to create an escape passage was explored after the auger machine being used for the horizontal drilling of the tunnel broke down.
Uttarkashi Tunnel Collapse News Live Updates (November 26): On the first day of vertical drilling on top of the partially-collapsed Silkyara-Barkot tunnel in Uttarkashi, almost 20 metres has been covered of the with 86 metres of digging required to reach the 41 workers who have been trapped for two weeks now. A unit of Madras sappers from the Corps of Engineers of the Indian army also reached the tunnel site Sunday morning to assist the rescue operations. Six plans are being deployed to rescue the trapped workers, with the best solution being horizontal drilling, news agency PTI reported the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) as saying.
The option to drill vertically to create an escape passage was explored after the auger machine being used for horizontal drilling of the tunnel broke down. Earlier, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said that the plasma machine brought from Hyderabad had started working on Sunday morning, cutting the blade from the auger machine from where it is stuck in an obstruction. “The auger machine has to be cut and brought out. It seems that it will be completed soon, within a few more hours. After that manual drilling will begin,” Dhami said. The megna, laser and plasma cutting machines have reached the Silkyara tunnel for the assisting in the removal of the blade. In addition to this, a machine equipped for sideways drilling is also expected to arrive at the tunnel during night, as per the NDMA.
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Fifteen from Jharkhand, eight from Uttar Pradesh, five each from Odisha and Bihar, three from West Bengal, two each from Uttarakhand and Assam, and one from Himachal Pradesh – the men trapped inside the Uttarkashi tunnel may have come from different states, but what united them was the need to venture out in search of a livelihood. Those working there fall in two salary brackets: Rs 24,000 for skilled workers, pump operators or drillers; and Rs 18,000 for unskilled workers such as labourers or helpers.
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Uttarakhand Tunnel Collapse Live: Rescue operations to resume soon; CM Dhami says morale of trapped workers ‘high’. Follow this space for the latest updates from Uttarkashi.
We build statues, name stadiums and write hagiographies to honour Bollywood stars, cricketers, politicians and a pantheon of celebrities. But for the human infrastructure of the nation — the women and men who build tunnels and highways, run factories, service middle-class homes — there are only obituaries of anonymity. The hapless migrant worker is truly the forgotten citizen, mainly breaking the surface of national consciousness as a figure in televised tragedy. “National greatness” is attributed to the products of migrant exertion — shiny new expressways and gigantic statues — but is never expressed in the vocabulary of care and policy requirements for those who make the nation great. Flung from the abjection of village life into the hostility of their new, distant environments, migrant workers largely exist in the national consciousness as dispensable life. They are driven out of cities during periods of health crises, crushed under collapsed buildings, mutilated through lack of industrial safety mechanisms and stare out of steel pipes from inside collapsed tunnels. There are a variety of strands of internal migration in India, including long distance and short distance, rural to urban, rural to rural, intra and interstate, intra and inter-district and circular and seasonal. And there are also a number of data sources that tell us about the sea of people that move across local and regional boundaries, seeking livelihoods, leaving behind families and, just as frequently, suffering the ignominy of being perpetual outsiders in their host societies.
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First published on: 26-11-2023 at 09:48 IST
