India’s transport minister said on Tuesday that all 41 construction workers who had been trapped in a collapsed mountain tunnel in the country’s north for more than two weeks had been freed after rescuers reached them earlier in the day.
Nitin Gadkari, minister for road transport and highways, said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he was “completely relieved and happy” when he was rescued from the Silkyara tunnel in Uttarkashi after an ordeal that lasted 17 days.
The workers were pulled out through a passage made of welded pipes, which the rescuers had previously pushed through with dirt and stones. They will each undergo an entrance health check at a temporary medical camp set up inside a 13-metre (42.6 ft) wide tunnel.
The massive rescue mission has captured the country’s attention in recent weeks. The workers were stranded on November 12 when a landslide caused part of the 4.5 kilometer (2.8 mi) tunnel they were building in Uttarakhand state to collapse about 200 meters from the entrance.
They survived on food and oxygen supplied through narrow steel pipes.
Rescuers resorted to manual digging after a drilling rig broke down while drilling horizontally from the front due to Uttarakhand’s mountainous terrain on Friday. The machine drilled through about 47 meters (nearly 154 ft) of the approximately 57-60 meters (nearly 187-196 ft) needed before rescuers began working by hand to create a passageway to evacuate the trapped workers.
By Tuesday, they had drilled more than 58 meters (190 feet). As darkness fell, families of those trapped underground gathered near the accident site, anxiously waiting to see their loved ones emerge from the tunnel.
Rescue teams inserted pipes into the excavated areas and welded them together so workers could be taken out on wheelbarrows. On Sunday, the rescuers also started creating a vertical trough with a newly replaced drilling machine as a crisis plan.
Most of the incarcerated workers are migrant workers from across the country. Many of their families traveled to where they had camped for several days to get updates on rescue efforts and hoped to see their relatives soon.
After days of surviving only on dry food sent through a narrower pipe, the authorities supplied the trapped workers with hot food through a 6-inch (15-centimeter) pipe. They received oxygen through a separate pipe and their health was monitored on site by more than a dozen doctors, including psychiatrists.
