Seventeen Days in the Tunnel

It was a little after five in the morning on 12 November 2023, and across India families were waking up for Diwali, the festival of lights.

Deep inside a mountain in Uttarakhand, a shift of workers was busy in a new road tunnel. The tunnel was being dug under the hills near Silkyara, in the Uttarkashi district, to shorten the journey to the Himalayan pilgrimage town of Yamunotri.

Then, about two hundred metres in from the entrance, the roof gave way. Tonnes of rock and soil crashed down and filled the tunnel from wall to wall.

Behind it, forty-one men were cut off from the outside world.

Alive in the dark

The men were not crushed. They were on the far side of the fall, in a long stretch of finished tunnel, about two kilometres of it, that still had lights and running water. But between them and the open air lay a wall of rubble around sixty metres thick.

They came from eight different states, from Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, West Bengal, Assam, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand itself. Most were labourers who had travelled far from home to earn a living.

By luck, a narrow pipe used to carry water ran through the rubble. Rescuers began to pump oxygen through it. They pushed through puffed rice, dry fruits and medicines. And they shouted down it, and heard the men shout back. All forty-one were alive.

Inside, the men kept each other going. Their shift supervisor, Gabbar Singh Negi, an experienced tunnel worker, was widely praised for keeping everyone calm. The men walked up and down the tunnel, did simple exercises and talked about home. They said later that they never stopped believing someone would come.

The machines

Outside, a huge rescue began. Soldiers, engineers, disaster response teams and tunnelling experts gathered on the mountainside. Families of the trapped men arrived from across India and waited at the tunnel mouth.

The plan was to drill sideways through the rubble with a powerful auger, a giant boring machine, and push steel pipes wide enough for a man to crawl through. The first machine was not strong enough. A bigger one was flown in by the Indian Air Force.

For days it ground forward, metre by metre. Again and again it struck steel girders and rods buried in the rubble, and stopped. Each time it had to be pulled back and the metal cut away.

On the ninth day, rescuers managed to push a wider pipe through. Now they could send in hot food: khichdi and dal in plastic bottles. A camera on a long cable was pushed through too, and for the first time the country saw the men's faces on television screens, crowding round in their helmets, waving.

The international tunnelling expert Arnold Dix flew in from Australia to advise the teams. He worked alongside the Indian engineers, and was seen praying with local people at a small shrine near the tunnel entrance.

The machine breaks

Then, around two weeks in, with the pipe more than forty-five metres into the rubble, the auger's blades jammed and broke inside the pipe. The broken machine had to be cut out piece by piece with gas and plasma cutters. Men worked through the nights to clear it.

Teams had also begun drilling down from the top of the mountain, as a backup. But that would take many more days.

About ten or twelve metres of rubble were left. And the machines could go no further.

The rat-hole miners

So the rescuers turned to a group of men who did not have machines. They had shovels, hammers and their own hands.

They were rat-hole miners, about a dozen of them, experienced in digging very narrow tunnels by hand, a dangerous method used in some small mines. It had been banned in coal mining for being unsafe. Now that skill was the only way left.

Two or three at a time, they crawled into the steel pipe, lay flat in the narrow space and dug at the rubble in front of them, cutting through soil, stone and metal. Others hauled the debris back out in a small trolley on a rope. Then they swapped places. They worked without stopping, through day and night.

It took them only about a day and a half.

Out into the light

On the evening of 28 November, the diggers broke through. Rescuers from the National Disaster Response Force crawled through the pipe to the men on the other side.

One by one, the workers were pulled out on wheeled stretchers through the pipe and into the open air. Outside, people cheered and garlanded them. Ambulances waited in a long line down the road. Families who had waited for seventeen days held their sons, husbands and brothers again.

All forty-one men came out alive.

In the days that followed, the rat-hole miners were celebrated across India. Many people pointed out that the men who finished the rescue were ordinary labourers, much like the men they had saved.

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The Press Information Bureau of the Government of India published regular updates on the rescue. Newspapers such as The Hindu and The Indian Express reported on it day by day, and later published interviews with the rescued workers and the rat-hole miners.