Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami has said that the rescue team will do manual drilling to make a passage for the trapped men to come out at the Uttarakhand’s Uttarkashi tunnel after the auger machine hit the metallic object.
The reports quoting officials said the machine will no longer be used in the operation.
"A plasma cutter would be used to cut the auger machine, which is stuck in (the) Silkyara tunnel. The cutter is being airlifted from Hyderabad and is likely to reach Dehradun by tonight. It (cutter) would then reach Silkyara by late at night. Manual drilling will begin from tomorrow morning," Dhami said at a presser
International tunneling expert, Arnold Dix, told news agency ANI there are several ways to reach the 41 trapped men, stressing that at the moment, "everything is fine". "You will not see the augering anymore. (The) auger is finished. The auger (machine) has broken. It's irreparable. It is disrupted. No more work from auger. No more drilling from auger. There will not be a new auger," he said.
Uttarakhand Chief Minister visited the Silkyara site on Saturday and went inside the tunnel as well to oversee the rescue operation. He has set up a temporary office at the tunnel site, and is believed to be there.
Earlier, the drilling was halted at the Uttarkashi tunnel after the auger machine hit the metallic object.
The auger machine had encountered the metallic object on Friday evening.
Earlier, on Thursday the blades of the machine had hit a pipe and drilling had resumed after 24 hours, only to be stopped again.
The officials have said only 10-12 metres of drilling was left for the rescuers to reach the trapped construction workers and that ground penetrating radar had revealed that there were likely to be no major metal obstacles for the next five metres, during a presser, reported NDTV.
"They (a team of ground penetrating experts) could not say this with 100% accuracy but what they are expecting is that there is no continuous metal object, like girders, pipes and metal plates, in the next 5.4 metres. They have pointed out some other hurdles, but this is good news," the report quoted Uttarakhand Secretary Neeraj Khairwal, who is the nodal officer for the rescue operation as having said.
The report quoting officials said, with the drill stopped, efforts are being made to manually inch closer to the trapped workers but the rescue is unlikely on Friday night.
"The auger machine has encountered some difficulty again and that's why it's being dismantled. Simultaneously, efforts are being made to get to the trapped workers manually. We are analysing the debris and trying to figure this out," the report quoted an official as having said.
Meanwhile, according to officials the workers are mentally stable and physically fit despite being trapped for 13 days.
"They are adequately clothed and when we speak to them, they say they will walk out on their own. That's the kind of mental strength they have," the report quoted an official as having said.
The report also said the labourers are also speaking to their families and one of the workers, who has been in such a situation before, has been helping his colleagues keep their morale high.
"The labourers are being given cut fruits, hot chapatis, daal and sabzi. These are being pushed through pipes in bottles," the official said, the report said.
The under-construction tunnel in Uttarkashi is part of the ambitious Char Dham project, a national infrastructure initiative to enhance connectivity to the Hindu pilgrimage sites of Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri, and Yamunotri. The labourers got trapped when a portion of the tunnel had collapsed on November 12.
