Rescued Workers succesfully evacuated after 17 days of uttarakhand tunnel collapse

Forty-one labourers, trapped in a tunnel in Uttarakhand for 17 days, are being rescued at last. 35 men are already out. The breakthrough came after rat-miners were brought in last evening and manually dug the last stretch.Thirty-five workers have been evacuated from the collapsed portion of the tunnel and the process of rescuing the rest is on. The workers are being taken to the temporary hospital put up inside the tunnel for medical check-up and acclimatisation.Besides the temporary hospital, elaborate preparations have been made for the rescue. An Air Force Chinook chopper is standing by for emergencies and a green corridor has been created to transfer the workers to a hospital.. Chief Minister Pushkar Sing Dhami is at the spot. “Rat miners” — labourers used to drilling narrow shafts as part of a primitive and currently illegal method of coal extraction — had to manually dig the rocks over a 12-metre last stretch that proved too tough for an American Augur drill and several other devices.Manual drilling is a slow and labour-intensive process in which the rat-hole miners had to go through the 800 mm pipe, drill manually and bring out the debris by shovels.The American Auger drill — a corkscrew-like device with a rotary blade at the front end — which drilled around 46.8 metres, had to be withdrawn as its blades got fouled up by the rocky debris and iron rods that formed part of the tunnel ceiling.