India’s military brought in specialised equipment on Sunday as efforts to free 41 trapped workers entered a third week, with digging ongoing in three directions after repeated setbacks to the operation.
The Indian air force said on Sunday that they were “responding with alacrity”, as they flew in their third load to a rescue operation since the partial collapse of the under-construction Silkyara road tunnel on November 12 in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand.
Rescue officials said they called for a superheated plasma cutter to be brought to the remote mountain location, after engineers driving a metal pipe horizontally through 57 metres (187 feet) of rock and concrete ran into metal girders and construction vehicles buried in the earth.
A giant earth-boring machine snapped just nine metres from breaking through.
The plasma cutting will be used to remove the broken giant earth-boring drill and metal blocking the horizontal route, before digging will continue by hand.
Thick metal girders in the rubble are blocking the route, and using conventional oxyacetylene cutters to clear them is tricky from inside the confined pipe, only wide enough for a man to crawl through.
